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| Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta, 1956. |
Morandi is the great, passionate, seductive, obsessional thinker
about what light means, about what it is to make an object, put it down in
space and paint it again and again as the light and the shadows change. Morandi
is the
painter – who thinks about these things so passionately, so cogently, lucidly,
beautifully, seductively. Morandi is for me the serious painter who remakes
still life, thinks about how objects can really be in the world. And I am a
potter. I make the damn things! That’s been my life for the last forty-five
years.
– Edmund de Waal
Life is matter and is earth, what
is and what is not. Two artists separated in time by a mere eighty-four days,
the passing of the painter and the birth of the potter in 1964, are finally on
view together until early autumn at the light and airy (and oddly named)
gallery space Artipelag out in the ravishing Stockholm archipelago. “Morandi is
such a powerful, continuing presence in my life, and for almost forty years the
artist I return to. He is an artist of return,” says the compassionate and
polite British ceramist Edmund de Waal who is also the author of the
bestselling (well over one million copies) The
Hare with Amber Eyes, published in 2010, de Waal’s ardent family chronicle
as a descendant of the super wealthy Ephrussi family and its banking dynasty in
the nasty old Europe of The Thin White Duke and the yesterday world of Stefan
Zweig.
Morandi/Edmund de Waal is Museum
Director Bo Nilsson’s very personal coagulation of Giorgio Morandi and de Waal
at Artipelag. The exhibition stresses a number of things they have in common
like the obsessional nature, the seriality, the single-mindedness and the
emotional quality of their work, a certain spirited-awayness with ordinary,
quite extraordinary and always empty vessels dissolved beyond the world at hand.
Fair enough.
In his review in The New York Times (September 18, 2008)
of the great Morandi exhibition at The Met, Holland Cutter argued that one may regard
all Morandi’s allegorical still lifes “as stanzas of a single poem, a kind of Divine Comedy of the tabletop, with epic
but miniature heights and hells”: “Despite their small size and plain
components – bottles, jars, boxes, bowls, seashells – the paintings are
emotionally audacious. This isn’t because of what they say outright about
desire or fear, but because of what they don’t say; because they are so
evidently shaped by self-restraint, and the passions that produced it.”
Morandi painted 1,400 of these everlastingly
fascinating still lifes during his lifetime (1890–1964) and he invariably
titled them Natura morta – each a
periodic table of homely, wobbly objects; unassuming utensils in an unsettled
shadowy plot that remains elusive yet carries a strong element of cure. In his 1955
essay “The Metaphysician of Bologna”, John Berger noted how Morandi’s “pictures
have the inconsequence of margin notes but they embody true observation”. And
then we have the fireworks of Morandi’s restrained poetry. The way he grouped
and depicted these vessels – paintings as the most perfect vehicles – makes it
very easy to conclude who’s the artist in this boat.
Edmund de Waal is like a vessel
himself of proper Englishness. A warm hello, a big-hand handshake, and off he
is to Morandiland. His glowing praise for Morandi is wonderful to listen to
because he means every bit of it and more. He has a lot of things to say and
there is arguably great knowledge and a rare kind of love for the world in all
this, as long as he stays with the painter: “Things can possess and hold emotion,
which of course is exactly what Morandi believes. Morandi believes that all
objects are metaphysical, they say something else about the world.” Like
Morandi, he likes the idea of bringing a few objects together “and seeing what
synergies, energies are happening between them”: “What I care about is when I
make objects I put them down in the world, put them next to each other, begin
to make groups, begin to make still lifes, begin to make installation, begin to
make sculpture out of porcelain vessels.”
Still lifes? Installation?
Sculpture? Meh. What on earth turned this master potter into an art world
invitee and then, after 2010, a late labourer of faux Minimalism? The Hare with Amber Eyes, aha. Sam
Anderson wrote in The New York Times
Magazine (November 25, 2015) that de Waal’s “prose style is like his pot
style: he gets drunk on simplicity, on repetition”. The same goes for his arty groupings
of cylindrical lighter-than-air ceramics with personal seal marks and things
that sometimes go over the edges in monotone cadences boosted by slabs of
alabaster, graphite, steel and wood, and here and there some porcelain tiles
and shards. These units are sealed in annoyingly egotistical vitrines with
over-literary titles written in lowercase letters.
