A wonderful lesson in seeing from Italy's retiring "Monk"
When Giorgio Morandi died at the age of 73 in 1964, he was, from the view of modern art that revolves around "movements" and historical groupings, a kind of seraphic misfit. He was not a joiner moved nowhere, did a little teaching, and spent most of the last 45 years of his life in a slightly musty, secluded flat in Bologna, the red-brick provincial city whose reluctant cultural ornament he had become. In all his life he stepped out of Italy only to cross the border for a few brief trips into nearby parts of Switzerland. Il Monaco, one critic nicknamed him, the Monk: a big heavy man, gray on gray, shuffling between the dark outmoded tall-boys, painting little groups of bottles and tins, or a vase with one paper rose stuck in it.
Throughout his career, Italian culture buzzed with manifestoes, claims and counterclaims. Before World War I, the Futurists tried to marshal art into a relentless machine-age spectacle. In the '20s and '30s, Mussolini and his cultural gang strove to co-opt Italian modernism into Fascist propaganda—dynamism, simplification. By the late '40s and '50s, socialist realism (especially in Bologna, which prided itself on its worker traditions) was trying, amid clouds of polemic, to become the house style of Italian art. All through this, Morandi stayed where he was, looking at his plain table of dusty bottles.
No other major modern painter has less to tell us about the tensions of history and the facts of the 20th century than Giorgio Morandi; none, except Matisse, retired more completely from the "confrontational" role expected of the avantgarde. Today Morandi's renunciation of the art world as a system seems noble, exemplary and perhaps inimitable. He disdained all ambitions that could not be internalized, as pictorial language, within his art. This earned him the reputation in some quarters of a petit maítre: a man who, though he said it very well had only one limited thing to say.
The untruth of this verdict can readily be seen in New York's Guggenheim Museum, where the first American retrospective of Morandi's work—65 paintings, with 58 drawings, watercolors and etchings-is on view until mid-January, after which it will travel to the Des Moines Art Center, which is responsible for having organized the exhibition.
"Here are most of my paintings, Morandi said to a reporter in the mid '50s, pointing to a thick dried crust of waste pigment that had accumulated through years of wiping on the crossbar of his easel. Morandi erased more paintings than he finished; his self-editing was relentless, a fact which should give pause to anyone who supposes there might not have been much difference between one still life and the next. But the differences, like the nature of his work itself, are hard to catch in words. One can easily say what the paintings are not. They do not tell stories They do not point to any kind of action "out there." They tell us nothing about Morandi the man. They are not dramatic, colorful or "modernist" in any doctrinaire way. And though they are saturated in historical awareness, they are unlike most still lifes that were done before them.