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Lot Essay
Painted in 1941, Natura morta dates from the wartime period which is recognised by some as his greatest productive phase, when he executed his most splendid and meditative still life studies. This was a time of evolution, invention, adaptation and of course contemplation. All these are evident in the increasingly abstract and deliberately unimposing manner in which Morandi's paintings, such as this Natura morta, conveyed a sense of the harmony and poetry of the visual world around us through the forms of a carefully composed group of dusty vessels.
In Natura morta, the objects painted on the canvas appear almost as a form of writing, of musical notation. There is a clear visual rhythm, a calligraphy even, to the composition, and this is accentuated by the emphatic verticality of most of the elements, which are filled with elegance despite their unassuming status as lamp, vase, bottle. Through this deliberately understated pictorial poetry, through the intense poise of these humble objects, Morandi taps into an underlying order in the world, revealing for the sake of the viewer a sense of indefinable beauty. 'The real philosophy book, the book on nature, is written in letters unknown to our alphabet,' Morandi explained.
'These letters are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, pyramids, cones and other geometric shapes. I identify with the Galilean field of thought in my old conviction that the feelings and images aroused by the visible world, which is a formal world, are very difficult, or perhaps impossible, to express in words. In effect they are feelings which have no relationship or a very indirect relationship with effects and with everyday interests, inasmuch as they are determined, as I said before, by shapes, colours, space and light' (Interview with Morandi, 'Voice of America', Presto Recording Corporation Paramus, New Jersey, 25 April 1957).
The timelessness of Morandi's paintings such as Natura morta was the result of a steady artistic evolution. During the 1910s and 1920s, Morandi had been associated with various avant garde Italian movements, and with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico amongst others. However, he had found that the styles that were being developed to reflect the modern age were overbearing and overpowering and diminished the message, the atmosphere, that he sought to convey. He pared away the stylistic advances, reaching a kernel of artistic truth that bridged the gap between the Old Masters such as Piero della Francesca, Vermeer or Chardin and the Metafisica atmosphere that informed the pictures of some of his contemporaries. He created his own brand of classicism, and this continued to develop, to refine itself, over the following years.
The increasing critical recognition he gained during this time resulted in a significant showing of Morandi's works including over forty paintings at the third Quadriennale in Rome two years before Natura morta was created. Indeed, an entire room was dedicated to Morandi, who in the previous two Quadriennales had been on the selection board for works but had only presented a modest selection of his own paintings. In 1939, an outcry ensued first when some of his contemporaries attacked what they perceived as the retrograde nature of the works and what they also considered the undue attention that such pictures were receiving, and then when others defended him after the younger artist Bruno Saetti was awarded top prize, Morandi receiving only second place. This turmoil around the exhibition and the prizes, which resulted in a vast flurry of articles being written in the national press defending and attacking each side, reflected the turbulent state of the art world under Mussolini. Morandi himself retired from this controversy, returning to the seclusion of his life in Bologna and Grizzana, his summer retreat. And there he regained some of the tranquillity that would be channelled into his paintings. 'I respect the freedom of the individual and especially of the artist,' Morandi stated with explicit reference to this period and his unwillingness to be pigeonholed or to enter the fray himself.
'When most Italian artists of my own generation were afraid to be too 'modern', too 'international' in their style, not 'national' or 'imperial' enough, I was still left in peace, perhaps because I demanded so little recognition. My privacy was thus my protection and, in the eyes of the Grand Inquisitors of Italian art, I remained but a provincial professor of etching, at the Fine Arts Academy of Bologna' (Morandi, quoted in E. Roditi, 'Interview with Giorgio Morandi,' pp. 143-55, K. Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi: Works, Writings and Interviews, Barcelona, 2007, p. 154).
Morandi stood apart from these fleeting ideals, seeking instead to grasp the mirage-like revelations of beauty in nature. His own wartime years were largely quiet from the time of the Quadriennale onwards, apart from his brief arrest and interrogation in 1943. His explicit desire to avoid waving any sort of flag, to seek instead his own personal visual poetry regardless of politics, he summed up by saying: 'I suppose I remain, in that respect, a believer in Art for Art's sake rather than in Art for the sake of religion, of social justice or of national glory. Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work of art in itself' (Morandi, quoted in ibid., p. 146).
Morandi's desire to express the abstract and the sublime through figurative means is reflected in the history of Natura morta. An incription on the reverse of this painting shows that it was subsequently given by the artist to the eminent sculptor Giacomo Manzù, who in turn gave it to his son. In Manzù's own works, he attempted to convey the abstract through a figurative motif - most famously, in his Cardinali (one wonders whether it is a coincidence that the central jug appears here to echo those stern sculptures in its outline). The presence of Natura morta in his collection thus provides an intriguing reflection into his ideas, and is at the same time a ringing endorsement - in two directions - from one prominent Italian artist to another.
