Paesaggio

‘The Emilian Apennines… at medium altitude, between the highest peaks and the low hills, unite two irreconcilables, sweetness and asperity; they are spare and sterile yet wonderfully luminous; their colours are few, hardly touched in and delicate, never violent, never contrasting, the shadows diffused, never dramatic’
Roberto Tassi

Just as Paul Cézanne’s name is indelibly wedded to Aix-en-Provence, so that of Giorgio Morandi immediately calls to mind Bologna, the city where he was born and lived for the entirety of his life, as well as the surrounding Emilian landscape and the small, rural village of Grizzana. Over the course of his career, Morandi and his sisters made frequent trips to Grizzana, often spending the sweltering summer months there. This was one of the only variations to the artist’s unchanging routine and simple lifestyle; the elusive artist rarely travelled and left Italy only twice during his lifetime. In his landscape painting, Morandi distilled the essence of Grizzana into painterly form, capturing the glowing, golden light, dusty green hues, terracotta-roofed farmhouses and the enveloping warmth of this corner of rural Italy. All of these characteristics can be found in Paesaggio of 1937, a work formerly held in the esteemed Italian twentieth-century art collection of Walter Fontana.

Roberto Tassi described the hold that Grizzana had over Morandi, his words serving as a vivid description of a painting such as Paesaggio: ‘The Emilian Apennines… at medium altitude, between the highest peaks and the low hills, unite two irreconcilables, sweetness and asperity; they are spare and sterile yet wonderfully luminous; their colours are few, hardly touched in and delicate, never violent, never contrasting, the shadows diffused, never dramatic; they combine the harsh, violet, desert of the exposed formations with the chestnut and beech woods, scattered rocks, meadows… stone houses; they are not sacred like the summit, but familiar and intimate; nothing dramatic, but essential…’ (R. Tassi, ‘Le paysage de Morandi’, in Giorgio Morandi artista d’Europa, exh. cat., Brussels, 1992, p. 20, quoted in Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964, exh. cat., New York & Bologna, 2008-2009, p. 160).

Rendered with thick strokes of rich green paint, Paesaggio, as so many of the artist's landscape paintings, is endowed with a sense of silence, as if time was standing still. Embalmed in a gentle, unmodulated light and void of sky, Paesaggio becomes, like Morandi’s still-lifes, a timeless and abstracted evocation of reality. As Cesare Brandi has described these works: ‘Those landscapes will never give the sense of a moment seized and subtracted from nature, as in a photograph or the paintings of Macchiaioli… The immediacy of his vision… is not instantaneity. The duration of these landscapes is infinite: the image of them goes back indefinitely, in determinate focus; they are primarily mental images conserved and reactivated by memory. Landscapes reflected on over time, fixed and established as they are, without any particular purpose. They lend their undergrowth and meadows, their density of shadows and open expanses, to an internal process and he readapts them in a sequence of simple colours and rearranges them in changed spatial relationships’ (C. Brandi, quoted in Giorgio Morandi 1890-1964, exh. cat., New York & Bologna, 2008-2009, p. 160).