The Met Museum’s exhibition, Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964, is like a primer on how to appreciate painting. It’s also the first comprehensive retrospective on the artist in this country, unbelievably.
Morandi has a reputation as an artist’s artist, lionized by art students and scholars, but in the shadow of household name artists. This most likely would have pleased a man who gave two interviews in his lifetime. Like a bottle in the back row of one of his still lifes – essential to the overall picture, but obscured.
He created relatively small-sized works, concentrating on unsensational subject matter, most often still lifes of bottles and geometric shapes. Similarly, he used a sedate palette, the mid-range colors of a desert’s four seasons.
But make no mistake, a tour of this unflashy but major artist’s work is not only pleasurable by the basic technical standards of art appreciation – color, composition, execution – it is an amazing chronicle of the development of artist finding his distinct voice and trusting it. This, even though the heart of his oeuvre, the still life, is an artworld trope. read more
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