In Natura morta, the objects painted on the canvas appear almost as a form of writing, of musical notation. There is a clear visual rhythm, a calligraphy even, to the composition, and this is accentuated by the emphatic verticality of most of the elements, which are filled with elegance despite their unassuming status as lamp, vase, bottle. Through this deliberately understated pictorial poetry, through the intense poise of these humble objects, Morandi taps into an underlying order in the world, revealing for the sake of the viewer a sense of indefinable beauty. 'The real philosophy book, the book on nature, is written in letters unknown to our alphabet,' Morandi explained.
'These letters are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, pyramids, cones and other geometric shapes. I identify with the Galilean field of thought in my old conviction that the feelings and images aroused by the visible world, which is a formal world, are very difficult, or perhaps impossible, to express in words. In effect they are feelings which have no relationship or a very indirect relationship with effects and with everyday interests, inasmuch as they are determined, as I said before, by shapes, colours, space and light' (Interview with Morandi, 'Voice of America', Presto Recording Corporation Paramus, New Jersey, 25 April 1957).
The timelessness of Morandi's paintings such as Natura morta was the result of a steady artistic evolution. During the 1910s and 1920s, Morandi had been associated with various avant garde Italian movements, and with Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico amongst others. However, he had found that the styles that were being developed to reflect the modern age were overbearing and overpowering and diminished the message, the atmosphere, that he sought to convey. He pared away the stylistic advances, reaching a kernel of artistic truth that bridged the gap between the Old Masters such as Piero della Francesca, Vermeer or Chardin and the Metafisica atmosphere that informed the pictures of some of his contemporaries. He created his own brand of classicism, and this continued to develop, to refine itself, over the following years.
The increasing critical recognition he gained during this time resulted in a significant showing of Morandi's works including over forty paintings at the third Quadriennale in Rome two years before Natura morta was created. Indeed, an entire room was dedicated to Morandi, who in the previous two Quadriennales had been on the selection board for works but had only presented a modest selection of his own paintings. In 1939, an outcry ensued first when some of his contemporaries attacked what they perceived as the retrograde nature of the works and what they also considered the undue attention that such pictures were receiving, and then when others defended him after the younger artist Bruno Saetti was awarded top prize, Morandi receiving only second place. This turmoil around the exhibition and the prizes, which resulted in a vast flurry of articles being written in the national press defending and attacking each side, reflected the turbulent state of the art world under Mussolini. Morandi himself retired from this controversy, returning to the seclusion of his life in Bologna and Grizzana, his summer retreat. And there he regained some of the tranquillity that would be channelled into his paintings. 'I respect the freedom of the individual and especially of the artist,' Morandi stated with explicit reference to this period and his unwillingness to be pigeonholed or to enter the fray himself.
'When most Italian artists of my own generation were afraid to be too 'modern', too 'international' in their style, not 'national' or 'imperial' enough, I was still left in peace, perhaps because I demanded so little recognition. My privacy was thus my protection and, in the eyes of the Grand Inquisitors of Italian art, I remained but a provincial professor of etching, at the Fine Arts Academy of Bologna' (Morandi, quoted in E. Roditi, 'Interview with Giorgio Morandi,' pp. 143-55, K. Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi: Works, Writings and Interviews, Barcelona, 2007, p. 154).
Morandi stood apart from these fleeting ideals, seeking instead to grasp the mirage-like revelations of beauty in nature. His own wartime years were largely quiet from the time of the Quadriennale onwards, apart from his brief arrest and interrogation in 1943. His explicit desire to avoid waving any sort of flag, to seek instead his own personal visual poetry regardless of politics, he summed up by saying: 'I suppose I remain, in that respect, a believer in Art for Art's sake rather than in Art for the sake of religion, of social justice or of national glory. Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work of art in itself' (Morandi, quoted in ibid., p. 146).
Morandi's desire to express the abstract and the sublime through figurative means is reflected in the history of Natura morta. An incription on the reverse of this painting shows that it was subsequently given by the artist to the eminent sculptor Giacomo Manzù, who in turn gave it to his son. In Manzù's own works, he attempted to convey the abstract through a figurative motif - most famously, in his Cardinali (one wonders whether it is a coincidence that the central jug appears here to echo those stern sculptures in its outline). The presence of Natura morta in his collection thus provides an intriguing reflection into his ideas, and is at the same time a ringing endorsement - in two directions - from one prominent Italian artist to another.