It’s this Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee
battle all over again – always in doubtful health – between two completely
different aspects of life. As the ceramist told The Guardian (October 18, 2015): “I am also making things in a
highly complicated art world of oligarchical people. So what am I doing? It’s a
proper thing to ask yourself.” Please, go ahead.
“To describe objects as homeless,
like creatures in search of a context and meaning, is typical of de Waal.
Anyone who has read his book The Hare
with Amber Eyes will recognise this,” notes Jorunn Veiteberg in the
exhibition catalogue regarding de Waal’s strategy to ensconce his objects and
how he sometimes also blurs them out behind milky glass. “Since the provision
of shelter and protection are so crucial here, it makes sense to highlight
these functions when talking about the vitrines and display cases that have
over the years become such a central aspect of de Waal’s installations.”
His father Victor, who was the Dean
of Canterbury from 1976 to 1988, never revealed anything about the family past,
how Gestapo stormed the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna during the Anschluss in March
1938 and put an end to the hundred-year-old dynasty. The Ephrussis were beaten
up and deprived of everything but managed to flee continental Europe. A black
piece from 2016 in the exhibition is called The
Reader (in small letters) and it is a eulogy for de Waal’s grandfather
Viktor Ephrussi, a Jewish scholar with “an incredible library. He ended up as a
refugee. With no books.” A maid named Anna managed to rescue a full collection
of a few hundred netsuke figurines in her apron and then in the mattress as the
looting went on. It was when de Waal inherited these 264 little carved
sculptures – one of them an ivory hare with amber eyes – that he found himself
in an obsessional track-and-trace hunt for his history.
In Canterbury the young de Waal studied
pottery in Geoffrey Whiting’s studio. Here he learned everything about classic
– brown – earthenware production. White porcelain was, as de Waal told Christina
Patterson in The Sunday Times Magazine
(September 13, 2015), “unavailable” because his teacher thought it “was
crookery, it was Stoke-on-Trent, it was standardisation, it was all these
things that were to be rejected and reviled”. de Waal studied English
literature in Cambridge and learned to speak Nihongo during a stay in Tokyo in
the early 1990s. Japan made him realise that he did not really like the great
influence of Bernard Leach and published his own book about the father figure
of British pottery in 1997 (de Waal’s first of several books on pottery).
“The book undertakes a critical
reassessment, based on a consideration of Leach’s ideas and works in the
Japanese and British contexts,” writes Veiteberg in the catalogue. “de Waal
clearly demonstrates the significant extent to which Leach and other similarly
charismatic men have shaped the language we use about ceramics and thereby
influenced our understanding of the medium. Not only have they obscured
oriental ceramics, they have also ‘drastically, heedlessly, dogmatically,
reduced the creative possibilities open to potters who drew their inspiration
from this source’. de Waal has made it part of his mission to confront dogmas
of this kind, and to trace different links between East and West.”
In her peculiar book The Artificial Kingdom, Celeste
Olalquiaga writes how “the age of wonder was greatly impulsed by those events
that marked the beginning of the modern era in the 15th and 16th
centuries: the voyages of discovery, the colonisation of America and the
rebirth of a classical past that had been forgotten for almost a thousand
years. A time when the universe was still – if residually – alive with magic
feelings, every creature and thing the source of infinite amazement, the age of
wonder indicated in its childlike openness the beginning of a new cultural era.
It was a moment when the West perceived the world as an object of contemplation
and spectatorial delight while readying its mercantile profitability and
intellectual consumption […] The arcades acted as urban greenhouses for this
cultural development to take place, enabling fantasies and memories, then and
forever the most sought-after experiences, to flourish side by side and in full
view. Trapped between houses and streets as much as between epochs, Parisian
glass-covered arcades were truly, as their name in French reflects, passages,
places of transit where, nonetheless, time got stuck.”
