Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness
Curated by Victor Wang
December 6, 2020 – June 14, 2021
M WOODS is proud to present the first
museum exhibition in China of the work of the celebrated Italian artist Giorgio
Morandi (1890-1964).
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
Morandi was born on July 20, 1890, in
Bologna, Italy, and spent nearly all his life there, working quietly in a modest
studio and apartment that he shared with his three sisters. Morandi’s acclaimed
small-scale and contemplative landscapes and still life depictions of
commonplace objects traverse a space of poetics that can be compared with what the
poet T.S. Eliot described as ‘the intersection of the timeless with time’.[1]
The survey exhibition at M WOODS, Giorgio
Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness, explores six decades of Morandi’s practice
across over eighty works, from his early life, when he first exhibited in
Bologna in 1914, and was heavily influenced by avant-garde art movements like Cubism and Futurism, to the period between 1930 and 1956, when Morandi was professor of
etching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, and his later work in the 1960s
just before his death. As the first museum solo exhibition of Morandi’s work in
China, the show also considers Morandi’s silent investigations of form,
meditative repetition of still life and introspective compositions in parallel with
concepts of timelessness in both European and traditional Chinese thought and philosophy.
Just as the ancient Greeks had two words
for time, chronos and kairos, the former describing chronological
time and the latter referring to the qualitative nature of time, a special
moment or event in time, Morandi’s work also departs from classical temporal categories
to create deep spaces of contemplation at the height of early twentieth-century
war and conflict. Rather than following a chronological approach, the
exhibition is assembled with reference to Morandi’s still life compositions. That
is, in the same way that the artist arranged a series of different objects to
create a single image, the galleries of the museum will be divided into
different themes that expand on specific elements of Morandi’s practice, such
as his use of repetition and recurrence throughout his career, or his long-term
investigation into the natural scenery in Grizzana, to bring together a portrait of the artist’s career through work
in different mediums and from different periods of his life.
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
[1] Pedro Blas González,, ‘Time and
Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets’, Oct 27, 2014, Russell Kirk
Center, available at:
https://kirkcenter.org/essays/time-permanence-eliot-four-quartets/
These themes are divided into four main
sections: ‘Transitions’, ‘Recurrence’, ‘Landscapes’(Paesaggi e fiori), and
‘Late Works on Paper’. Morandi once said
“the feelings and images that the visible world awakens in us are very
difficult to express or are perhaps inexpressible with words, because they are
determined by forms, colors, space and light”.[1] For the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, the transcendental was a way to
understand the boundary of things in the perceivable world, and he suggested
that we can only understand space and time through our interaction with, and
perception of, objects and things.[2] This section of the exhibition will trace the important transitions and formative influences on
Morandi’s linguaggio formale, his
formal language, through several key works such as Still Life, 1914, one of his earliest still life
paintings and Natura Morta con Bottiglia e Brocca, 1915, both works the
artist made just before he was called up to fight in World War I, and Still Life,
1928, one of Morandi’s best known compositions
that displays lingering visual elements
from when Morandi was briefly associated
with the Metaphysical Painting movement in Italy that embraced transcendental
ideas of reality and objects. Also on show are Morandi’s
more unusual still life paintings of shells, alongside his etchings and oil
paintings of table tops with bottles, boxes, vases and flowers, that reflect both
the shift in the political environment of the time, exemplified by artistic
movements such as Strapaese, and a return to more regional modes of art that challenge the
understanding of objects beyond their direct meaning or their perceived nature
in the world, into a space that neither words nor cultural significance alone,
as Morandi shows, can fully describe.
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, (Recurrence Gallery), courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
Morandi’s method of continuously repeating
still life compositions and subjects, or “serial variations”,[3] is highlighted in the section entitled ‘Recurrence’ and traced through the
evolution of two specific objects: the white bottle and cylindrical white vase
as seen in works such as Still Life, 1956. The philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche described recurrence and timelessness as cyclical: not in terms of
how long something lasts in the world, but in how things repeat again in time,
and the many ways in which things are continued or passed on through time. “A
white bottle is all that remains”,[4] Morandi said in 1962. For Morandi the use of repetition was key, and the same
set of objects was revisited by the artist again and again in paintings and
etchings. This section will highlight a series of works that centre on Morandi’s
arrangements of vases and bottles from the 1920s to the 1960s, in addition to works
from the late 1940s, when he
received the First Prize for painting at the 1948 Venice Biennale.
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, (‘Landscapes’ (Paesaggi e fiori)), courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
‘Landscapes’ (Paesaggi e fiori), will
highlight Morandi’s long-term investigation into the natural scenery in Grizzana
and Bologna, and his innovative landscape paintings and etchings that reveal
his fascination with the outdoors and Bologna’s urban landscapes. Here we will
show key works such as Landscape of Grizzana,
1913, the artist’s second etching ever made.
A specific gallery
within this theme will also be dedicated to Morandi’s exploration of flowers in
still life, with works such as Flowers, 1952, a subject that the artist
was deeply passionate about.[5] Morandi became familiar with the
work of French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists such as Claude Monet and
Paul Cézanne through exhibitions in Venice and Rome, but he travelled very little
in his lifetime, and only crossed the Italian border a few times. This section
will display paintings, drawings and etchings immortalizing the natural scenery
in Grizzana, a town at the foot of the northern Apennines in Emilia-Romagna where
Morandi spent the summer months, alongside his paintings of casas colonicas (farmhouses) and landscapes and sketches made from his studio window in Bologna.
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi:
The Poetics of Stillness’, courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021.
Photo by M WOODS photography team
With special thanks to the Morandi family; Collezione Augusto e Francesca Giovanardi, Milano; Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m., Bologna/Milano/Paris; Institutional Collection and Private Collections, China; Private Collections, courtesy Imago Art Gallery-Lugano, Switzerland.
[1] “STILL LIFE”, (NATURA MORTA),
1942, “A Backward Glance: Giorgio Morandi and the Old Masters”, Guggenheim
Bilbao, 2019
[2] Nicholas F. Stang, ‘Kant’s
Transcendental Idealism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/>.
[3] Giorgio Morandi: 1890-1964:
Nothing Is More Abstract Than Reality, (exhibition catalogue), edited by Maria
Cristina Bandera and Renato Miracco (Milan: Skira; London: Thames and Hudson,
2008), p. 260
[4] Giorgio Morandi: 1890-1964:
Nothing Is More Abstract Than Reality, p.280
[5] Giorgio Morandi: 1890-1964:
Nothing Is More Abstract Than Reality,
p. 49
[IMAGE CAPTIONS]
1) Natura morta con bottiglia e brocca, 1915
2) Flowers, 1942
3) Still life, 1960
4) Still life, 1938
5) Still life, 1950-1951
6) Landscape, 1928
7) Still life, 1914
8) Flowers, 1952
9-15) *
*Installation view, ‘Giorgio Morandi: The Poetics of Stillness’, courtesy M WOODS 798, Beijing, 2021. Photo by M WOODS photography team
Images courtesy of the Collezione Augusto e Francesca Giovanardi, Milano; Galleria d’Arte Maggiore g.a.m., Bologna/Milano/Paris; Institutional Collection and Private Collections, China; Private Collections, courtesy Imago Art Gallery-Lugano, Switzerland. All images © Morandi family/SIAE, Rome.