Domestic Meditations

The deceptive simplicity and rigour of Giorgio Morandi’s Natura morta, painted circa 1948, was reflected in the artist’s own life. Stories of his hermit-like existence are legion and have become legendary as the artist is conjured up in our imaginations in his cell-like studio in Bologna, alone save for his ever-increasing array of vases and old bottles. For the majority of his years, he lived in the same apartment on Via Fondazza with his mother and three sisters. There, he would spend much of his time arranging and rearranging the vases, fake flowers, bottles and other vessels that he had accumulated over the decades and which he immortalised in his still life pictures. In a process that recalls the patience and perfectionism of the laying out of Zen gardens in Japan,Morandi would move each element until the rhythm of colours, spaces and objects encapsulated the sense of harmony which he sought and which he captured so poetically in his paintings.

While Morandi may have avoided travel abroad, except on the rarest occasions, he was not as reclusive as it would at first seem. The simplicity of his life, like that of his paintings, was deceptive.Morandi was Professor of Etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, and was therefore constantly exposed to a stream of students, while also keeping in contact with a range of friends and fellow artists throughout Italy indeed, Natura morta was given by him to the sculptor Giacomo Manzù. Morandi often travelled within his home country for exhibitions, enjoying seeing in the flesh the paintings of his contemporaries as well as the artistic forebears whose examples were such crucial touchstones to him. Even when he journeyed to Switzerland for the opening of one of his own exhibitions, he made sure that he saw a range of pictures, not least by one of his greatest artistic heroes,

Chardin. Chardin’s influence, or rather a spirit akin to that of the French painter, is evident in the scumbled light, the warm ochres and the incredible stillness of Natura morta. In this picture, it is easy to see the truth of Morandi’s statement that,‘I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquility and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else’. Morandi’s paintings evoke an atmosphere of calm and timelessness.They are focuses for contemplation and meditation, pools of quiet within the hurly burly of the modern world and modern art, and in this they reflect perfectly the artist himself. Despite their timelessness, there is a rigorous and distinctly modern aesthetic at work in the pareddown restraint with which Morandi has rendered the various fruit and vessels in Natura morta. He has pushed the world of the figurative, of the still life, towards abstraction, creating a picture that, through the reduced geometry with which he has captured the scene, becomes a discreet and absorbing symphony of colour and form. Morandi explained, ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see’.Through the abstraction and shimmering unreality of Natura morta,Morandi introduces us to the mysteries and wonders of existence itself, to the quiet beauty of humble objects and of everyday life.

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