This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Estorick Collection and it is fitting that Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), one of the most consistently popular of the museum’s artists, should inaugurate the celebrations. Although Morandi’s trademark still-life paintings of bottles and jars have been regularly shown in Britain (the last major show was at the Tate in 2001), the appetite for his work is unassuaged, perhaps because its delights are not revealed all at once. His work encourages repeated looking and gives something back each time, differently articulated.
‘The monk of the bottles’, as he was called, lived with his mother and three sisters in an apartment in Bologna, hardly travelling anywhere, and concentrating on working in his studio. He joined the Fascist-sponsored factions and unions to avoid attracting attention or risking internal exile, and was rewarded with a professorship — of etching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. As the painter Arturo Di Stefano has perceptively written: ‘Perhaps Morandi settled into a personal exile of his own, muddling through the shouty and savage Fascist era, answering when called upon and fading from view when not, quietly and diligently accumulating prizes and prestige. Contrary to Brecht’s assertion that no one paints a still life on a sinking ship, in such tempestuous times it served him well to do precisely that.’ In other words, his primary allegiance was to his art.
You don’t go to Morandi to learn about the personalities or pressing issues of the day, for he was no history painter or committed cultural observer. Yet his work was radical, obsessed with formal relationships at the expense of narrative thrust, and quietly but rigorously concerned with distilling the essence of objects in light. In his studio he could control things, such as the positioning of his chosen objects and the fall of light upon them, whereas outside was chaos. Throughout the 20th century, the Italians were much addicted to manifestos and art movements, but apart from brief flirtations with Futurism and Scuola Metafisica, Morandi remained apart, ‘a kind of seraphic misfit’, in Robert Hughes’s telling phrase. De Chirico said that Morandi was adept at identifying the metaphysical dimension of ordinary things, and it is perhaps this access to realms beyond the material that secures our continued interest in his landscapes and pot-scapes.
The Estorick show of some 80 items is nearly all works on paper (there is one painting, a late still life from 1962, of what looks like three canisters in front of a jug, on the second floor in Gallery 5), and the main body of the exhibition comprises a superb selection of etchings divided between Galleries 1 and 2 on the ground floor. Morandi taught himself etching from manuals, and became a master of the medium, technically adventurous and assured. The earliest work here dates from 1912, and one of the first to hold some of the Morandi allure — as well as to demonstrate his growing mastery of hatched lines — is ‘Landscape, Grizzana’ of 1913. Next to it hangs ‘Still Life with Bottles and Pitcher’ from two years later, and the closest Morandi got to Futurism. This forest of slim uprights, foreground evocatively blending and eliding with background, calls to mind a more Surrealist composition, one of Paul Nash’s poignant sculptures of found objects from 1937, actually called ‘Forest’. Could Nash have known the Morandi?
Morandi has always been trumpeted as a painter’s painter, but this should not blind us to the appeal of his work to a wider public. In Gallery 2 is a small group of just four watercolours of breathtaking and exquisite simplicity. All are exemplary but my favourite is the pink and blue still-life from 1960. We don’t have much opportunity to see Morandi’s watercolours, and these two pairs — of still life and landscape respectively — are a large part of the reason for visiting this show. Don’t be led into thinking there’s nothing much there: notice instead how Morandi suggests things by their absence, by the gaps between objects. He was always playing with positive and negative space, and a fine example of this is the 1931 etching ‘Still Life of Vases on a Table’, in which the foremost vases appear as blank white shapes against a background of varied cross-hatching. In fact, these white ‘negative silhouettes’, with their finely controlled contours, look like torn paper shapes collaged on to the etching.
Upstairs in Gallery 4 is a wall of ten outline drawings from the Estorick’s own collection, mostly of still-life subjects, very spare, with a delicate fluid line, relaxed but at the same time utterly controlled. There’s one minimal landscape. All are beautiful but would make most sense in a room of Morandi’s paintings. As it is they have been juxtaposed with a display of polaroids and digital prints by the Italian photographer Nino Migliori (born 1926), like Morandi a denizen of Bologna. These photographs are in homage to the Grizzana landscape Morandi painted, but being rather unpleasantly overdrawn and overworked, detract from the succinct understatement of Morandi’s vision. Best to return downstairs for another look at the master’s etched lines, and perhaps for closer scrutiny of the landscapes or flower subjects. ‘Hillside in the Morning’ (1927) and ‘Flowering Tuft’ (1932) are particularly worthy of note.
Although many of the still lifes are composed from long-necked bottles, tins, jugs and flasks, these look less like manufactured objects than sculptural elements arranged architecturally in a small town. There is much play with silhouette and the optical vibration of one shape darker or lighter than another next to it. The tonal gradation is remarkable in the way it distinguishes the subtlety of the spatial relationships between these elements. There is flattening and there is volumetric realisation, and an overriding simplification that is endlessly deceptive. The ineloquence of the motif perfectly matches the private, inward vision, but somehow the communication to the attentive spectator remains mysteriously rich and insistent.
In the hurly-burly of our frantic world, Morandi’s work requires us to slow down and give our full attention to something small and seemingly unimportant. The lack of drama and rhetoric might make him easy to overlook but, once engaged, we are compelled to give these etchings, drawings and watercolours our full attention. However modest the subject, the work is as demanding as all great art.
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