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Lot Essay
When the MoMA directors James Thrall Soby and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., were touring Italy in 1948-1949, while preparing a comprehensive exhibition of 20th century Italian art, they were told at every turn that Giorgio Morandi was then the country's greatest living painter. This claim is all the more remarkable because Morandi seemed to stand apart from the essential character of modern art in his time, with its predilection for abstraction writ large. The artist declared: "I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than that what we actually see... I am essentially a painter of the kind of still-life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else (quoted in E. Roditi, Giorgio Morandi, Dialogues on Art, London 1960; reprinted in Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008, pp. 352 and 354).
Morandi's approach to his subject during the years following the Second World War was serial: he moved stepwise from one canvas to the next, often using the same objects, shifting them slightly, or altering the composition more dramatically with the addition of a new bottle, vase or canister. Unlike most post-war masters, he worked on modestly scaled, easel-size canvases, in which he subjected a limited assortment of favorite objects that had long been in his possession to endlessly subtle and unfolding variations. Soby recalled first seeing the artist's paintings: "One sensed the intense meditative and philosophical process through which these objects were arranged... One knew that the slightest shifts in scale, light, color, balance, and counter-balance were of the utmost importance to him" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2008, p. 230). The continuous process of painting, not the finality and significance of a single image in itself, was Morandi's primary interest, as it had also become in the sculpture and painting of Giacometti, and the late work of Picasso.
The present Natura Morta displays the profound simplicity and reduced means of Morandi's still-life arrangements during the 1950s. A cylindrical vase and a cup flank a thin-necked oil bottle. Morandi's composition is nearly symmetrical, but he deliberately counters this effect by contrasting the heights of the two cups. Two blue cylindrical containers are only slightly visible behind the three foreground objects: their darker coloration and the slight diagonal slope of their rims lend the composition all that is required to suggest the illusion of depth. In a related composition, Morandi retained the oil bottle in the center, but placed one of the blue canisters in front of it (Vitali, no. 881; circa 1953).
The painter and critic Leone Minassian wrote in 1953: "The objects are bathed in a dreamlike atmosphere but nevertheless retain an elusive presence" (quoted in ibid., p. 268). They hover, as if suspended in time, in the pale, bleaching light of the artist's bedroom studio, yet in this silent stillness, they seem pregnant with the potential of endless becoming. Kenneth Baker has observed: "The paintings yield their subtleties, and the process of seeing them yields its subtleties, only to steady, relaxed attention. Like any such meditative effort, looking at Morandi's paintings will make you feel the darting restiveness of your everyday conscious attention... Morandi's art presents us with a vision of calm, relaxed awareness. But it also confronts us with the thought that such consciousness comes about only through the discipline of unflagging concentration such as the paintings record" (Giorgio Morandi, exh. cat. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1981, pp. 43 and 45).
(fig. 1) Giorgio Morandi in his studio. Photograph c Leo Lionni.
BARCODE 2724 9352
Morandi's approach to his subject during the years following the Second World War was serial: he moved stepwise from one canvas to the next, often using the same objects, shifting them slightly, or altering the composition more dramatically with the addition of a new bottle, vase or canister. Unlike most post-war masters, he worked on modestly scaled, easel-size canvases, in which he subjected a limited assortment of favorite objects that had long been in his possession to endlessly subtle and unfolding variations. Soby recalled first seeing the artist's paintings: "One sensed the intense meditative and philosophical process through which these objects were arranged... One knew that the slightest shifts in scale, light, color, balance, and counter-balance were of the utmost importance to him" (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2008, p. 230). The continuous process of painting, not the finality and significance of a single image in itself, was Morandi's primary interest, as it had also become in the sculpture and painting of Giacometti, and the late work of Picasso.
The present Natura Morta displays the profound simplicity and reduced means of Morandi's still-life arrangements during the 1950s. A cylindrical vase and a cup flank a thin-necked oil bottle. Morandi's composition is nearly symmetrical, but he deliberately counters this effect by contrasting the heights of the two cups. Two blue cylindrical containers are only slightly visible behind the three foreground objects: their darker coloration and the slight diagonal slope of their rims lend the composition all that is required to suggest the illusion of depth. In a related composition, Morandi retained the oil bottle in the center, but placed one of the blue canisters in front of it (Vitali, no. 881; circa 1953).
The painter and critic Leone Minassian wrote in 1953: "The objects are bathed in a dreamlike atmosphere but nevertheless retain an elusive presence" (quoted in ibid., p. 268). They hover, as if suspended in time, in the pale, bleaching light of the artist's bedroom studio, yet in this silent stillness, they seem pregnant with the potential of endless becoming. Kenneth Baker has observed: "The paintings yield their subtleties, and the process of seeing them yields its subtleties, only to steady, relaxed attention. Like any such meditative effort, looking at Morandi's paintings will make you feel the darting restiveness of your everyday conscious attention... Morandi's art presents us with a vision of calm, relaxed awareness. But it also confronts us with the thought that such consciousness comes about only through the discipline of unflagging concentration such as the paintings record" (Giorgio Morandi, exh. cat. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1981, pp. 43 and 45).
(fig. 1) Giorgio Morandi in his studio. Photograph c Leo Lionni.
BARCODE 2724 9352