When Max Richter composed The Blue Notebooks in 2004, he scored
the beauty and the mourning and the loss of old Europe with a gravity that de
Waal could only dream of to validate in his work. All I can detect in this innocuous
monotony is a glacial quality – ice masquerading as fire if you will – and it’s
like he is just objectifying the idea of what art is or might be. There are a
lot of works in this exhibition where there is light from within and truths
from the highest ground and they are all by Morandi.
Edmund de Waal’s new fame and his
old love for the colour white led him to curate a smaller show at the Royal
Academy in his hometown in late 2015 titled White
(in small letters). It included many of his favourite white things – paintings
by Morandi and Robert Ryman, Malevich’s suprematist teapot, the white page from
Tristram Shandy, Turner’s porcelain
palette, some photographs by Fox Talbot, an unprinted elephant folio, masks of
Royal Academicians and a corbel head from the Roman Empire – a selection so cunning
that Bo Nilsson knew that he had found the person he’d been looking for to pair
up with Morandi.
There are two groups of de Waal’s
works at Artipelag and they are threading their way in the exhibition. The ones
that aren’t boxed in whiteness are his black elegies, like the piece for the
Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who went insane and died in December 1938 in
transit to Stalin’s gulag, and these seven vitrines “have fragments, broken
pieces of porcelain, broken pieces of gold. And they are an attempt which is
very important to me, and which I keep coming back to in my work, which is: how
do you think about memory? How do you remember things? How do you move around
the world with these fragmentary apprehensions of the past, of people, of
poetry, or a song?”
Surrounding his other works is a
singled-out Natura morta from 1963
with three vessels (one is an object that could have been turned by de Waal) on
a vibrant tabletop tinged with grey. de Waal says that he hopes that his works
have some of the qualities “of this incredibly beautiful, singular Morandi I
brought into the space. When you look at this remarkable painting, you see
three objects and the shadows they cast. You see this extraordinary, lucid,
passionate white object. You see two strong shadows as well, and this is the
kind of index for me, for Morandi, for the works that I have made and scattered
around.”
An Italian dinner table becomes the
centre of drama, tension and cellphones in Paolo Genovese’s flowingly
intelligent black comedy Perfect
Strangers (2016) when seven (not so) dependable friends and lovers leave
their most intimate vessels of communication open for each other’s reviews while
a new reality of secrets and lies unfolds with a Buñuelian snap. The failure
and inanity of relationships is also the story of Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960): “The world will be
wonderful, they say. From what point of view – when a phone call can announce
the end of the world,” Steiner utters, more to himself than to Marcello.
“One should live outside of
passions, beyond emotions, in that harmony you find in completed artworks, in
that enchanted order. We should learn to love each other so much, to live
outside of time, detached. Detached.” Before he shoots himself and his
children, Steiner explains his love for the two tabletop compositions by
Morandi that he owns, one on the wall and the other on an easel: “The objects
are flooded with a wistful light, and yet painted with such detachment,
precision, rigour that makes them almost tangible. You can say it’s an art
where nothing is coincidental.”
Giorgio Morandi lived a
sequestered, sexless life in a colonnaded building at Via Fondazza 36 in
Bologna together with his mother (until her death in 1950) and his three
unmarried sisters. (The place is a museum-by-appointment today.) Bo Nilsson
tells me that you can see by the way the shadows fall in his paintings if they
were made in Bologna or in the family’s holiday house in Grizzana – since 1985
Grizzana Morandi in honour of the great artist – thirty-five kilometres
southwest of Bologna. At home, for some reason, he had to go through one of his sisters’ bedroom to reach the small studio where he kept his large collection
of hollow utensils, which he modified with paint from time to time, and the
three tables of different heights that he used to create his effulgent still
lifes, with three or four or more vessels in slight distortion against a
straight or contorted horizon and the sluggish, dreamy sideways light.
