 FURTHER AFIELD
Further Afield: Giorgio Morandi at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Adagio
By Judy Pomeranz
The Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) exhibition, now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a very quiet show. Unlike the many blockbuster exhibitions the Met has so dramatically staged over the years, this is not a display that dazzles with dozens of eye-popping, show-stopping masterpieces. This is an exhibit that whispers. The colors are muted, the subjects consist of the simplest still lifes and the starkest landscapes. It is a show to be savored and contemplated, one to be viewed slowly and silently.
In fact, if you were to rush through this show, you might well come away with the feeling that you’d seen about two or three pictures, copied a few dozen times. You might also come away feeling that Morandi’s work is a little dull, in terms of both pizzazz and variety. But God resides in the details of these small works. The interest of these paintings is inherent in their ability to seduce you with their gentle charms and to hold your attention with the ever-so-subtle distinctions that distinguish one from the next. But you have to slow down in order to find and appreciate them.
When you do, you notice the references, homages and influences these little gems contain. You see the subtle tonalities derived from Renaissance frescoes, the clarity, monumentality and solidity of objects derived from Uccello, Giotto and Masaccio. In some early works, you see a precision of rendering and a mystical quality which owe a direct debt to de Chirico. And throughout the show you see an interest in the universal structures that underlie both the landscape and ordinary objects that comes directly from Cézanne, the artist Morandi referred to as “the legitimate heir to the glorious Italian tradition.”
 This was high praise indeed from a man who was born in Bologna and rarely ever left his hometown. But despite Morandi’s sheltered, rather ascetic lifestyle and reluctance to travel far from home, and despite the inherent quietude of his subject matter, Morandi was discovered and embraced by an international group of fans and patrons who lent him enormous credibility and helped him achieve a degree of fame that persists, in some circles, to this day. The Met obviously intends that this first American retrospective survey of Morandi’s work will broaden that circle considerably.
By the early 1920s, when the artist was still a young man, Morandi’s personal style–a melding of his multifarious influences with a unique interest in repeated and studiously deadpan depictions of ordinary objects in a limited palette–is clearly emerging: “I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see…. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meaning that we attach to it. Only we can know that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree…. I have never intended to give the objects in my still-life arrangements any particularly familiar meanings.”
Sometimes Morandi’s still lifes resemble architectural skylines; sometimes they seem like unrelated forms which just happen to be mingling with one another. Rarely is the “thingness” of the thing important to the composition. Whether the thing is called vase or box, cylinder, pitcher or bottle, is utterly irrelevant. Morandi’s pictures are not about meanings we might derive from combinations of objects, nor are they about perfection in the rendering of the visual reality of the objects. These paintings are only and importantly about themselves. They are about their muted colors and interesting shapes and about grand aesthetic differences that result from tiny compositional and color changes. The same holds true for Morandi’s landscapes, whose geographic derivations have no bearing or impact on his pictures’ effectiveness as works of art.
So it might quite accurately be said that while he always painted from life, he was one of the earliest abstractionists and a standard bearer for the art-for-art’s-sake movement. His simple shapes and basic palette also have been credited as being forebears to the minimalist movement.
But to obsessively parse the influences on his work and the impacts he had on later movements is to lose track of what Morandi did best, which was to simply paint the structure of the world and to manipulate that structure for his own exploratory and aesthetic purposes. The best way to appreciate this exhibition is to approach it with ample time to spend time just looking. Do look closely and do look for the differences that matter and the distinctions that make similar works look and feel so completely individual, but don’t over-analyze. Do enjoy the subtleties and by all means do appreciate the quietude, which is a rare commodity indeed.
Giorgio Morandi is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through December 14. For further information, phone 212-535-7710 or visit www.metmuseum.org.
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