Abstract Reality: Morandi, Silent in the Spotlight

The paintings are hung in the lower level of the Lehman Gallery, tucked away behind the medieval art and below the temporary exhibitions of paintings whose regular homes are being renovated. Arranged more or less chronologically around a ring-like gallery decorated with insufficient lighting and minimal adornment or fanfare, the exhibition is so reclusive that you’re unlikely to notice its existence unless you know to look for it.

This is a fitting display for so modest and subtle a painter as Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), an artist who deliberately shunned the fashionable avant-garde art world that swept up and made global stars of his friends, who barely left his hometown in all his life, even as World War II raged around him in fascist Italy, who steadfastly refused to paint anything but objects of the most ordinary nature. Some might describe his life and subject matter as banal; Morandi himself might have characterized them as meditative, or uncompromising. Accordingly, the exhibition itself is so understated as to be hermetic.

Giorgio Morandi was considered by many of his contemporaries to be the greatest Italian painter of his time. His retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his first-ever career-spanning show in the United States, leaves viewers to discover why. Out of the exhibition’s absolutely unremarkable presentation, the sheer elegance and uniqueness of Morandi’s still lifes and landscapes – which together comprise the vast majority of the works on display – emerge gradually, as if revealing themselves to patiently adjusting eyes. Morandi’s brilliance lies in his subtle experimentation with light, depth, color and texture, and in his explorations of how the slightest of adjustments can completely alter the atmosphere and emotional impact of the most pedestrian subjects. His depiction of everyday objects is sometimes barely representational, tapping into many different interpretations of the visual reality we take for granted.

“There is nothing more abstract than reality,” Morandi famously said of his repetitive subject matter. And the paintings displayed go a long way toward explaining this cryptic maxim, revealing a gradual progression toward more and more abstract styles. His subjects are often a pretext for stylistic exploration; his earliest works are stylistic exercises deeply influenced by Boccioni’s dynamism and Cézanne’s geometrics. He toys with surrealism in the “metaphysical” series, executed between 1918 and 1922, in which he paints baffling still lifes of unidentifiable objects. Although the visual language he employs for these works is naturalistic, the objects in them seem to defy logic and physics as they float motionlessly, cast strange shadows or vanish suddenly into unseen spatial realities. Morandi, however, deliberately avoids the dreamlike symbolism that characterized the painting of his contemporary Giorgio de Chirico, preferring to leave his paintings even more ambiguous and mysterious.

Later paintings return to more ordinary subjects but shift further away from naturalistic representation. The landscapes are little more than color patterns and brush textures, yet are always barely recognizable, like viewing nature through frosted glass; there’s a tree here, a house there, a grey cloud overtaking a blue sky above, but few details. The still lifes of the 1930s resemble dystopian cityscapes: the chaotically placed bottles and boxes that populate them stand tall and monolithic, dominated by greys and browns but often featuring a lone, half-hidden shock of brightness – a white bottle conspicuously out front, an orange pitcher peeking out from behind a box. The seashells dominating his still lifes from 1943 – painted during World War II bombings of Bologna – represent the most extreme chaos of the exhibition, resembling exploded forms like the husks of objects blasted apart from within. The watercolor still lifes from the artist’s later years in the ‘50s and ‘60s get progressively smaller and more intimate, shedding almost all relation to representational reality. The subjects of these final works become unrecognizable, lighting is reduced to a haze, and blank canvas overtakes brushstrokes in defining the borders of objects. In these final works, Morandi peels away visual cues to render his subjects nearly abstract.

But perhaps these characterizations assign too much meaning to the artist’s work. Morandi repeatedly rejected the idea of symbolism, insisting that the objects in his paintings stand for nothing but themselves. “In the end, it’s just a white bottle,” he explained when pressed about the meaning of a particularly prominent character in many of his still lifes. The exhibition tends to avoid suggesting interpretation of the works beyond technical analyses, letting Morandi speak in his own words through quotes and anecdotes interspersed on the walls throughout.

This distanced approach is often effective, letting Morandi’s work stand alone, but the obliqueness can be occasionally frustrating. Two displays, for example, contain about a dozen etchings, a reminder of Morandi’s life work as a printmaking professor at Bologna’s Accademia di Belle Arti. But the exhibition provides no background information on these miniature works, which mirror Morandi’s painted subjects but take on a wildly different character with their incredible line detail and complex, crosshatched shading. Morandi’s mastery of etching technique is obvious, but his etchings are underrepresented and left without any comprehensible connection to his paintings.

A pleasant surprise is Morandi’s rare figure paintings, which include an early homage to Cézanne’s 1905 painting Bathers and three self portraits. The 1915 Bathers borrows the scene from Cézanne’s painting and pushes it through another filter, simplifying and elongating the geometry of the eponymous figures and melting the background into abstractness. The 1919 self-portrait, hidden on the opposite side of a still life featuring a cactus, depicts the artist’s face in close-up as a geometrical puzzle, all shapes and facets of light. The real treat, though, is the prominently hung twin self portraits from 1924-1925, which depict the artist in the same expressionless pose and outfit but with startlingly different results. The later painting is a triumph of impressionism, with details brought to life via thick brushwork and strong contrasts. The earlier one is purposely hazy and washed out, all colors and no definition, like viewing a scene while half-blinded by direct sunlight.

The ultimate effect of the exhibition is that it washes over you, inundating you with wave after wave of repetitive paintings. There are perhaps a few too many paintings here, and the inherent shortcomings of the drab, concrete Lehman Gallery threaten patience. Occasionally something seizes you – an alarming stab of color in an otherwise dark still life, the web-like density of lines in a tiny etching – but the exhibition is often an exercise in meditation. It has you musing over the long procession of still lifes and landscapes, listening for some hint of intention or message from the artist, but in the end, both artist and work remain silent. You might interpret a landscape with a menacingly placed electrical tower as betraying Morandi’s feelings for fascism or industrialism, but a painting right next to it strips the same scene of all negative connotations. Some viewers might be frustrated by Morandi’s relentlessly opaque approach, but those who surrender to his minimalism will delight in the smallest of discoveries. In Morandi’s oeuvre, meaning is meaningless, and mere existence is poetic. There needn’t be any point or message. In the end, it is just a white bottle, painstakingly rendered from a dozen different perspectives, and that alone is beauty enough.