by Daniel Barbiero
Seven objects crowd close together on a plain surface within a neutral space. Four of the objects, two of which are bottles, one of which might be a vase or another bottle, and the fourth of which might be a vase, are a flat white. A gray pitcher is partly hidden behind the bottles; the remaining objects are a jug and a blue-and-white striped cylindrical object. All seven are painted with thick, opaque strokes that emphasize their solidity and immobility; their deliberate lack of fine detail verges on a kind of geometric abstraction. They make up the subject matter for Giorgio Morandi’s 1946 painting Still Life of Bottles and Pitchers.
Like virtually all of the still lifes Morandi depicted following his association with the Italian metaphysical painters in 1918-1920, the 1946 painting shows a collection of everyday objects tightly grouped in an empty, circumscribed space. Its almost claustrophobic arrangement reproduces in miniature the appearance of the studio in which it was created.
Morandi’s studio, now a museum, was a small, cluttered room up a flight of stairs in his apartment on Via Fondazza in Bologna. I visited it on a beautiful September day during my first trip to Italy, now nearly thirty years ago. The objects that Morandi had put in still lifes – the many bottles, cups, vases, jugs, boxes, pitchers, and caffettiere – filled the place, along with easels, wood blocks, and various bric-a-brac. I could recognize individual objects I’d seen the paintings: their profiles were their signatures, their matte colors the outward marks of their personalities.
In Morandi’s studio I had the impression of an artist fixated on the things close at hand and consequently absorbed in the minute variations to be seen by staying in one place for a good length of time. For Morandi, that place was Bologna, which he famously left infrequently. I thought I could understand what might have kept him there. The city’s old center, where he lived, has an enigmatic atmosphere defined by the dark tones of its ubiquitous brick and stone arcades, the drunken skew of Asinelli and Garisenda, its two leaning towers, the unfinished facade of the basilica of San Petronio, and the Ghibelline merlons of the crenellated buildings overlooking its piazzas. I found it striking that Morandi’s idiosyncratic modernism emerged against this late medieval backdrop; it was tempting to imagine the stolidity of Bologna’s architecture reflected in the tangible thingness of the objects in his paintings.
The tangibility of Morandi’s objects finds a parallel in Cubism, while remaining stylistically far removed from it. The Cubists, in portraying an object from different perspectives, wanted to convey all of its sensible qualities: the way its surfaces and angles appear to the eye, and the way the weight of it feels in the hand. I understand Morandi to have done something similar with his still lifes. His objects show up as opaque masses, mute and self-identical; his still lifes take as their point of departure what we can see and how perception projects us into a world of things. This is something Maurice Merleau-Ponty explored in depth in The Phenomenology of Perception.
For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a function of the lived body, a body that is both present to itself as a kind of primordial subject existing in a pre-personal, unarticulated self-awareness, and present to the world in which it acts to realize itself. Through perception the sentient body gives structure to the world and charges it with meaning. The world in turn transcends it and presents itself as something pre-given, something always already there. The world may appear to us as something indifferent and enclosed in itself, but in reality it is as bound to us as we are bound to it; as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, the relation between us and it is a correlation; it is a kind of system or circuit. Hence the world given in perception isn’t something in-itself but rather in-itself-for-us. By virtue of this correlation, we have an intuitive understanding of it and of the things that furnish it. Even so, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that these things have an irreducible otherness to them, that, as he puts it, “to ‘live’ a thing is not to coincide with it.” The world and the things in it may give themselves to us in perception, but something is withheld at the same time. Something resists us, there is some aspect of its being-for-us that is not us and from which we are separated by the nothingness that is the transparent immateriality of the perceptual grasp.
Morandi seems to have intuited this. Consider what he told art critic Edouard Roditi in conversation in 1958:
I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meaning that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.
In Morandi’s still lifes, matter indubitably exists. Cups are cups and bottles are bottles; their independent existence as material facts is never in doubt, nor is there any doubt that their perceived existence – their existence as presented to us through perception– is what gives them to us as cups and bottles and not as some indeterminate substance. Seeing them, what Merleau-Ponty in a later work called our perceptual faith – our taken-for-granted assumption that they really are – is reaffirmed even if, as Morandi claimed, the actual existence of the objective world given to us in perception is other than as we perceive it. But we can say this only because that world is given to us in perception. In effect it is perception and the separation it interposes between us and the world that licenses something like Morandi’s metaphysical suspicion, or better yet counter faith, that there is an in-itself occulted behind the in-itself-for-us.
In the still life paintings from the mid 1920s onward and particularly from the 1930s, as exemplified by this 1946 picture, Morandi often played a kind of double game. On the one hand, his artistic practice was firmly rooted in the perceptual given. The stripped-down and recycled repertoire of ordinary objects he used along with the complete lack of narrative structure inherent in the still life genre, served to focus the viewer strictly on the apparent facts of the matter as he presented them on the canvas. On the other hand he seems to have chosen to emphasize our separation from the objects he depicted by contriving to highlight their impenetrability – to exaggerate the plenitude of their being in contrast to the transparency of our gaze. He did this partly through a tendency to ignore the finer details of his objects’ surfaces, rendering them instead as dully colored fields. As I saw in his studio, he ensured this effect by modifying the objects themselves. Many of them – including, apparently, the objects in the 1946 picture – had been painted over with gray or white matte paint in order to give them more opaque, non-reflecting surfaces. The coatings of dust he apparently allowed them to acquire further dulled their appearance. And he did it through formal means as well. His sophisticated sense of composition, combined with his brushwork, worked to render the forms of his objects ambiguous and to push them toward abstraction, without having them lose their distinctive opacity. (His later watercolors, which virtually dissolve his objects into the air surrounding them, show him working this same problem from the opposite direction.)
“Nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see”: unlike most discoveries, which can only be made once, this is something I relearn when confronted with a painting like Morandi’s 1946 still life. It’s a reminder that, like any faith, perceptual faith entails a leap, and that when things give themselves over to us in perception, we give them something back in meaning. What Morandi’s still lifes seem to show is that whenever this transaction takes place, something is always left on the table.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021). Website: danielbarbiero.wordpress.com
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