Two hours with Giorgio Morandi

Poetry in a white bottle:

Aditha DISSANAYAKE

Two years ago on a day like this in September I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Nowhere else had my partner and I been so down and out than in New York that year.

After waiting in line at the reception desk when we find out the cost of a ticket for students is $12, (a little over Rs.1200) while a ticket for visitors cost $20 (Rs.2000), with only $25 dollars between us, he suggests I go inside on the student ticket and see the much talked about exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’s paintings, while he sits on the steps outside.

But, just as he turns to go, a lady standing besides us touches my hand and asks if we would like to have the extra ticket she has with her which she had bought for her friend who had failed to turn up.

Amazed at our luck, we thank her profusely before making our way to the Robert Lehman wing where the paintings are on display.

We make the first, (and thankfully the last) mistake of the day by walking towards the first picture that catches our eye. The young officer standing at the entrance walks up to us and suggests we begin with the paintings near the entrance because everything is in chronological order. “This would help you trace how Morandi developed as an artist”, He explains.

We are glad he gives us this valuable piece of advice. This is so because, when you see two or three of Morandi’s paintings at random, probably of bottles, vases, over-turned cups and boxes crowding a table you feel surely you have seen it all.

This, however, is not the way to grasp the essence of his work. With Morandi it is a case of more is more; you have to see his paintings in groups, you have to have the chance of tracing a single bottle, a cup or a vase across his entire painting career.

As you begin to gaze at the pictures, you begin to hear a different voice calling out to you from each one. The longer the line of paintings on the walls, the clearer the manipulation of color, the changes in the light, the difference in space and the shifts in rhythm. The more you see them the more you realize how remarkable Morandi’s seemingly unremarkable paintings are.

The reason becomes all too clear, not at once, but gradually, painting by painting, till you discover inside the tin boxes, bottles, bowls and the vases, sheer poetry. To see a painting of Morandi,is to read a few lines from “The Infinite” by his favorite poet, Leopardi.

“It was morning and through the closed shutters, the sun, the first light of day, crept furtively into my dark room by the balcony.” Morandi too lets light into his paintings, lavishly at times, sparingly at others. Walking through the Met show it is easy to imagine the artist with the studio windows fully open or half closed, as he worked on his still life paintings.

The shutters would have surely been almost fully closed during his Metaphysical phase when he used light like a miser. These paintings drawn during 1918 and 1919, which are the first to draw everybody’s attention at the show belong to the only period in Morandi’s life when he attached himself to a “school”.

And, as befits the Metaphysics the objects he painted are supposed to be seen not as just objects but symbols of the human figure. This burden of discovering the meaning behind the paintings, drawn with too much mathematical precision does not seem quite right, not quite the mantra of Morandi.

What a relief to find the landscapes, the two self portraits and the still life paintings after the suffocating Metaphysics. Be it in the pictures of the country side near Bologna, (from 1940) or those of the city (from 1950), the farmhouses, the fields, the streets, the red-tile roofs, now bathed in the soft light of spring, now blazing in the heat of summer, Morandi creates a dream like atmosphere.

It is surprising to realize that the unsentimental symbols of technology, like the high-tension electric towers in the two landscapes of Grizzanato painted during World War II, do not obstruct the overall sense of peace the paintings evoke.

And finally to the truly domestic table cloth, the little vase, the knife, the cup, all from this world and thankfully with no metaphysical meanings attached to them. Here is Morandi at his best.

Solemnity and unpretentiousness reign supreme.

By the time I reach the last painting I realize nothing could be more relaxing than to stare at a bunch of asters and zinnias on top of the blue and white striped vase; the only object in the picture set against a background of blue and brown, and find myself totally at peace.

It feels good to know you don’t have to crack your mind trying to solve what the daubs of paint might represent. A religious idea? Fascism? Patriotism? If you can stand rooted in front of the single white bottle with the over turned cup, smiling and telling yourself “this is beautiful” you would make Morandi happy. This, after all is what he wanted. Art that evoked emotions solely from what the eye could see.

At the end of the two hours, I feel I have discovered the allure of Morandi. With him a “cup is a cup. A tree is a tree”. Here is “Art for arts sake.”