Giorgio Morandi: The Poetics of Space

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta (Still Life), 1954, Photo credit Gary Brewer

By GARY BREWER December 12, 2024

“[A] dreamer can reconstruct the world from an object that he transforms magically through his care of it.”                                   

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Giorgio Morandi’s small, delicate meditations on being are a breath of fresh air in these tumultuous times. To see so many of his works speaking quietly to one another is a rare treat. These variations on humble arrangements of forms in space gently express the artist’s desire to slow time and experience the present. The exhibition of 60 works is housed in a 19th-century townhouse on East 63rd Street. The small rooms with their fireplaces and windows feel just right for these masterpieces of intimate sublimity.

It is a small miracle that this show came into being. Beautifully curated by Mattia De Luca, and Marilena Pasquali, the founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center, Bologna, this is a museum-quality exhibition that could be at the Metropolitan or Museum of Modern Art.  

 Using the subtlest tonal and chromatic differences and a seemingly casual hand, Morandi created images that gently hover in our imagination. His deft brushstrokes in these still life paintings leave a faint record of the path of the artist’s hand and spirit, feeling and articulating the spaces around and between the objects.

The subjects he chooses are mundane. Simple forms from everyday life: cups, pitchers, vases, paper flowers. An occasional landscape. They are rendered in low-contrast tonalities of muted earthy colors. He has stripped the paintings down to a spare, naked honesty, forms in space captured in a reductive representation. By shearing the paintings of strong contrasts, bold colors and dynamic energy he reduces the optical intensity and achieves a poetic stasis. A stillness and silence pervade these paintings.

They are subtly animated in a quiet dance: the weight of one object next to another, forms gently coming forward or receding, the shadows in the late works following the rules of intuition rather than perspective. His compositions are musical, the height and width of each object creating a visual synesthesia equivalent to musical notes. The careful placement of the forms within the rectangle of the canvas is exacting, the height of the horizon line or curvature of the table’s surface deeply considered.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta (Still Life) 1953, Photo credit Gary Brewer

The influence of Cézanne can be felt in the spare economy with which Morandi captures an image, and the tension he achieves in creating an ambiguous dialogue between the surface plane of the canvas and the illusion of space. This is especially present in Morandi’s late works. The shadows in between and around the objects spur a frontal read of space. The tabletop is forced forward, receding and acting as a flat plane simultaneously. This flattening of space gives the works a mysterious quality difficult to convey in words. It is the magic inherent in the plasticity of the medium of painting, the ability to affect perception in novel ways that beguile and entrance a viewer. The works open a space beyond the noise of existence and suspend time, transcending the common shopworn world and immersing us in a deep poetic reverie.   

In the last room of the exhibition, late paintings from the 1960s achieve a balance between weight and weightlessness. The paint is thinly applied; the movement of the brush negotiates the field, feeling out the space that surrounds the depicted objects. It is not randomness but a loving touch: one feels a sincerity and profound understanding of how to make intention felt through visual sensation. Presence, absence, being and emptiness are expressed on a modest scale imbued with an ocean of feeling and desire.

The way he groups his objects is complex. In his late works the abstract relationships of one form to another—how each shape occupies space and its effect on the forms next to it—achieve a rare visual poetry. These paintings convey an intimate architecture of longing for a utopian balance and calm: an order that reconciles the tragic and tumultuous world outside the frame.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta (Still Life) 1953, Photo credit Gary Brewer

As for Morandi’s personal life, information is scant. He lived with his mother and three sisters. He never married, nor did any of his sisters. He stood six feet, four inches tall. He worked at home, in a tiny studio measuring nine square meters. After his mother’s death, he and his siblings continued to live together. He rarely left the city of Bologna, where he was born. These small details of a quiet life dedicated to painting suggest a monastic existence in which painting is a form of meditation or prayer, a spiritual practice to capture the illuminations hidden in the everyday world.

It is refreshing to see the depth of feeling that can be achieved in such small works. These paintings realize so much with so little, challenging the strategies of excess that many contemporary artists employ.

Years ago, SFMOMA acquired a Morandi painting for its permanent collection. It was hung on a wall as one entered the modern wing of the museum. Over the years, large-scale works by Gerhard Richter, Barry McGee and others were hung next to it. In each instance the wholeness and profound resolution of feeling, form and philosophical depth of the Morandi stood toe to toe with the larger works, holding its ground. The subtle power of his work never wavered next to images whose loud, bold forms of expression could not overshadow it. 

Morandi’s paintings work their magic with an economy of means that acts as an elixir. They take us outside of time and place into a world saturated with the joy of simply being. To achieve so much with so little is an alchemical transformation, and we as viewers are carried into Morandi’s rarefied world of objects imbued with a poet’s soul. WM