Memento Morandi

With such distancing, refuge—or so the curators believed.

  • Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II was on view at Galleria Mattia De Luca’s New York City pop-up on East 63rd Street from September 26 to November 26.

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.

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Joseph Henry is an art historian and occasional curator with limited knowledge of preindustrial kitchen tools.

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