Master of Unfussed Clarity

By ROBERT HUGHES

A wonderful lesson in seeing from Italy's retiring "Monk"

When Giorgio Morandi died at the age of 73 in 1964, he was, from the view of modern art that revolves around "movements" and historical groupings, a kind of seraphic misfit. He was not a joiner moved nowhere, did a little teaching, and spent most of the last 45 years of his life in a slightly musty, secluded flat in Bologna, the red-brick provincial city whose reluctant cultural ornament he had become. In all his life he stepped out of Italy only to cross the border for a few brief trips into nearby parts of Switzerland. Il Monaco, one critic nicknamed him, the Monk: a big heavy man, gray on gray, shuffling between the dark outmoded tall-boys, painting little groups of bottles and tins, or a vase with one paper rose stuck in it.

Throughout his career, Italian culture buzzed with manifestoes, claims and counterclaims. Before World War I, the Futurists tried to marshal art into a relentless machine-age spectacle. In the '20s and '30s, Mussolini and his cultural gang strove to co-opt Italian modernism into Fascist propaganda--dynamism, simplification. By the late '40s and '50s, socialist realism (especially in Bologna, which prided itself on its worker traditions) was trying, amid clouds of polemic, to become the house style of Italian art. All through this, Morandi stayed where he was, looking at his plain table of dusty bottles.

No other major modern painter has less to tell us about the tensions of history and the facts of the 20th century than Giorgio Morandi; none, except Matisse, retired more completely from the "confrontational" role expected of the avantgarde. Today Morandi's renunciation of the art world as a system seems noble, exemplary and perhaps inimitable. He disdained all ambitions that could not be internalized, as pictorial language, within his art. This earned him the reputation in some quarters of a petit maitre: a man who, though he said it very well had only one limited thing to say.

The untruth of this verdict can readily be seen in New York's Guggenheim Museum, where the first American retrospective of Morandi's work--65 paintings, with 58 drawings, watercolors and etchings-is on view until mid-January, after which it will travel to the Des Moines Art Center, which is responsible for having organized the exhibition.

"Here are most of my paintings, Morandi said to a reporter in the mid '50s, pointing to a thick dried crust of waste pigment that had accumulated through years of wiping on the crossbar of his easel. Morandi erased more paintings than he finished; his self-editing was relentless, a fact which should give pause to anyone who supposes there might not have been much difference between one still life and the next. But the differences, like the nature of his work itself, are hard to catch in words. One can easily say what the paintings are not. They do not tell stories They do not point to any kind of action "out there." They tell us nothing about Morandi the man. They are not dramatic, colorful or "modernist" in any doctrinaire way. And though they are saturated in historical awareness, they are unlike most still lifes that were done before them.

The typical still life of earlier centuries--the 17th century Dutch table, say, cascading with "parrot tulips and gold beakers, fur, fruit, fish, feather and dew-drops--was a symbol of appropriation. It declared the owner's 5 power to seize and keep the real stuff of the world. Even the still lifes of that great master of meditative vision, Chardin, tend to retain this emblematic quality; it was written into his social background. In Morandi, things are otherwise.

The sense of display is abolished. The objects are inorganic and dateless: milky long-necked bottles and squat flasks, a biscuit tin, a fluted bowl, some long-beaked metal pitchers. They carry no marks, patterns or brand names. They look fragile and contingent, but they endure for decades, through picture after picture. (To make sure that nothing disturbed the precise relationships he put them in, Morandi drew chalk circles around the bases of his "models" on the surface of the table.) Sometimes the things have the look of architecture; the slender bottle necks, leaning together, vaguely recall the towers of Bologna and San Gimignano. Occasionally their groups, bound together by some mutual gravitation of shape, might remind one of people insecurely huddled on the edge of Morandi's small flat earth, the tabletop.

The way they are painted looks awkward at first, ill defined--but only because it makes no concessions to haste. Morandi used no short cuts. He eschewed the sharply abbreviated shapes, high contrasts of tone and grabby oppositions of color that make an image "memorable" on first sight. Instead, the things in his paintings seep deliberately into one's attention. They start vaguely, as little more than silhouettes, a vibration of one low color against another.

Gradually they "develop" on the eye, and one begins to grasp their internal relationships: how articulate the subtle sequence of tones may be, in a form that once looked flat and light brown; how many colors may be contained, as dusty hints and afterimages of themselves, in what seemed to be a sequence of gray patches. If the straight side of a bottle seems to waver, it only does so to remind us how mutable and hard to fix the act of seeing really is. And if the shapes look simple, their simplicity is extremely deceptive; one recognizes in it the distillation of an intensely pure sensibility, under whose gaze the size of the painting, the silence of the motif and the inwardness of the vision are as one.

As Art Historian Kenneth Baker points out in the catalogue to this show, Morandi chose an art that could not frighten or persuade, as the mass-media imagery of Italy was intent on doing; his struggle was "to purge representation of its manipulative potential so that painting . . . might be carried on without cynicism or apology." Modestly, insistently, Morandi's images try to slow the eye, asking it to give up its inattention, its restless scanning, and to give full weight to something small.

When Japanese aestheticians spoke of the quality of things known as wabi, they had in mind something like this: the perfect nature of humble ordinary objects, seen for themselves, in a state of unfussed clarity. Chardin had this most of the time, and Vermeer nearly all of it; Manet and Georges Braque, in very different ways, understood it; and Morandi's entire life was predicated on the prolonged search for it. That is why the Guggenheim's show provides such a wonderful lesson in seeing, a metaphysical oasis in the ballyhoo and braggadocio of late modernism. --By Robert Hughes

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