Bo Nilsson claims that he “wanted
to nick Morandi from the Italians and make him a little more Nordic”. That is a
very good thing to bring along as you enter Morandiland at Artipelag with the
works on paper – watercolours, drawings and his great crosshatched etchings (a
few of each) – that Nilsson regards as the helpers or “squires to his still
life paintings”: “The first room is a sort of library/archive, or that is the
feeling we have liked to create just to calm things down. We want to facilitate
some reading, and in addition we hope that our visitors would like to write
something about their recollections because much of the exhibition is in different
ways about remembering. And we would like to have an interaction with the
visitors.” I could so much do without the makeshift library and the disturbing
row of green lamps – but who am I to complain, surrounded by fifty works by
Morandi the Magnificent?
The hardest thing to see is what is
in front of our eyes. “A true revelation, it seems to me, will only emerge from
stubborn concentration on a solitary problem,” wrote the Italian anti-Fascist author
Cesare Pavese. “I am not in league with inventors or adventurers, nor with
travellers to exotic destinations. The surest – also the quickest – way to
awake the sense of wonder in ourselves, is to look intently, undeterred, at a
single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have
never seen before.”
American Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud started
from Morandi’s still lifes when he painted Three
Sandwiches (1961) and many of his other early famous pieces, though the end
results were always wonderfully brash melodramas contrary to Morandi’s sensuous
and moody enterprise. In the video interview made for Museo Morandi in Bologna
that accompanied his exhibition there in 2011 – with fifteen small works by
Thiebaud and eleven by Morandi – he speaks with oceanic awe how Morandi
“makes complete paintings, but they are not really finished paintings. You go
to Morandi in a way to help him finish his paintings”:
“One of the reasons you have
trouble with seeing Morandi is, I think, because he is difficult to look at.
You have to give of yourself, you have to be willing to develop a very
important sense of empathy, where you have to feel his ‘musculature’,
irresolution as well as resolution, the ambiguity of his intention. The way he
reduces the three primary colours to such a low resonance that they are
unpersuasive in terms of spectral energy – they exist in this very quiet,
beautiful moment of intimacy. And he creates this very curious shadowy, almost
dusty, light.”
“I took from him very persuasive
influences such as the way he develops pressures. If you look at his still
lifes and you have this grouping of say five or six objects where there is not
quite enough room for those objects to exist in that space, but it gives this
marvellous tension like a vice has pushed them together. And as quiet as his
paintings are, they are full of these tensions and pressures, and feelings
about balance and unbalance, and interactions between relationships of planes
and so on,” says Thiebaud in this interview.
There is a very strong sense of
Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare
(1977) in Morandi’s painted works – the film’s restrained colours, muffled
sublimity and sorrowing state of mind and emotion – the little beauty of a life
that begins and ends in just one day, May 8, 1938, the day when Hitler came to
Rome by train. Franklin Einspruch writes of Morandi in The New Criterion (June 23, 2016) that, “Such was the misfortune of
his being one of the finest painters in Italy at a time when it was being run
by porcine brutes. (I like to think that Italians’ true feelings about Fascism
were revealed when a crowd in Milan pelted Mussolini’s machine-gunned corpse
with vegetables. And then shot it again.)” Truth of the matter is that Morandi
played along so well in this Duce formicary from 1922 to 1943 that he was either
a genius of survival or a Fascist himself. “Among the buyers of my work, it
gives me great pleasure to recall His Excellency Benito Mussolini,” Morandi
wrote in a Bolognese Fascist paper in 1928. “I have had much faith in Fascism
since its first inklings, faith that has never ebbed, not even in the darkest
and most tumultuous moments.”
“I am essentially a painter of the
kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and
privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else,” Morandi said in an
interview in 1958. “When most Italian artists of my generation were afraid to
be too ‘modern’ or ‘international’ and not ‘national’ or ‘imperial’ enough, I
was left in peace perhaps because I demanded so little recognition. In the eyes
of the Grand Inquisitors of Italian art, I remained but a provincial Professor
of Etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna.”
