Brilliance, bottle by bottle

NEW YORK — Giorgio Morandi is a quiet giant in the world of art history. A painter and printmaker, he spent his entire life (1890-1964) in and around his native Bologna, Italy, traveling abroad only twice, briefly. After completing his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Morandi was drafted into the military in 1915 but became seriously ill and was dismissed as unfit for service. He returned to the family home he shared with his mother and three sisters, working there and in the surrounding countryside for the next 50 years.

He taught etching at the Bologna Academy for more than 25 years, but mostly he kept to his studio, making image after image of bottles, vases, pitchers and tin boxes arranged on a stark table against a blank wall. The objects huddle together, edge to edge, in tenderly choreographed studies of tone, balance, boundaries, presence and absence. Morandi composed his modestly scaled paintings in a palette of muted hues: putty, fog, dried clay, faded brick, sand, slate and dust, with the occasional brighter note of yellow, green, blue or red. His etched line is strong and luminous.

Casual viewers might dismiss the narrow scope and subdued quality of Morandi's work as tedious, but a broad, fervent following has embraced those limits as virtues. The repetition offers insight into process and serves as a vehicle for a meditative, introspective practice. Morandi's images are intimate and deeply felt; they carry a disarming philosophical heft.

Artists across media have been influenced by Morandi's insistent interiority, his infusion of ordinary objects with a sense of poetry, his gentle touch and unswerving attention to spatial and tonal relationships, his way of dematerializing material objects. He is often quoted for stating, toward the end of his life, "There is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality."

Morandi's work has been exhibited internationally since the 1920s and earned multiple prizes at the Venice Biennale and the Sao Paulo Biennial during his lifetime. The first comprehensive survey of his paintings, prints and watercolors to appear in the U.S. opened recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (through Dec. 14).

On the occasion of the show (which makes its only other stop in Bologna next year), we talked to four artists who count Morandi as a model and inspiration.

Robert Irwin