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Lot Essay
Giorgio Morandi's paintings of flowers are suffused with a similar contemplative ambience to his other still life compositions. Painted in 1956, Fiori is filled with warm light. The single vase holding the flowers - a contrast to the village-like compositions of boxes and bottles of so many of his still life images of the period - speaks of a dignified restraint. Yet the ripples of the petals themselves, captured in a swirl of brushstrokes, lead the eye across their irregular forms, our attention being brought to every ridge and cranny of the various buds. They appear like an explosion of form, especially in comparison to the symmetry that informs so many of the vases, boxes and bottles of his still lifes. Here, the quasi-organic forms of the flowers - aside from a few early examples, Morandi only painted imitation plants made of silk and other materials - have an almost baroque extravagance.
The fact that Morandi painted silk flowers is itself telling. This image of incredible tranquillity, this focus for meditation, has taken as its subject a trope which is often associated with the memento mori - flowers about to lose their bloom serve as metaphors for fleeting beauty and fleeting life. In Fiori, the flowers, painted on an intimate scale, have gained a monumentality and a stability. The appearance of scumbled light and even of dust which appears to have accrued on the petals speaks of the slow and steady passing of time, a theme that is all the more poetic against the backdrop of the modern era.
Fiori was a gift to Morandi's friend, Vitale Bloch. It was during the course of 1956 that Morandi, in the company of Bloch and Lamberto Vitali, had made one of his few excursions abroad, visiting Winterthur in Switzerland to preside over the opening of an exhibition of his work in the Kunstmuseum there, where his pictures were appearing alongside the sculptures of his compatriot Giacomo Manzù. During this stay, Morandi also took the opportunity to visit Oskar Reinhart's collection, where he was particularly enchanted by a picture of a boy making a house of cards by his artistic hero, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.
Looking at Fiori, Vitale Bloch's words from the preface he wrote for Morandi's first major retrospective - which had been held in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and in the New Burlington Galleries, London - appear particularly apt. 'For his flower still lifes he generally uses paper roses,' he wrote. 'These are like vers d'occasion and in them the gracefulness, the stillness, and the resignation which are eloquent of the soul of this artist find their most direct expression' (V. Bloch, 'Introduction', in Giorgio Morandi: Paintings and Prints, exh. cat., London, 1954, n.p.).
The fact that Morandi painted silk flowers is itself telling. This image of incredible tranquillity, this focus for meditation, has taken as its subject a trope which is often associated with the memento mori - flowers about to lose their bloom serve as metaphors for fleeting beauty and fleeting life. In Fiori, the flowers, painted on an intimate scale, have gained a monumentality and a stability. The appearance of scumbled light and even of dust which appears to have accrued on the petals speaks of the slow and steady passing of time, a theme that is all the more poetic against the backdrop of the modern era.
Fiori was a gift to Morandi's friend, Vitale Bloch. It was during the course of 1956 that Morandi, in the company of Bloch and Lamberto Vitali, had made one of his few excursions abroad, visiting Winterthur in Switzerland to preside over the opening of an exhibition of his work in the Kunstmuseum there, where his pictures were appearing alongside the sculptures of his compatriot Giacomo Manzù. During this stay, Morandi also took the opportunity to visit Oskar Reinhart's collection, where he was particularly enchanted by a picture of a boy making a house of cards by his artistic hero, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin.
Looking at Fiori, Vitale Bloch's words from the preface he wrote for Morandi's first major retrospective - which had been held in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and in the New Burlington Galleries, London - appear particularly apt. 'For his flower still lifes he generally uses paper roses,' he wrote. 'These are like vers d'occasion and in them the gracefulness, the stillness, and the resignation which are eloquent of the soul of this artist find their most direct expression' (V. Bloch, 'Introduction', in Giorgio Morandi: Paintings and Prints, exh. cat., London, 1954, n.p.).