A Still Life:Giorgio Morandi @ the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.

"Nothing is more abstract than reality" - Giorgio Morandi

 

 Still Life (1953)

Giorgio Morandi led a still life. He was born in Bologna in 1890 and he died in Bologna in 1964. To look at a lot of his paintings, you'd almost be able to believe that, in that time, he hardly left his studio. He did but he almost didn't need to. Giorgio Morandi saw beauty in the most simple things. When Picasso looked at Cezanne's apples it inspired him to extrapolate wildly and, with Georges Braque, invent Cubism. When Morandi looked at them he seems to have come away with the conclusion that it was all a bit much, that it needed paring down.

Morandi was influenced by Cezanne and Picasso, even Derain, but in the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art's ongoing show, Giorgio Morandi:Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation (in Parma), you can get a real sense of how much Morandi managed to do with so little. There are a few outliers, which we'll come to, but, for the most part, there's a lot of vases, bottles, and fruit carefully arranged on tables. Usually painted in muted, muddy, colours.

It's not an art that screams for attention. Which sits well with Morandi's ascetic, or reclusive, reputation. Even if that wasn't quite true, Morandi was actively engaged in the Italian art scene at the time. He just preferred to paint the way he did and stay in Bologna as much as possible.

Metaphysical Still Life (1918)

As a younger man, Morandi had made some metaphysical paintings in the style of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra. But even those were quieter than the works of those contemporaries. They weren't as busy as Carra's more hectic style and they lacked the uncanny menace of de Chirico's mannequins, rubber gloves, speeding trains, and eerily vacant plazas.

But for Morandi, it seems, they were busy enough. Most of the rest of his career he stuck almost rigidly to the style is he now rightly famous for, the still life painting. There are so many on show as the Estorick that I've only included the best ones but it's a moot question how a viewer decides which ones are best. There's not a huge amount of difference.

Still Life (1963)

The Courtyard on Via Fondazza (1954)

Still Life (1948)

Landscape (1953)

Flowers (1942)

I've tried to mix them up with some of the outliers I mentioned earlier. There's a Bolognese courtyard, or half a courtyard - most of it is wall, that owes a debt to Cezanne, there's a hazy landscape, and there's a bowl of flowers. Morandi had always been keen on flowers but during World War II he took to painting them. Perhaps his message of peace. Who knows? Either way, it's about as close as Morandi ever got to making a political painting.

The meditative still life paintings kept coming though. The curators at the Estorick compare Morandi to a chess player who would contemplate every possible configuration before making a move and note how the surfaces that the collection of objects depicted on were painted so airily that an impression of floating was given.

Still Life (1942)

Still Life (1936)

Still Life with Fruit (1927)

Self Portrait (1925)

Along with a bowl of fruit (again, clearly inspired by Cezanne), there's even a very rare self-portrait of the man himself in his mid-thirties. Painted nearly four decades before his death, it is the last portrait (self or otherwise) Morandi would ever make. In fact, the last painting he'd make with any human figure in whatsoever.

Morandi seemed to see life happening in objects as much as he did in people. The Estorick show is pretty small. Just two rooms with the second room being dedicated to etchings and watercolours. It has to be said that room is of less interest, Morandi seemed to work better in oil, but there's still some good stuff in it.

The Bridge over the Savena in Bologna (1912)

Even some works that suggest that Morandi did, occasionally, leave the house. There's a lovely etching of a bridge in Bologna (of course), there's a haystack (!), and then there's a really rather blurry landscape. You could easily get the impression that Morandi was rushing that because he was in a hurry to get back to his studio and arrange some bottles and vases on a table.

It's a funny way to live a life. Devoting yourself so thoroughly to one subject entirely, it reminds me of medieval religious zealots, but it was clearly what Morandi wanted to do. To keep doing it until he got it right. He devoted so much time and attention to his art and yet he didn't demand our time or attention at all. He made the images. We look at them, admire them in my case, and then we move on. That seems like something Morandi would have been more than happy with. Nothing is more abstract than reality.

Haystack in Grizzana (1929)

Landscape (1958)