(2 of 3)
The typical still life of earlier centuries—the 17th century Dutch table, say, cascading with "parrot tulips and gold beakers, fur, fruit, fish, feather and dew-drops—was a symbol of appropriation. It declared the owner's 5 power to seize and keep the real stuff of the world. Even the still lifes of that great master of meditative vision, Chardin, tend to retain this emblematic quality; it was written into his social background. In Morandi, things are otherwise.
The sense of display is abolished. The objects are inorganic and dateless: milky long-necked bottles and squat flasks, a biscuit tin, a fluted bowl, some long-beaked metal pitchers. They carry no marks, patterns or brand names. They look fragile and contingent, but they endure for decades, through picture after picture. (To make sure that nothing disturbed the precise relationships he put them in, Morandi drew chalk circles around the bases of his "models" on the surface of the table.) Sometimes the things have the look of architecture; the slender bottle necks, leaning together, vaguely recall the towers of Bologna and San Gimignano. Occasionally their groups, bound together by some mutual gravitation of shape, might remind one of people insecurely huddled on the edge of Morandi's small flat earth, the tabletop.
The way they are painted looks awkward at first, ill defined—but only because it makes no concessions to haste. Morandi used no short cuts. He eschewed the sharply abbreviated shapes, high contrasts of tone and grabby oppositions of color that make an image "memorable" on first sight. Instead, the things in his paintings seep deliberately into one's attention. They start vaguely, as little more than silhouettes, a vibration of one low color against another.
Gradually they "develop" on the eye, and one begins to grasp their internal relationships: how articulate the subtle sequence of tones may be, in a form that once looked flat and light brown; how many colors may be contained, as dusty hints and afterimages of themselves, in what seemed to be a sequence of gray patches. If the straight side of a bottle seems to waver, it only does so to remind us how mutable and hard to fix the act of seeing really is. And if the shapes look simple, their simplicity is extremely deceptive; one recognizes in it the distillation of an intensely pure sensibility, under whose gaze the size of the painting, the silence of the motif and the inwardness of the vision are as one.
As Art Historian Kenneth Baker points out in the catalogue to this show, Morandi chose an art that could not frighten or persuade, as the mass-media imagery of Italy was intent on doing; his struggle was "to purge representation of its manipulative potential so that painting . . . might be carried on without cynicism or apology." Modestly, insistently, Morandi's images try to slow the eye, asking it to give up its inattention, its restless scanning, and to give full weight to something small.