Giorgio Morandi - NATURA MORTA (STILL LIFE)

 

Giorgio Morandi
1890 - 1964
NATURA MORTA (STILL LIFE)
Signed Morandi (lower right)
Oil on canvas
10 1/8 by 14 in.
25.7 by 35.7 cm
Painted in 1950
Painted in 1950, the present work exemplifies Morandi’s elegant and measured exploration of the world around him. Vases and pots appear and reappear throughout the years as Morandi continually rearranged these objects to deftly modulate and emphasize different formal and spatial pictorial elements. Morandi often allowed these objects to be covered with a layer of dust that shifted and altered in the light, thereby 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 standardization of mass production" (Matthew 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.

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