Giorgio Morandi: Not Just Bottles
I had just arrived at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery in Venice. My eleven-year-old daughter, Sophie, who accompanied me, settled herself on the floor of the first room with her sketchbook and pencil. We had come to look at the exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’
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I had just arrived at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery in Venice. My eleven-yearold daughter, Sophie, who accompanied me, settled herself on the floor of the first room with her sketchbook and pencil. We had come to look at the exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’s late work, from 1950 to 1964, the year of the artist’s death, and Sophie knew that we were going to be there for a long time. The gallery wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t empty either, and as I stood in that first room, trying to digest what I was seeing, I heard an exchange between an American couple. The husband, who apparently had entered the gallery through the other door and had come to the first paintings last, looked around him with a somewhat bewildered expression on his face and called to his wife, “More bottles!” From the other room, I heard her answer him in an accusatory voice, “I told you. They’re all the same!” I don’t quote this couple to make fun of them, but rather to begin with what they so succinctly pointed out. In his last years, Morandi mostly painted the same things, and he did paint a lot of bottles. He did not, however, paint only bottles, and yet the man’s comment resonates with the experience of seeing the work, because the most recognizable objects in these canvases are often bottles. Almost every work includes at least one bottle, although there are paintings that feature a pitcher or some other quickly identifiable object. Near the paintings in the gallery were small texts that included the names of some of the other things—a cigar box, for example. But the boxes and cylinders that accompany the bottles in these paintings do not scream cigars or matches or salt. It is impossible to know what they are without being told. The first question when you look at Morandi, which may also be the last question, is “What exactly am I looking at?” This question brings up the further questions, “How should I look?” and “Where should I look?” One could argue that nearly every painting, both representational and abstract, elicits these questions, but I think with Morandi they go to the heart of the work. The identities of the artist’s bottles, vases, cups, and boxes are recessive, by which I mean that as you look at the objects before you on the canvas, the sense of them as ordinary named things diminishes over time. The objects seem to pull away from you into another spatial dimension, a second world that you recognize, but its content has changed. This impression of otherness continued to grow as I looked. I kept asking myself where I should rest my eyes. It turned out that as quiet as these paintings are and as beautiful as they are as a whole, there is something restless
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about them, too; they challenge the spectator to work at unpacking the curious relations among the objects in front of him. Among the first works in the show is a configuration of bottles, vases, and a pitcher. The white bottle is flanked from behind by a yellow bottle on the left and a rusty red or terracotta-colored vase on the right. Directly beside it on
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