snapSHOT of the Art World | Morandi vs. Morandi

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), known in his lifetime as one of Italy’s finest painters, and still today proving his abiding relevance, was the subject of two large back-to-back shows in New York this winter, one organized by the Rome-based gallery Mattia De Luca and the other at David Zwirner’s Chelsea venue—both exhibitions comprised over one hundred works altogether, bringing Morandi’s lyric and cerebral work out of their usual Italian repositories into the American spotlight.

Giorgio Morandi. Paesaggio [Landscape], 1928 V. 135; installation view at Mattia De Luca.
© Giorgio Morandi; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy Mattia De Luca gallery

Morandi, renowned for his singular rigor (sometimes reductively referred to as “obsessively serialistic”), devoted over forty years to still lifes of quotidian objects rendered in small-scale oil paintings, etchings, and watercolors. All titled Natura Morta, these works most often depict close-up perspectives of a group of the same cherished yet ordinary jars, bottles, vases, pitchers, metal cans, ceramic bowls, ramekins, and colored bricks that the artist carefully assembled on a table in his studio in Bologna. From time to time, Morandi would re-arrange these configurations, subtly adjusting their positions and lighting angles to reveal exquisitely delicate variations of colors and shapes, so that multifaceted relationships could be discovered between each object, each composition, and the viewer. His ambition, he mused, was to “touch the core, the essence of things,” stating that “even in as simple a subject, a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond.” Curator James Thrall Soby, who included eighteen Morandi works in a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1949, insightfully captured the essence of his genius, believing that the artist was “not simply a painter of bottles and occasional landscapes, but a man intent on exploring subtle equations of forms, placing, and atmospheric effects . . . separating their volumes and color and then interlocking them again through an alchemy he alone understood.”

Giorgio Morandi. Natura Morta, 1947 V. 577; Natura Morta, 1946 V. 518; Natura Morta, 1950-1951 V. 763; Natura Morta, 1951 V. 762.
Installation view at Mattia De Luca. © Giorgio Morandi; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy Mattia De Luca gallery

Curated by the art historian Marilena Pasquali, the Mattia de Luca exhibition, which opened several months before Zwirner’s, was exquisitely displayed in an 1878 Neoclassical townhouse on the Upper East Side. Enhanced by its intimate setting, the installation, spanning two floors, showcased sixty-five Morandi works mostly concentrating on his iconic still-life paintings. Much like the way Morandi deliberately positioned his objects as actors and used the canvas as their theater, Pasquali employed the ornate enfilade of rooms and stairwell of the nineteenth-century building as a stage upon which to arrange the works in intimate groupings of two or three. This design allowed unusual accessibility that encouraged a deeper connection to these works. The natural light that streamed through the windows in these notably high-ceilinged rooms on the day that I was there suffused their cream-colored walls and provided an unexpected serenity.

Morandi’s paintings engender visual trances that morph the simple scenery and objects of modern life into images shaped by light and made voluminous through shadow. His barely perceptible gradations of color, executed through the careful layering of thick and thin brushstrokes to create depth and soft texture, come to light only upon prolonged observation, rewarding the patient viewer with additional discovery.

Giorgio Morandi. Natura Morta, 1927 V. 117; Natura Morta, 1928 V. 128; Natura Morta, 1930 V. 157; Natura Morta, 1936 V. 208.
Installation view at Mattia De Luca. © Giorgio Morandi; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy Mattia De Luca gallery

Entire worlds are contained in the little arrangements of household vessels with muted tones painted in beiges, browns, off-whites, dove and pearl greys, greens, and soft yellows. And if you gaze long enough, the painting variations confer a heightened sensibility, transforming not only how you see, but also your own awareness of the way your sight works, a sort of meta-observation. You notice how your eye reconfigures the planes and lines in each composition into a house or a hill or a pot or a flower: Is the tallest of cathedral spires not also the fluted neck of a vase?

