Giorgio Morande tried to suit the world at a table
With the types of species, the Italian painting that is still life is not a ghost city, completely, but it provokes more than its share of dust and herbs. It is just the fact that French fruit containers and Dutch lemon scales get a larger part of the textbook more than anything of this kind of Bel Paese. Even the great art historian Adolfo Ventury had to abandon his citizens when he admitted that the model “was considered an exclusive feature of the painters north of the Alps.” It was in 1913, to be fair, before Venturi or anyone else heard about Giorgio Morandi, a huge exception to the Italian base, and most others.
If you love him, as anyone spends a long time enough with his work, New York can be a single place. However, in September, Mattia de Luka brought up to sixty -five of his paintings, drawings and publications, many private collections. Thirty-seven others are now hanging in David Zeerner-more than Morandis, he said, more than Manhattan has passed since late Dubia. This is still not enough, but somewhat appropriate, because Morande traveled less than his art: he rarely left Italy, and rarely left his city in Bologna, and the way he told some, he rarely left the apartment where he lived with him his sisters died in 1964, about. Age is approximately twenty. Saying that he spent all his time in the drawing would be very shiny. He spent his time extending his own paintings, mixing his own paints, arranging cups and bottles on the millimeter, and destroying his own works when they failed to please him. The painting was what he did with the minutes and the remaining hours.
“Life is still” (1942).Artwork by Giorgio Morandi / © ARS / Siae / A group of Fondazione Magnani-Rocca / Courtesy David Zwner
Food residue was sufficient for more than a thousand pictures, though, including cups, utensils, bottles, etc. – you write about Morande, you realize how the English is on kitchen vessels – the best and the largest part. He can do flowers or landscapes, or for a period of time in his twenties, self -images, but Forte was giving things without life and pulse. (These two exhibitions refer to a stupid, high -end Trebah: its bottles are cold and not alive, but Life is still.) A certain stored olive oil container, such as a bottle that wears a white-decoration white ball dress, appears in a fabric after a fabric-sometimes the right-wing ribs curve, as if Morlandy boycotted it in the middle of the road, and sometimes it is major, pale and surrounded by modest cups. In 1936, he is still old, in Zeerner, he seems to radiate the slave beige field behind him. Beige, brown, wrapping, and layers are not neutral in Morande. There are always some fires or movement without weight. Things are alive because the space is alive because gray is alive.
One of the stories that are told about the fixed is that it is mainly a religious art: the iris symbolizes the Holy Trinity, the shells of nuts symbolize steel, and the half -eating food symbolizes the transmission of life, and so on. Things are not just things. No one calls Morande a Christian artist, but you do not have to have to hear the spiritual whisper in his work-even at the first time, it shows us the material world to suggest another thing. One in 1914 is still his life with a bottle and jugs, shown at the De Luka show in the past fall, made me think that Morande painted some cubic photos but was not really a cubic. It seems that the bottle, the sparkle and most of everything else move to the same vibrations that win-a force outside the theater that keeps them aligned, completely different from the fragments that are free from the divine that it gets in Braque or Picasso. The most illuminated work in the Zwirner show may be a “metaphysical life”, since 1918, when Morande was still borrowing tricks from other Giorgio, De Chiraico. Here we must soon be a regular bottle, but also a box and a model that was sliced in half, and a proto tube, all of them demanding the dismantling of the symbol, not just. Whatever the solution, it cannot be found in (remembering the title) alone.
Sakan Al -Hayat (1960).Artwork by Giorgio Morandi / Courtesy Mattia de Luca Gallery; Image by alvise Aspesi
So it makes sense when people talk about Morlandy in the silence of the cathedral. Umberto Eco, speaking at the opening of the Morlandi Museum in Bologna, in 1993, seized the opportunity to wonder “how spirituality can be expressed” simply. I am not here to differ. I would just like to add that Morande is also a comic. Spiritual comic, if I insist, but the man has VanquainNot a wet type, abdomen, but masks like those you may find in Jack Tatti or cartoon shol Steinberg. They do not develop in the context of the Morande profession; They start irregularly inside and outside, until their appearance and disappearance game becomes metaphysics. Note, for example, the number of times that things appear in this crane still playing musical chairs. The organisms try to claim a seat and confirm their full size, most of which do so, but the loser (there is always one completely) is reduced to a flat negative space, and a colored vagina. In 1957 he is still at the De Luka exhibition, the loser is a blue container; In 1942 in Zwirner, it is a tall sparkle in the back.
“Life is still” (1936).Artwork by Giorgio Morandi / © ARS / Siae / A group of Fondazione Magnani-Rocca / Courtesy David Zwner
There is not enough space in these pictures. MORANDI is sure of it – it is the restriction that allows the dignities to start. Things are rooting their heads from the left or the theater to the right; A slightly larger candlestick for its lumps to one side; It seems that countless pairs of bottles, cups and jugs push each other like two children at the back of a small bus. When an artist draws two standing side by side on a flat surface, the perspective rules say that either of them is less than the bottom of us, the end of the story, but for Morande, this is just the beginning. Look at the edge that makes the sharing of the objects, and the way the left left left left, where it seems that every being pushes his brother and approaches us and then he is pushed immediately.
Triple takes Double Takes follow -up. In one image, the top of the cup is completely mixed with the background color and makes the bottle be raised. Elsewhere, the bottle neck is raised on her body. Morande’s titles tend to be frighteningly useful – it was produced from “fixed life with x organisms”, but what We are Things? At least a quarter of the time, I’m not sure. I spent some time to mutitize and muttered in front of “fixed life with two being and cloth at a table” before I surrendered and asked experts at hand, David Lieber, who sponsored Morande’s other offers for Zwirner, and Alice Shabella, who sponsored this one. The thing on the right seems to be a type of a long ceramic dish. One on the left is a wooden sculpture of the type you may find at the bottom of the stairs, and not that knowing this explains a lot. Any eccentric genius can make pits to sculpt the stairs; Not every eccentric genius will choose such a distinctive object and then draw it in the face far From the scenes.
I can continue. This is the joy of Morande: a comedy has no height or fall. Triple and Quadruple takes a decrease in one nice fog. There is rarely anything precious or knows how to work – about the time when he stopped drawing models, discover how to gently, without asking us to solve mystery. What DE Chirico and most of the surrealists have started to do, and they need full trunks of Melanodramic supports to do, he did so in space alone.
Another main story about fixed is that it is a basic material art, and it is an inclusive type. To own the Dutch painting in the seventeenth century of the lobster and some grapes on a silver dish was a way to own the actual dish, fruits and crustaceans. Nature is captured and consumed, indefinitely, at Loker.
It is not Morande no Try to capture the things he draws. He just refuses to play part of a mosque, or allow you to feel one. Its pictures can be collected, clearly – this is the main reason for a hundred of them passing through Manhattan is an event – but I did not get a whiff of affection for the things in it, or a feeling that their painter gave many of them from them. Van Gogh only painted sunflower. He loved them. Morande broke the tops of the ceramic objects, which were stained in the paint, leaving them to collect dust. The whipped olive oil container was its subject, but it was unprecedented. I doubt that he felt that he understood it well enough to gain the right to love. Keep slipping.
However, understanding that the life that is still in Morlandy is an annoying illusion that may surpass you, and the treatment he is looking for again, more difficult. Your reward, instead of the usual thorny comfort, is a state of dark confusion around the material world and how it is fit together. Be honest: You really don’t understand the three dimensions you live in, you are tired of trying. Another and the largest of these pictures is the belief that people can know anything well enough to imagine that he belongs to them. ♦