Metaphysics of the mundane

The great Italian artist Giorgio Morandi never painted anything that he could not see with his own eyes.

Known to be the quietest of quiet men, Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) had once claimed to have been ‘fortunate enough to lead an uneventful life!’

From 1909 (when he was still in his teens) until his death in 1964, the Italian artist lived in a spartan apartment with his mother and three unmarried sisters. He stuck to a quiet, daily routine. Most of his paintings he did in his studio, which was no more than a small room in his flat.

He travelled beyond Italy only thrice, and that too after he was past 60. “One can travel this world and see nothing,” he explained. “To achieve understanding it is ­necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.” While many of his contemporaries studied French or German, Morandi saw no reason to do so. “I speak only my native language… and read only Italian periodicals.”

A bachelor all his life, he remained content in the company of bottles, boxes, glasses, and vases of all sizes and shapes. Painting was a very physical process for Morandi; he stretched his canvases and ground his own pigments. He erased more paintings than he finished; his self-editing was relentless. Speaking of his motivation, he revealed in 1939 that “before I die, I should like to bring two paintings to completion. What matters is to touch the limit, the essence of things.”

By the time he passed away on 18 June 1964, the 73-year-old artist had left behind more than 1,300 painstakingly composed oil paintings and hundreds of etchings, drawings, and watercolours. A chain-smoker most of his life, the cause of death was lung cancer.

Bottles, bowls and pitchers

Morandi studied at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907 despite his father’s best efforts to dissuade him from arts. Early in his career, he was attracted to Cubism and Futurism. Thereafter, the significant but short-lived Metaphysical Painting movement led by his compatriots Giorgio di Chirico(1888-1978) and Carlo Carra (1881-1966) fascinated him.

The Metaphysical artists employed motifs from everyday life but positioned them within unusual contexts; under unreal lighting, and uncommon perspectives — to provide a feeling as if they were stepping out of time. In due course, Morandi evolved his own style and produced mysteriously haunting works of everyday objects by stroking them in gentle hues and tones; and inducing a poetically contemplative mood.

Historians are amazed at the way humble objects became the vehicle for a rigorous investigation of representation and perception for Morandi who often made his own objects, out of paper or blocks of wood. He believed in making compositions “that communicate a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all.” He claimed that it took him weeks “to make up my mind which group of bottles go well with a particular tablecloth and yet still, I often go wrong with the spaces. Perhaps I work too fast…”

Over time Morandi gained the reputation of being the most austere still-life painter of his time. Calling him the Metaphysician of Bologna, eminent art critic John Berger observed way back in 1955 how Morandi’s work embodied true observation; how his subjects existed in space; and how his vision depended upon a certain quiet. “Giorgio Morandi was probably the most austere still-life painter of all time. The objects Morandi paints can be bought in no flea market. They are not objects. They are places, places where some little thing is about to come into being. The infinity of becoming.” Berger found that Morandi’s work contained no obviously Roman or Renaissance echoes; nor did it express the conventional energy and zest of the Italian temperament.

“His subject matter is peculiarly limited: undramatic landscapes, flower-pieces of paper roses, still-lifes of bottles. Yet in any ordinary international exhibition, the definite character of his work would stand out… And in an age in which a pretentious international-ism of style encourages every artist to feel that he is a potential world figure, such quiet, parochial humility as Morandi’s is rare and dignified.”

No story, no drama

Well-known art critic Robert Hughes observed that Morandi’s paintings did not tell stories; they did not say anything about Morandi the man; they were not dramatic, colourful, or ‘modernist’ in any doctrinaire way; they did not tell the viewer about the tensions of history and the facts of the 20th century. “Morandi’s renunciation of the art world as a system seems noble, exemplary, and perhaps inimitable. He disdained all ambitions that could not be internalised, as pictorial language, within his art. This earned him the reputation in some quarters of a petit maítre: a man who, though he said it very well, had only one limited thing to say.”

Quiet, polite, and humble, Morandi relished keeping a low profile and shunning publicity but that did not deny him acceptance and popularity in the intellectual circles of Italy. He was featured in important art events including the Venice Biennale (1949) and the seminal exhibition ‘Twentieth-Century Italian Art’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1949). In 1957 he was awarded the Grand Prize for painting (ahead of Jackson Pollock and Marc Chagall) at the São Paulo Biennale in Brazil.

Teaching art was an essential part of Morandi’s life. He taught drawing in the local elementary schools for years before joining the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts as a Professor of Etchings in 1930. He remained with the Academy for 26 years.

Morandi’s imagery has influenced generations of artists and connoisseurs. American art critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote: “In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for the daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul.” In May 2020, Morandi’s Natura Morta (Still Life) from 1951, sold for $1.6 million, the highest price for any lot sold in an online sale at Sotheby’s.