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Lot Essay
Painted in 1950, Giorgio Morandi’s exquisite still-life Natura morta resonates with the timeless sense of contemplation, absorption and invention that characterises the artist’s finest explorations into the poetic potential of the genre. Featuring a collection of simple, everyday objects, transformed by the artist’s intense and scrupulous gaze into an abstract study of line, colour, structure and form, the painting is infused with an enigmatic, almost otherworldly atmosphere that appears at odds with the domesticity of the scene. Instead, each of the vessels included in the composition seems frozen in time, bleached by the artificial light of the artist’s small bedroom on Via Fondazza in Bologna which doubled as his modest studio. It was here, surrounded by the array of quotidian objects that populated his canvases, that Morandi immersed himself in the investigation of the seemingly endless visual possibilities of his still-life subjects. Natura morta was purchased from the Galleria del Millione in Milan during the mid-1950s, at a time when Morandi was reaching a new level of artistic fame internationally, and has remained in the same family collection for the past six decades.
Executed in delicate, muted tones of ivory, grey and soft pink, Natura morta showcases one of Morandi’s most famous and oft-used objects: the white spiral fluted vase, which had been a central protagonist in his work since the earliest stages of his painterly career. This highly distinctive object, so lovingly rendered in the present composition, takes centre stage amongst the group of vessels, its dramatically curving profile prominently occupying the foreground, while the other objects stand tightly clustered together at a slight distance behind it. These objects – a pewter jug, a soft yellow rectangular vase with curved shoulders, and a somewhat mysterious item at the back, partly concealed by the other characters in the still life – appear to almost merge together as a single, united form, their outlines overlapping and converging together. Eliminating the functional properties which formerly underpinned their existence, Morandi instead focuses on the formal structure of these objects, distilling them down to the fundamental aspects of their structure. In this way, they are no longer independent, readable objects. Instead, they become a semi-abstract study of pattern, colour and form, in which volume and line become the principal focus. Alongside this, Morandi plays with our perception of space in the composition, at once implying a traditional, three-dimensional progression of space, and simultaneously denying it through the convergence of the objects.
In his catalogue raisonné for Morandi’s works, Lamberto Vitali linked the present composition with two other paintings from the same year, which explore a similarly staged still-life grouping (Vitali, nos. 751-753). From the Second World War onwards, Morandi increasingly worked in series, tackling the same subject over a number of canvases, making subtle changes from one composition to the next, tracking their effects and analysing their impact on the items before him. Although he worked with the same cast of objects throughout his career, he remained constantly alert to their pictorial possibilities, and the manner in which their character changed when placed in a certain configuration, or aligned together in a new pattern. Describing this highly methodical and deeply contemplative practice, Morandi said, ‘It takes me weeks to make up my mind which group of bottles will go well with a particular coloured tablecloth. Then it takes me weeks of thinking about the bottles themselves, and yet often I still go wrong with the spaces. Perhaps I work too fast? Perhaps we all work too fast these days? A half dozen pictures would just about be enough for the life of an artist’ (Morandi quoted in J. Herman, ‘A visit to Morandi’ in L. Klepac, Giorgio Morandi: the dimension of inner space, exh. cat. Sydney, 1997, p. 27).
Throughout the 1950s, Morandi’s fastidious self-discipline and intense focus came to dominate his practice, as he concentrated on the interrelationships between an increasingly small number of objects. With just four components in the present work, Morandi has created a visually compelling, timeless composition from the simplest of means. As Italian art critic and historian, Lionello Venturi noted in 1957, ‘a still life by Morandi is most beautiful when it is simple; when few objects of common shape are offered on the canvas. In recent years Morandi has become aware of this, and his simplifications of motifs are more and more emphasised, in order to let the colour harmony speak by itself’ (L. Venturi, Giorgio Morandi Retrospective 1912-1957, exh. cat., New York, 1957, n.p.). Held together with a delicate, mysterious internal tension, there is a feeling that the smallest of movements would destroy the harmonious equilibrium and poise of these objects. This poetic intensity, garnered from the most humble and familiar of objects, was for Morandi one of the fundamental aims of his painting: ‘Even in as simple a subject’ he explained, ‘a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond’ (E. Roditi, op. cit., p. 358).
Executed in delicate, muted tones of ivory, grey and soft pink, Natura morta showcases one of Morandi’s most famous and oft-used objects: the white spiral fluted vase, which had been a central protagonist in his work since the earliest stages of his painterly career. This highly distinctive object, so lovingly rendered in the present composition, takes centre stage amongst the group of vessels, its dramatically curving profile prominently occupying the foreground, while the other objects stand tightly clustered together at a slight distance behind it. These objects – a pewter jug, a soft yellow rectangular vase with curved shoulders, and a somewhat mysterious item at the back, partly concealed by the other characters in the still life – appear to almost merge together as a single, united form, their outlines overlapping and converging together. Eliminating the functional properties which formerly underpinned their existence, Morandi instead focuses on the formal structure of these objects, distilling them down to the fundamental aspects of their structure. In this way, they are no longer independent, readable objects. Instead, they become a semi-abstract study of pattern, colour and form, in which volume and line become the principal focus. Alongside this, Morandi plays with our perception of space in the composition, at once implying a traditional, three-dimensional progression of space, and simultaneously denying it through the convergence of the objects.
In his catalogue raisonné for Morandi’s works, Lamberto Vitali linked the present composition with two other paintings from the same year, which explore a similarly staged still-life grouping (Vitali, nos. 751-753). From the Second World War onwards, Morandi increasingly worked in series, tackling the same subject over a number of canvases, making subtle changes from one composition to the next, tracking their effects and analysing their impact on the items before him. Although he worked with the same cast of objects throughout his career, he remained constantly alert to their pictorial possibilities, and the manner in which their character changed when placed in a certain configuration, or aligned together in a new pattern. Describing this highly methodical and deeply contemplative practice, Morandi said, ‘It takes me weeks to make up my mind which group of bottles will go well with a particular coloured tablecloth. Then it takes me weeks of thinking about the bottles themselves, and yet often I still go wrong with the spaces. Perhaps I work too fast? Perhaps we all work too fast these days? A half dozen pictures would just about be enough for the life of an artist’ (Morandi quoted in J. Herman, ‘A visit to Morandi’ in L. Klepac, Giorgio Morandi: the dimension of inner space, exh. cat. Sydney, 1997, p. 27).
Throughout the 1950s, Morandi’s fastidious self-discipline and intense focus came to dominate his practice, as he concentrated on the interrelationships between an increasingly small number of objects. With just four components in the present work, Morandi has created a visually compelling, timeless composition from the simplest of means. As Italian art critic and historian, Lionello Venturi noted in 1957, ‘a still life by Morandi is most beautiful when it is simple; when few objects of common shape are offered on the canvas. In recent years Morandi has become aware of this, and his simplifications of motifs are more and more emphasised, in order to let the colour harmony speak by itself’ (L. Venturi, Giorgio Morandi Retrospective 1912-1957, exh. cat., New York, 1957, n.p.). Held together with a delicate, mysterious internal tension, there is a feeling that the smallest of movements would destroy the harmonious equilibrium and poise of these objects. This poetic intensity, garnered from the most humble and familiar of objects, was for Morandi one of the fundamental aims of his painting: ‘Even in as simple a subject’ he explained, ‘a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond’ (E. Roditi, op. cit., p. 358).