A very still life

Italy8217;s most celebrated modern artist painted boxes, bottles and containers8212;art for art8217;s sake or is there more to them?

Italy8217;s most celebrated modern artist painted boxes, bottles and containers8212;art for art8217;s sake or is there more to them?
You expect a landmark exhibition to yield surprises, but they8217;re not always as big as this. Digging into 8216;Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964,8217; at New York8217;s Metropolitan Museum8212;the largest-ever survey of 8220;Italy8217;s greatest modern painter,8221; as Morandi has been called8212;I discovered something few art lovers know: in the first years of Mussolini8217;s dictatorship, Morandi was a full-blown Fascist.

Buried in an appendix, from a thumbnail autobiography Morandi published in 1928, when he was 37, is this: 8220;Among the buyers of my works, it gives me great pleasure to recall His Excellency Benito Mussolini. The great faith I have had in Fascism from the outset has remained intact even in the darkest and stormiest of days.8221;

The show is the toast of the New York season. Who could resist the parade of still life this famous 8220;painter8217;s painter8221; turned out over his 50-year career? But that skirts the central questions: such as whether Morandi can keep his status as the poster child for the old ideal of art for art8217;s sake, with no regard for any world beyond the frame. Or do we need to imagine that Morandi8217;s still life, with the tightly marshalled bottles, boxes and vases, is about more?

The Met survey shows how, over the course of two World Wars, Giorgio Morandi stayed cloistered at home in Bologna with his three adult sisters, painting. The show centres on Morandi8217;s lifelong campaign as a painter of little tabletops covered in jars and bottles. There are often boxes, too. When Morandi was feeling wild, he might paint a vase, sometimes with flowers in it.

No one has ever arranged a bunch of bottles as Morandi did. We get to watch Morandi work the tiny world inside his pictures, building and unbuilding it until there8217;s nothing left to explore8212;and then to watch him always finding more.

I feel the strictures of Morandi8217;s bourgeois life in the pictures that came out of it. To witness someone painting the same tabletop, day after day, week after week, does not exactly conjure up a sense of life lived large. Morandi portrays a world where a few attractive objects, arrayed on a corner table, are what matter more than anything. Where arranging and then rearranging all the little things you own counts as a fulfilled existence. 8220;Muted8221; is the crucial word for what is on view here8212;8221;painting on Prozac8221;, as one onlooker said.

Many of the still life works feel like they bear witness to a life lived at one remove: the perspective in Morandi8217;s scenes is often flattened out. His crowded tabletops are cropped as though we8217;re close to them, but they8217;re seen from far away. Morandi8217;s version of still life is all about compression, claustrophobia. There8217;s no celebration of the objects in Morandi8217;s scenes. It8217;s more a kind of forbearance and complacence.

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The world we witness in these pictures is the world we8217;d imagine propping up a petty boss like Mussolini. The world in Morandi8217;s art looks dusty and stale because he wanted it that way. The family8217;s servant girl was forbidden from dusting the bottles and boxes in his studio.
The Met survey shows that Morandi the painter chose to reveal the limits of a world, and a social class, that refused to look beyond itself.
_Blake Gopnik,LATWP