Giorgio Morandi. Fiori, 1952 V. 796. Installation view at Mattia De Luca.
© Giorgio Morandi; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Photo by Nicholas Knight, courtesy Mattia De Luca gallery

A similar epiphany was much harder to achieve at David Zwirner, where only nine of Morandi’s still life compositions were on view. The experiential compare-and-contrast exercise of seeing two Morandi shows in succession compelled this viewer to consider the importance of setting and lighting to properly showcase the works and communicate the curator’s vision when installing an exhibition. The two variations cleverly acted as a mise-en-abyme of Morandi’s lifetime pursuit of visual answers to his fundamental question: How do slight shifts in light, form, and color interact to control what the eye sees?

Installation view at David Zwirner.
© Giorgio Morandi; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Courtesy David Zwirner

Giorgio Morandi. Autoritratto (Self-Portrait), 1925.
© Giorgio Morandi; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, NY.
Courtesy David Zwirner

At Zwirner, not only is there a jarring mismatch between the small, elegant rectangular works in period frames and the one-size-fits-all mega-exhibition design, with the archetypal huge harshly lit walls of the whitest of cubes, but the selection of works themselves makes it difficult for a viewer to connect with Morandi’s existential project. The show focuses on thirty-seven works ranging from 1918 to 1963, from one of Morandi’s patrons, the art historian Luigi Magnani (1906–1984), whose collection is notable for “the variety of techniques, subjects, and periods it represents” as touted in the press release. But this variety is, in fact, the reason for the show’s weakness: by choosing to showcase the one-offs and the early works before Morandi hit his stride, the personal collection on view suggests that the artist’s oeuvre is sparse and disjointed; instead, this selection would have worked nicely as an addendum to a larger retrospective.

However, for a viewer already familiar with the artist’s landmark work, the Zwirner show does add some delightful footnotes, including one of Morandi’s seven self-portraits and some gorgeously subtle landscapes, such as Paesaggio (Levico), a watercolor from 1957 whose economical use of just a couple of rectangles of green brilliantly conjures a pastoral scene. The Courtyard of Via Fondazza (1954), one of the larger paintings in the show at 19 by 21 inches, is a striking vista from an open window, looking out onto the surrounding roofs of the town. This particular view is from Morandi’s house in Bologna where he lived and worked from age nineteen up until his death. The unusual choice to recreate his exact view, which was partially blocked by a wall in real life, thereby “cutting off” half of the picture plane, immediately makes the painting personal, allowing the viewer to share the artist’s perspective and enter his space.

In the era of AI, where endless replicas and variations of any scene are available at the speed of light, what need have we of hundreds of iterative scenes of the same jars and cans in muted colors? Is the rare and unusual not more worthwhile? But the study of Morandi’s project, precisely the elevation of repetition to high art, teaches us that it isn’t the variations themselves, but also the prodigious and almost devotional recreation of these familiar objects over a lifetime that imbues them with meaning. As part of the tradition of Italian Metaphysical Painting, of which Morandi was a leading figure early in his career, Morandi pulls on a universal thread by immortalizing the humble domestic vessels used by humankind for centuries in his refined still lifes that evoke the both vanitas and memento mori traditions. One notable critic breathlessly and reverently claimed that “Morandi’s objects appear simply, with a previously unknown intensity, presenting themselves so pregnant with meaning that we realize only in the moment that we have now had a complete experience, and that life is worthy of being lived for the sake of accumulating such experiences.” Counterintuitively, Morandi, the man who never traveled, who never moved, who painted the same small subjects endlessly, proves that the greater the formal constraints, the greater the avenues for exploration and experimentation, and the greater the visual and spiritual reward.

Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation was on view at David Zwirner
from January 16 to February 22, 2025.

Giorgio Morandi—Time Suspended Part II was on view at Mattia de Luca from September 26 to November 26, 2024.

A selection of the artist’s works remain on permanent view at the Magnani Rocca Foundation outside Parma, Italy and the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy.

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