Giorgio Morandi

Galleria del Milione, Milan (acquired directly from the artist)

Private Collection, Italy (acquired from the above in the late 1950s)

Thence by descent to the present owner

Lamberto Vitali, Morandi, Dipinti, catalogo generale, vol. II, 1948/1964, no. 1065, illustrated n.p.

Morandi’s work from the late 1950s demonstrates the artist’s continuing investigation and development of the still life form. Whilst the earliest still lifes from the 1920s show Morandi experimenting with different inspirations, ranging from the elegance of Italian Renaissance painting to Cubism and Cézanne, by the 1950s he had established a distinctive aesthetic that matched the contemplative stillness of his subject. Towards the end of that decade, however, Morandi began experimenting with new configurations; discussing the works of this period, Stella Seitun describes how they, ‘present increasingly complex variations on the theme, expressed in a formal stylisation close either to abstraction of the visible or to architectural compositions’ (in Giorgio Morandi. A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, 2013, p. 142).

This is true of Natura Morta in which Morandi experiments with the placement of the objects in relation to the viewer, to one another, and along with the way they inhabit the pictorial limits of the canvas. Grouped closely together, Morandi focuses his attention to the cropping of objects, they are no longer contextualised within a rectangular space indicative of two intersecting surfaces; instead they fill the centre of the composition anchored together against a monochromatic background elongating the composition. This destabilising effect is emphasised by his use of colour; he achieves a remarkable eloquence from a relatively limited palette, using only the most delicate nuances to indicate form. In some places these forms seem to disappear completely as Morandi allows colours to soften and morph into one another. Gently dissolving the spatial relationships and boundaries between objects, Morandi creates a work that pushes towards a delicate abstraction, inspiring the juxtapositions of Ben Nicholson and the elegant arrangements of Edmund de Waal.

This interplay between abstraction and figuration was key to Morandi’s modernity, as Francesco Arcangeli explained: ‘he [Morandi] deliberately concentrates his attention on the abstract quality which is implicit in his figurative painting and, a student of nature just like an artist in the past, he nevertheless considers it to be ambivalent: enormously important according to his objective intention, but of no significance with respect to his inner goal. Like all the great figurative artists of his generation, he balances upon a razor’s edge, negating the importance of the subject while at the same time sensing its inevitability. He behaves like an abstractionist but, engaging in abstraction in the context of his figurative painting, he considers himself to be outside the possible licences inherent to pure abstraction’ (F. Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi, Milan, 1964, p. 239).