Morandi at the Met

...Here were the iconic still lifes, noiseless and austere in their muted color scale and spatial ambiguities...

...He was 19 when his father died and the family moved, with a livein housekeeper, to an apartment on the via Fondazza...

...Abramowicz’s catalogue entry is restricted to discussion of his etching technique...

...Rooms were hung with original works, among them drawings by Seurat and Rousseau, a Rembrandt etching and one by Ingres, a Baroque painting by Giuseppe Crespi and small pieces from the 14th-century Bolognese school...

...The exhibition was an impressive package that succeeded in presenting Morandi as he wanted himself presented...

...No middle ground exists for the audience: These subtle shifts of tone and perspective either captivate (as they do me) or bore...

...Italy was a new country and a largely poor one at the beginning of the 20th century...

...The Met’s obligation is to cultural memory, not to marketing myths...

...In life, Morandi kept a fi rm grip on what was written about him, demanding editorial control and thwarting publication of his extensive network of wellplaced contacts...

...Less messianic—and more to the point of his rise to prominence in a nasty time—are Morandi’s own words: “I have had much faith in fascism since its fi rst inklings, faith that has never ebbed, not even in the darkest and most tumultuous moments...

...Put fl esh on the bones, however, and the story turns labyrinthine, even devious, and unreconcilable with the received image of the artist as the lonely embodiment of some lost ideal...

...From the standpoint of pure painting, this was a welcome show...

...His subdued palette echoes the ochres, browns, pinks, and brick reds of Bologna’s old colonnaded buildings...

...The same household objects repeat like mantras throughout his work, each adjustment between them fi nely calibrated to break the silence—some would say monotony—of the whole...

...Born into a prosperous Bolognese family, Morandi was raised in a villa on the outskirts of the city...

...The formal structure and spatial organization of Morandi’s paintings place him at the heart of the modernist undertaking...

...Morandi was hardly cloistered on the via Fondazza...

...but it stumbled as a cultural event...

...But it points to the gulf between our proliferating machinery of art appreciation and the springs of a humane culture...

...BY MAUREEN MULLARKEY A painter’s painter and one of Italy’s most admired, Giorgio Morandi (18901964), took his time...

...Maureen Mullarkey writes about art for the New Criterion and other publications...

...At the Met, with some 110 paintings, etchings and watercolors on view, every phase of his work was represented...

...A wide circle of infl uential friends, many of them writers and intellectuals, facilitated the posture...

...Then it takes me weeks of thinking about the bottles themselves, and yet often I still go wrong with the spaces...

...That Morandi was not one of them is nothing against his art...

...More than an invitation to the felicities of paint, an exhibition is also a social fact, a material prompt to historical understanding...

...Or as Umberto Eco trills in the last commissioned line of the catalogue: “Morandi spent his entire life addressing the problem of the redemption of matter...

...His patrons, including major and minor players in Mussolini’s regime, were men of taste...

...Gallery and museum catalogs kept him abreast of modernist activity abroad...

...And, it follows, on the auction block...

...The fascist tag-along disappears behind smoke...

...Morandi stayed there with his sisters until he died...

...At a time when art itself has become the lectio divina of a secular culture, it matters greatly how much authority society cedes to the defi cient, fl exible spirituality accessible through art...

...Despite critical and fi nancial success in his lifetime, Morandi has remained, since his death, a sidebar to the 20th century canon, and the fi rst full survey of his work in the United States, the recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is part of an effort —begun in 2001 at London’s Tate Modern—to widen his audience and establish his place on the art historical time line...

...It takes me weeks to make up my mind which group of bottles will go well with a particular colored tablecloth,” he said...

...It was a select gathering from collections originally assembled in collaboration with Morandi himself, who steered sales of his work to those scholars, critics, and wealthy connoisseurs who could advance his career...

...At the Met, curatorial piety omitted any hint that Morandi’s success was decisively linked to the rise of fascism...

...He continued to describe himself as “a simple provincial professor of etching who sought no recognition...

...His distinctions are penetrating but so discreet you have to work at observing them...

...Umberto Eco was 13 when the partisan resistance wrested control of Milan in 1945...

...it would not have been uncommon for unmarried siblings to share a household...

...He worked and slept in the same room surrounded by the bottles, boxes, vases, and canisters of his still life repertory...

...That rhetorical tease hints at the self-possession of an artist who also took time to cultivate the image of himself as a solitary genius, isolated from modernist movements and fascist career networks...

...They hastened to gloss his crafted— and aggressively guarded—persona as an apolitical outsider...

...Besides, Morandi’s sisters were sophisticated professionals, not the old maids of popular imagination...

...A 1945 catalogue essay by the art historian and collector Roberto Longhi set this tone of approach by referring to “the monastic Morandi in his cell...

...And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the fi ring lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance...

...foreign visitors were always welcome...

...The artist’s political allegiances do not bear on the loveliness of his formal achievement...

...The man never left Italy until, at age 66, he went twice to exhibitions in Switzerland...

...Fluent in French, two of them taught in Egypt and Tunisia before returning to Bologna in 1935...

...A frequent visitor to the Uffi zi, he traveled to nearly every art exhibition, contemporary or historical, held in Italy in his lifetime...

...accordingly, it drained culture of meaning by introducing Morandi in near-devotional terms...

...Lessons learned from C?zanne appear in the linear evasions of homely items compressed on a tabletop, like distilled architecture...

...To seek infi nity in an arrangement of bottles is an acquired taste...

...Such is the skeleton of “the Morandi myth...

...yet his sympathies remain deeply relevant to the way in which we understand art’s place in the larger culture...

...If he were still censoring from the grave, he could not improve the entries—elegant spirals of fumy erudition—the Met provided for him...

...Rare self-portraits, several handsome landscapes, fl ower paintings, and a commanding group of etchings are included...

...A benefi ciary of the new cultural policies, he negotiated the hubris of a lethal regime with the same quiet fi nesse he brought to painting...

...Perhaps I work too fast...

...It was an edifying characterization but a pious fable...

...It revealed his expedient use of the fascist unions and laws to obtain better teaching positions and opportunities to exhibit and sell his work...

...A decade ago, he commented on that moment: “It was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation...

...Sensitivity to tone and contour has no moral weight comparable to sensitivity to evil...

...The narrowness of his range, its compositional encores and refrains, can be misleading...

...Janet Abramowicz’s groundbreaking 2004 monograph, meticulously documented and based on Morandi’s personal record book, demolished his politically neutral, reclusive pose...