The pre-eminent Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) is frequently called an artists’ artist, which is usually taken to indicate that his extreme formality or painterliness (depending on who is arguing the case) appeals more to those in the know than to the man in the street. Morandi undoubtedly does have a deep and lasting appeal to artists, as this exhibition reminds us, but his profoundly unassuming and contemplative pictures also speak directly to a wider public, if the context is congenial. Morandi’s work is quiet, concentrating on groups of jars and bottles or odd corners of landscape, and in the bustle and cacophony of a mixed exhibition they can be overlooked. However, this is a mixed exhibition with a difference: it is devoted not just to Morandi’s own work, but also to his influence on later generations of British artists — specifically to those working today, though five of the 12 artists featured here are now dead. The show nevertheless proposes a living tradition, a follow-through of interests and shared visual concerns which is heartening to find in this age of studied diversity and mindless repetition.
Curated by Paul Coldwell, artist and director of the postgraduate programme at Camberwell Art School, the exhibition intersperses a fine selection of Morandi’s paintings, drawings and etchings with examples of work by late-20th-century British artists. (Were no earlier painters influenced by Morandi? What, for instance, did his near-contemporary William Nicholson think of him?) Nowadays ‘influence’ is a dirty word among progressive academics — who perhaps don’t care to accept that their own ideas owe anything to anyone else — and Coldwell duly prefers to suggest connections and set up ‘conversations’ between Morandi and his chosen dozen. The trouble with this approach is that absolutely any artist might have been chosen, whatever their real relationship to Morandi. Some will say that this is in fact the case — the inclusion of Rachel Whiteread proving the point. Certainly Professor Coldwell might have insisted on a closer relationship between the artists, to the exhibition’s profit, but this would doubtless have interfered with the intensely personal nature of his own intellectual journey round Morandi. (This is further adumbrated in the handsome catalogue, £12.95 in paperback and fully illustrated.)
The show is a small one, confined to the two downstairs rooms at the Estorick. It starts on a high note, with a lambent Ben Nicholson of floating rectangles and near-squares, borrowed from Kettle’s Yard, set against a blocky Morandi landscape. One of Coldwell’s conversations is certainly set up between Morandi’s brushy treatment and the sanded swirls in the Nicholson, which oddly enough doesn’t really occur with the other, more complex Nicholson still-life hung to the right. Why? Perhaps because it strives too hard for its effects. Next to it are two poignant landscape drawings by Morandi, eloquent for what has been left out of them, juxtaposed with the amorphous slather and harry of an early romantic Christopher Le Brun painting. Tenuous connections continue with Paul Winstanley’s soft-edged TV lounge hung next to another fine Morandi. It’s good to find Vic Willing’s early still-life from 1957 in such mixed company, though the catalogue reproduction is much crisper and more intense in colour than its actual rather worn splendour.
One of the comparisons in this show that really makes sense is the next grouping, of David Hockney with Morandi. Some people tend to disparage Hockney’s etched illustrations for Grimms’ Fairy Tales, probably because they are better known than much of his other work. Actually, in this case, the drawings stand the test of familiarity. Morandi was also a masterful etcher, whose prints became popular before his paintings even though he taught himself the craft from old manuals on the subject, and to see his etchings next to Hockney’s is revealing of both artists. Morandi’s fabulous etching ‘Savena Landscape’ is inventive in the same way as Hockney’s ‘Sexton Disguised as a Ghost’; in both the production of surprising shapes and forms is what primarily beguiles the eye, and leads on to recognition and pleasure.
Forget the exhibition’s subtitles, such as ‘The Personal Archive’ and ‘Lost and Found’; they’re taken from the catalogue and offer only a distraction to looking. In the second room is yet another superb Morandi painting, a 1956 still-life borrowed from a private collection (the generosity of owners who’ve lent to this show is much appreciated), succinct and succulent in blocks of pale colour — beige, green, grey, pink, brown and blue. The forms abut, yet seem also to draw away from one another, as if with a shiver of recognition (desire or distaste?). The large grey William Scott still-life next to it is distressingly over-inflated by comparison, vapid and meagre in its use of shapes. An unhappy conjunction. The specificity of Euan Uglow’s still-life comes as quite a contrast. In it you can read the labelling on the tin, and the pattern is clear on his Delft jar, unlike Morandi’s preference for dusty or disguised surfaces. (He would often coat a bottle with paint, which had the effect of making it less specific. But it also made it opaque, therefore easier to see and to depict.) Uglow thought Morandi’s paintings beautiful and was much drawn to the non-fussiness of the shapes. The encounter of these two artists is a fruitful one.
Much is made of the cool muted light in Morandi’s paintings, the opposite of what is perceived as being typically Mediterranean. It is suggested that Morandi appeals to the British through this coolness of palette and through his passion for understatement. But it must be the formal variety of the Italian master which speaks to sculptor Tony Cragg, here represented by a sensual curvy bronze vessel, though one of his sand-blasted glass pieces would have been more appropriate. The show draws to an end with a Patrick Caulfield still-life and a tremendous minimal Morandi of 1955. Upstairs is another room of Morandi’s drawings and etchings, from the Estorick’s permanent collection. And at the top of the building, in a further room, are three glorious early oils by Zoran Music (born 1909), always worth a look.
Professor Coldwell thinks that Morandi had no affection for his bottles and jars. I find this hard to believe — the evidence of the paintings is against it. Morandi is tender, as well as rigorous and austere. The work is not emotionally cold even if it is cool in colour. Nor is it dingy and light-deprived, but luminous. It is also more complex than it first appears. His still-life elements have been likened to personages, actors upon a stage. (This seems to be the justification for including a DVD of a 35-minute 1980 performance called ‘Homage to Morandi’ by a trio of young men styling themselves ‘Theatre of Mistakes’.) A still-life of profiled pots and bottles is sometimes like the silhouette of a walled town with towers, the buildings huddling defensively together as they have for centuries in Morandi’s native Bologna. Still-life as cast of characters, still-life as environment: an imaginative reinterpretation of deliberately limited resources. Morandi, like so many great artists, was a radical in conservative guise. The saving grace of this exhibition is that there is so much of his work to see and savour.
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