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Lot Essay
Exuding a quiet serenity, Giorgio Morandi’s 1952 composition Natura morta embodies the refined, meditative quality of the artist’s iconic still lifes following the end of the Second World War. Focusing on an array of quotidian vessels and containers arranged in a loose grouping, this deceptively simple composition is a masterful study of form, color and light, held together by a delicate, mysterious internal balance. Achieving a poetic lyricism from the most humble and familiar of objects—bottles, jugs, vases—was for Morandi one of the fundamental aims of his painting: “Even in as simple a subject,” he explained, “a great painter can achieve a majesty of vision and an intensity of feeling to which we immediately respond” (Interview with E. Roditi, quoted in M.C. Bandera and R. Miracco, eds., Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008, p. 358).
As with all of Morandi’s still lifes, the objects which populate the scene were personally selected by the artist from the extensive collection of items he kept in his studio. Often sourced from local flea-markets in his hometown of Bologna, and ranging from bottles to boxes, tins to vases and clocks, these objects were recurrent characters in his paintings, appearing in different guises and arrangements across numerous compositions. In most cases, they suggest a certain domesticity, as if they have been pulled from the kitchen or living room of Morandi’s home and appropriated for his artistic vision. However, by entering the world of the painter’s still lifes, they stand outside their original, intended function—to aid this, Morandi would eliminate all traces of an object’s former life before incorporating it into a scene, removing labels from bottles of oil and boxes of tobacco, pouring white paint into glass vessels to reduce the play of reflections and light on their surfaces, and anonymizing containers and tins by covering them with an even layer of matte paint.
Here, two tall, thin bottles coated in white are arranged to the left of the scene, standing just in front of a small pitcher, closely aligned yet ever so slightly different in their profile and texture. A cylindrical yellow container topped by an inverted funnel sits alongside them, leading the eye towards a pair of slender necked vases to the right, which round out the tight configuration. Morandi often spent weeks at a time deciding on the arrangement of his still lifes, contemplating the positioning of his chosen objects at length, from the exact spacing between each item, to the precise angle at which their edges overlap. Examining the serendipitous relationships that occurred as a result of these choices, he sought to celebrate the manner in which such subtle variations in tone, lighting, and arrangement could dramatically alter the visual perception of the objects before him. This approach required intense concentration and methodical analysis, in which every element was scrutinized, studied and evaluated before being committed to canvas. For Morandi, every new configuration represented a unique challenge.
Morandi’s keen skills of observation and diligent process of study ensured that although his works focused on a small repertoire of objects, they never repeated themselves. It was a hazard he was acutely aware of throughout his career, stating in an interview with Edouard Roditi in 1958: “I have always concentrated on a far narrower field of subject-matter than most other painters, so that the danger of repeating myself has been far greater. I think I have avoided this danger by devoting more time and thought to planning each one of my paintings as a variation on one or the other of these few themes” (quoted in E. Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1990, p. 107). Executed in a warm palette of subtly variegated tones and thick, painterly impasto, Natura morta is an exquisite example of Morandi’s mature poetic reflections on perception and representation, capturing the level of in-depth study that lay behind his compositions, which hover on the fragile boundary between abstraction and figuration.
As with all of Morandi’s still lifes, the objects which populate the scene were personally selected by the artist from the extensive collection of items he kept in his studio. Often sourced from local flea-markets in his hometown of Bologna, and ranging from bottles to boxes, tins to vases and clocks, these objects were recurrent characters in his paintings, appearing in different guises and arrangements across numerous compositions. In most cases, they suggest a certain domesticity, as if they have been pulled from the kitchen or living room of Morandi’s home and appropriated for his artistic vision. However, by entering the world of the painter’s still lifes, they stand outside their original, intended function—to aid this, Morandi would eliminate all traces of an object’s former life before incorporating it into a scene, removing labels from bottles of oil and boxes of tobacco, pouring white paint into glass vessels to reduce the play of reflections and light on their surfaces, and anonymizing containers and tins by covering them with an even layer of matte paint.
Here, two tall, thin bottles coated in white are arranged to the left of the scene, standing just in front of a small pitcher, closely aligned yet ever so slightly different in their profile and texture. A cylindrical yellow container topped by an inverted funnel sits alongside them, leading the eye towards a pair of slender necked vases to the right, which round out the tight configuration. Morandi often spent weeks at a time deciding on the arrangement of his still lifes, contemplating the positioning of his chosen objects at length, from the exact spacing between each item, to the precise angle at which their edges overlap. Examining the serendipitous relationships that occurred as a result of these choices, he sought to celebrate the manner in which such subtle variations in tone, lighting, and arrangement could dramatically alter the visual perception of the objects before him. This approach required intense concentration and methodical analysis, in which every element was scrutinized, studied and evaluated before being committed to canvas. For Morandi, every new configuration represented a unique challenge.
Morandi’s keen skills of observation and diligent process of study ensured that although his works focused on a small repertoire of objects, they never repeated themselves. It was a hazard he was acutely aware of throughout his career, stating in an interview with Edouard Roditi in 1958: “I have always concentrated on a far narrower field of subject-matter than most other painters, so that the danger of repeating myself has been far greater. I think I have avoided this danger by devoting more time and thought to planning each one of my paintings as a variation on one or the other of these few themes” (quoted in E. Roditi, Dialogues: Conversations with European Artists at Mid-Century, San Francisco, 1990, p. 107). Executed in a warm palette of subtly variegated tones and thick, painterly impasto, Natura morta is an exquisite example of Morandi’s mature poetic reflections on perception and representation, capturing the level of in-depth study that lay behind his compositions, which hover on the fragile boundary between abstraction and figuration.