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Lot Essay
"I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but it has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree." (Morandi quoted in K. Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi, Barcelona 1997, p. 122)
Between 1953 and 1954 Morandi's still-lifes were made up of very few objects. Often containing no more than four separate objects, his still-lifes from these two years form a particularly important body of intensely observed work that reveals the artist experimenting with variations on the theme of a small and tightly organised composition of objects set against a wide and often steep empty horizon-like background.
The present work of 1953 is a particulary fine example from this period. The culmination of at least three paintings on a theme, it is one of the most detailed and refined of the period and elegantly expresses the core of Morandi's concerns. Squeezed together into a tightly knit compositional unit slightly below the centre of the canvas, the four clearly distinct objects that comprise the work, form a solid unity of matter in the midst of a deserted and subtlely muted blue-grey backdrop of empty space. The cohesive solidity of this conglomeration of bland and ordinary household objects is disturbed only by a few narrow areas of intensely dark shadow. Yet it is these exquisitely painted and sharply observed cracks in the seeming order of the whole composition that breathe life and the vividness of reality into the work.
To the right of the central group the decorative and, in this context, distinctly feminine looking vase seems strangely out of place alongside the bland uniformity of the three other objects. The delicate modelling of its decorative twisting pattern and its long neck piercing the horizon-line at the top of the painting grant the vase an unusual nobility in this minimal context. In addition its open top resting just above the horizon line elegantly balances the composition by echoing the larger more shadowy oval of the cup on the lower left. This flask-like vase was undoubtedly a favourite object of Morandi's appearing on numerous occasions in his work. It is also the dominant feature in the painting (cat. rais. no. 884) that is clearly a less successful forerunner to the present work in which Morandi has painted an identical composition save for the oval green box. The presence of this oval box, though seemingly innocuous in the present painting, is, on comparison of the two paintings, also clearly vital to the overall success of the composition.
As this remarkable still life shows, in the arrangement of his objects and his attention to the minutest detail, Morandi's sustained contemplative approach to the painting of these remarkably ordinary household objects endows his work with a strange atmosphere of unreality that is, like reality itself, both startling and ever-changing.
Between 1953 and 1954 Morandi's still-lifes were made up of very few objects. Often containing no more than four separate objects, his still-lifes from these two years form a particularly important body of intensely observed work that reveals the artist experimenting with variations on the theme of a small and tightly organised composition of objects set against a wide and often steep empty horizon-like background.
The present work of 1953 is a particulary fine example from this period. The culmination of at least three paintings on a theme, it is one of the most detailed and refined of the period and elegantly expresses the core of Morandi's concerns. Squeezed together into a tightly knit compositional unit slightly below the centre of the canvas, the four clearly distinct objects that comprise the work, form a solid unity of matter in the midst of a deserted and subtlely muted blue-grey backdrop of empty space. The cohesive solidity of this conglomeration of bland and ordinary household objects is disturbed only by a few narrow areas of intensely dark shadow. Yet it is these exquisitely painted and sharply observed cracks in the seeming order of the whole composition that breathe life and the vividness of reality into the work.
To the right of the central group the decorative and, in this context, distinctly feminine looking vase seems strangely out of place alongside the bland uniformity of the three other objects. The delicate modelling of its decorative twisting pattern and its long neck piercing the horizon-line at the top of the painting grant the vase an unusual nobility in this minimal context. In addition its open top resting just above the horizon line elegantly balances the composition by echoing the larger more shadowy oval of the cup on the lower left. This flask-like vase was undoubtedly a favourite object of Morandi's appearing on numerous occasions in his work. It is also the dominant feature in the painting (cat. rais. no. 884) that is clearly a less successful forerunner to the present work in which Morandi has painted an identical composition save for the oval green box. The presence of this oval box, though seemingly innocuous in the present painting, is, on comparison of the two paintings, also clearly vital to the overall success of the composition.
As this remarkable still life shows, in the arrangement of his objects and his attention to the minutest detail, Morandi's sustained contemplative approach to the painting of these remarkably ordinary household objects endows his work with a strange atmosphere of unreality that is, like reality itself, both startling and ever-changing.