Giorgio Morandi

Galleria Il Milione, Milan (acquired directly from the artist in 1953)

Augusto Giovanardi Collection, Milan (acquired from the above in 1953)

Galleria Il Milione, Milan (acquired on 8th June 1960)

Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner

Leningrad, Hermitage & Moscow, A.S. Pushkin Museum of Figurative Arts, Giorgio Morandi, 1973, no. 21, illustrated in the catalogue

Marseille, Musèe Cantini, Morandi, 1985

Bologna, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Moderna, Giorgio Morandi, Mostra del Centenario, 1990, no. 125, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Milan, Palazzo Reale, Morandi e Milano, 1990-91, no. 73, illustrated in colour

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Morandi, Exposición antológica, 1999, no. 52, illustrated in colour the catalogue

London, Tate Modern & Paris, Musèe d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Giorgio Morandi, 2001-2002, no. 20, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

Lamberto Vitali, Morandi. Dipinti, Catalogo generale 1948-1964, Milan, 1977, vol. II, no. 868, illustrated

Morandi’s 1953 painting Natura Morta is an elegant rendering of the still life subject that was central to the artist’s explorations of the visible world. Following the development of this key theme in his paintings of the war years, in the early 1950s Morandi continued working towards a heightened simplicity and purity of form. His search for new compositional variations through the precise placement of jugs, bottles and boxes, remained of central importance and he began working groups of objects into compact, often flattened and centralised, formations rendered in the lighter palette that is seen in the present work.

This carefully reiterated choreography of objects was central to Morandi’s work. Vases and jugs appear and re-appear throughout the years – the coffee-tin with the painted oval, for example, features in various configurations throughout his work of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The objects were often covered with a layer of dust that shifted and altered, blurring the edges of the objects and offering a hushed sense of passing time. Morandi also painted the objects, removing any labels or distinguishing features that would have attached them to a specific period or distracted from the resoluteness of their forms. As Matthew Gale writes: ‘It had the effect of muting the excesses of transparency and reflection, reducing the glitter typical of academic still lifes to the austere formalism of modernist compositions with their reference to the standardisation of mass production’ (M. Gale, ‘white bottle – red earth’, in Giorgio Morandi (exhibition catalogue) , Tate Modern, London, 2001, p. 87). Rendered with beautiful simplicity, these ever-changing configurations allowed Morandi to remove the objects from their domestic origins and translate them into examples of pure form.

In Natura Morta the group of objects is carefully orchestrated within the proscribed field of vision. The simplicity of the composition creates an almost two-dimensional effect with Morandi achieving a sense of volume through the placement of the objects – light against dark – and the subsequent interplay of colour and light, rather than the precise delineation of contours or tonal modelling. In particular, the purity of the white vase resonates against the coloured tins behind.  Describing the startling effectiveness of these whites, Leone Minassian wrote: ‘The vibration of this inherently pallid colour is magically obtained through an incredible combination of milky gleams with an alternation of warm and cold hues. The whites are barely tinged by these light and gentle hints of colour, but the result is frankly extraordinary’ (L. Minassian quoted in Morandi 1890-1964 (exhibition catalogue), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2008, p. 280).

In the present work Morandi goes beyond the objective recording of reality, transforming the objects in front of him into new entities and revealing not only their physical properties but their inner materiality. As Cesare Brandi wrote: ‘Nor perhaps had anyone before Morandi spoken so intensely by evoking inanimate objects, since, above and beyond their supreme figurative values – the exquisite research into colour, the daring spatial solutions – there is something in these still lifes that goes beyond, I will not say the subject, but the very fact of their being paintings, and quietly sings of humanity’ (Cesare Brandi cited in Giorgio Morandi (exhibition catalogue), Imago Art Gallery, London, 2009, p. 12)