Morandi was very open to all kinds
of influences when he studied art at the Carracci’s Accademia between 1907 and
1913 – the Renaissance painters Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio and Giotto,
and later Chardin and Cézanne were absolute favourites. Though he never liked
program art, Morandi saw the first exhibition of Futurist painting in Florence
in 1913, which had him leaning momentarily towards Pittura Metafisica and the
standstill style of Carlo Carrà (who called Futurism a “tornado in a bedroom”)
and de Chirico whose philosophy was that “Every object has two aspects, the
common aspect, which is the one we generally see and the one which is seen by
everyone, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals
see at moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation.”
Wittgenstein wrote that “The
aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their
simplicity and familiarity” and Warhol urged, “Isn’t life a series of images
that change as they repeat themselves?” The Morandi still lifes began in 1915 –
the same year as he found himself conscripted to serve in the military but was
hurriedly discharged – and as the decades passed they became more reduced and
elegant but never abstract. “How can small paintings of small simple bottles
and boxes be so irresistible? Why did Morandi return to these objects over and
over, and without the gloss of routine ever dulling his art?” asks Arthur Dante
in The Nation (December 3, 2008). “Morandi’s
compositions certainly have a history of simultaneity. It is striking that the
shadows in his paintings go this way or that, as if there were different
sources of light, or as though the bottles were sundials casting shadows made
at the different times of the day they were painted.”
John Berger touched on this in his
Morandi essay in Art News (February
1955): “Only in the Mediterranean and particularly in Italy is one made
visually aware of the gradual, impersonal, open, passing of time – the days
falling like single grains of sand in an hourglass,” Berger wrote. “The typical
Italian light by which one sees a landscape, a house, a town, seems to emphasise
the age, the comparative durability, the almost unchanging construction of the
scene. The heat forms a slight haze which takes the edge off temporary,
superficial details, but at the same time the constant of the light exaggerates
the apparently permanent identity of every object.”
In the late 1920s there were two
art movements that looked for Il Duce’s approval. Both were low-key Modernism
that defended national values with an identity of agrarian life: “Both
Strapaese (Supervillage) and Novecento (20th Century) claimed to be
the supreme interpreters of italianità
[the Italian spirit] but held contrasting conceptions of the meaning of Italian
modernity and national identity. Yet both movements expressed a desire to
fashion an Italian mass culture that would meet the challenges posed by
Americanisation,” explains Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945. Morandi chimed with the
Fascists who appointed him Professor of Etching at Accademia di Belle Arti in
1930, a post he held until 1956 when he could make a living out of his art.
“Morandi never really believed in Modernism’s
idea of progress, and thus made no effort to ensure that his painting was
moving forward according to some timeline. This is entirely in line with the
collapse of faith in progress that World War I bore with it,” writes Bo Nilsson
in his thoughtful essay in the catalogue. “Morandi’s still lifes do not
typically have the grand perspective of historic still life painting, but
rather a claustrophobic sense of enclosure that gives them an almost historic
patina.”
I miss Morandi’s still lifes with
the seashells that he painted during World War II, but you can’t have
everything. As we enter the rooms with the paintings that are always either his
still lifes or his landscapes, the latter painted from a window view of his two
studios, Nilsson explains that “Morandi’s still lifes become more like
landscapes while his landscapes become more and more like still lifes” in his
last decades. (Morandi preferred watercolours in the 1960s.) “Still life was
not just a motif category for him, but something very important because it gave
him an opportunity to control the whole process, from arranging the subject to
the most important, evaluating his painting, and the curiosity of how to look at
things,” Nilsson elucidates. “Morandi is looking for something deeper, which is
more fundamental in the tradition of painting. One could call it an essence,
something that is not about how the light falls on the object but a knowledge
of the object beyond the light.”
In Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) the telekinetic daughter is reading a black book of
poetry, then rests her head on the table to set three glasses in motion. While
working on the film, the director wrote in his diary: “What I am trying to do
is to tear apart the way we look at the present day […] that today we are
more obliged to live in a kind of fog. The film is about the existence of god
in man, and about the death of spirituality as a result of possessing fake
knowledge.”
More than ever now we need the
enchanted order of these small Morandis to push us over the edge, and start
again.
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| Edmund de Waal, Five Winter Songs (detail), 2016. |
Morandi/Edmund de Waal at Artipelag outside Stockholm through October 1, 2017.