Memento Morandi

On the Upper East Side, peace at last. Within the expanses of a brick-and-brownstone mansion on East 63rd Street, some sixty-five paintings, prints, and drawings of bowls, pitchers, and vases promised respite. These are small pictures—innocuous but intriguing, somber but solicitous. “Morandi’s work has never felt more relevant as we navigate our own periods of uncertainty and challenge,” write this display’s organizers, the Rome-based Galleria Mattia De Luca and the Giorgio Morandi Study Center in Bologna. “Distancing oneself from the world in order to inhabit it, to accept it without losing autonomy of thought or humanity in behavior. Rarely has an artist conveyed all of this as effectively as Giorgio Morandi.” Rarely, it would seem, has an artist’s anxiolytic effect been more fitting, more salutary, than in the midst of this country’s uncanny repetition of its own plebiscitary self-harm.

Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II was the largest presentation of the artist’s work in New York in almost twenty years, per one newspaper account, and one that coaxed otherwise little-seen works out of private collections. Yet despite enjoying a Met retrospective in 2008 (more electoral good timing), Morandi lags in popularity behind that of other museum modernists. It’s hard to get around one especially pervasive cliché when describing him—the “painter’s painter.” Successful without acting so, Morandi modeled a career born from equal parts monastic dedication and professional self-positioning. His formats were consistent over almost forty years: clustered still lifes of everyday miscellanea in neutral or earth tones, plus some dispassionate, Italianate landscapes. Morandi lived his entire life in Bologna and rarely left the humble apartment he shared with his mother and three churchgoing sisters.^* Yet he participated in multiple Venice Biennales (winning a prize for painting in 1948) and Rome Quadriennales, as well as in the São Paulo Biennial in 1957. That year, artists like Lygia Pape exhibited mesmeric, concretist abstractions in a brand-new, sinuous central pavilion by Oscar Niemeyer. Morandi showed oils of coffee cups and pots and made out with the exhibition’s grand prize. Not unlike Edward Hopper, for example, or Balthus, Morandi stuck to a dutifully anachronic modernism as the integrity of studio media splintered around him.

With such distancing, refuge—or so the New York curators believed. Morandi’s still lifes already waver between rustic charm and icy confrontation, but as arrayed between C. P. H. Gilbert’s panel wainscotting and crown molding, they assumed a patrician guise more imperious, more aloof, and thus all the more performative. Compositionally, Morandi’s paintings insist on unvarying frontality and centralization. But his actual surface elements undermine such steadfastness. In some still lifes he builds monochromatic backgrounds not as seamless plenum but haphazard coverage. One 1950–51 painting (titles almost never distinguish Morandi works) offers a placid, fuscous backdrop to mugs and a vase, but streaks of brown in the back hint at irresolution. His paint is like skin under which one can just detect the flow of blood.

Soon, the self-evidence of individual scenes wavers: The flowers in a 1952 oil appear more like sticks of chalk than botanical specimens. In a 1942 natura morta, saucers tilt and cluster around each other as if deranged by gravity. In one indistinct 1963 landscape—its two half-formed structures sitting amid mounds of brown beyond any definite scale—it appears as if Morandi gave up on considering what houses look like. Elsewhere, classificatory orders lapse: What is that spheroid object that keeps appearing in the early ’50s? A juicer? An eyeball? The “timelessness” of Morandi is owed in part to his shunting of industrial modernity, but his works often attest to the historicity of commodity culture, to the knowledges and habits solicited by stuff and then forgotten in the course of consumption’s innovations. In the midcentury etchings assembled in the exhibition, print’s tonal economy consolidates ground and pushes each can, pitcher, and nameless container into the foreground. Bygone object worlds pile up into mounds of latent use value.

In his studio on the Via Fondazza, art historians report, Morandi spent days constructing his scenes from hundreds of available items, arranging pieces, balancing light, allowing dust to settle its patina. A certain neurosis lurks in such fastidiousness, all to simulate, of course, a calm stasis. This isn’t quite rearranging desk chairs on the Titanic—more so fiddling with things at home as history rampages outside. The retrospective’s curators would like their town house devoid of context, but politics finds a way. Morandi maintained a viable artistic career in Fascist Italy and thus had to figure out some kind of relationship to its authoritarian state. He profited from its new infrastructure—its sponsored exhibitions, its teaching jobs, its single-minded rhetoric—even as he distanced himself by the ’30s and ’40s from Fascism’s increasingly narrow, monumentalizing, and figure-laden self-image. He, in other words, in a mantra repeated louder and louder during any moment of manifest state violence, was just trying to focus on work.

Morandi’s explicit commitments, however, emerged from his affiliation in the 1920s with the regionalist Strapaese circle. Against Futurism’s clanging machines, neoclassicism’s grandiosity, or abstraction’s sterility, this loose affiliation of reactionary writers and critics opted for a homespun fascism born of old-fashioned country values. They found it in Morandi’s ageless cups and pitchers. “I have had much faith in Fascism since its first inklings,” the artist declared in 1928, “faith that has never ebbed, not even in the darkest and most tumultuous moments.” Tumult is a word one might not reach for with these pictures, but its apophatic manifestations perturb them nonetheless, in the cloistered topos of the artist’s studio, in the abstemious tonalism of the Mediterranean palette, in the stage-managed calm of Morandi’s object theater.

Given Morandi’s locavore practice, it’s ironic that the most public appearance of his work is in Italy’s ultimate record of shrugging cosmopolitanism, Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). In one scene, Marcello has joined his friend Steiner’s salon of soigné, casually misogynist Romans for an evening of music and deliberations on poetry. He admires one lanky still life on the wall hung amid tasteful effects—not unlike Morandi’s recent display in Manhattan. “His subjects are immersed in the light of dreams,” Steiner says of his favorite artist, “yet painted with detachment, precision, exactness…” “Detachment” later returns when Steiner forebodingly wonders out loud about living “outside of life, detached,” repeating that last word, distaccati. Morandi’s piece appears on-screen again only when Marcello arrives at Steiner’s to find the latter dead by suicide after murdering his own children. The painting’s columnar forms loom in the background as Marcello takes stock of the brutal scene. These vases, cups, and other things act as nonwitnesses, present but unresponsive, abiding but remote. They are containers for all sorts of crises, for the unbearable allure of timelessness.