Giorgio Morandi's still lifes runneth over

NEW YORK — "Giorgio Morandi: 1890-1964," the enthralling exhibition of 110 paintings, drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a bit of a surprise, but not for revealing an overlooked master. The show, as the first Morandi retrospective ever mounted in the United States, was in fact guaranteed to be loved. It includes some landscapes and a couple of dry self-portraits, but his spare still-life paintings, with their pale, sensuously brushed forms, reliably send a shiver down the art public's spine.

The painter lived if not a monastic then certainly a scholastic life, seldom leaving the ancient university town of Bologna, Italy, except for summer getaways in the cool Apennines. (He taught etching at the city's Fine Arts Academy.) Morandi had critical success internationally during his career, but he is not an artist whose name is guaranteed to attract the public.

What's the surprise? Until now, it hadn't occurred to me just how much a great still-life painting by the Italian Modernist deviates from common expectations.

Typically, still life paintings come in one of two kinds. They either picture natural objects -- flowers, fruits, insects, food, plants -- or else they gather diverse domestic items, such as books, musical instruments, a lady's fan, a gentleman's pipe, letters, coins, candles and cups. Often they combine the two -- Jean-Simeon Chardin's kitchen tables, with little silver and copper utensils and shellfish; Raphael Peale's luxurious accumulations of strawberries and fine china; or, launching the Modern era, Paul Cezanne's monumental apples, dispersed amid mountain peaks made from a crumpled tablecloth.

But not Morandi. Most of his still lifes, and almost all of the greatest ones, don't conform.

His still life pictures show cups, vases, bowls, pitchers, compotes, bottles, biscuit tins, cigar boxes, flowerpots, decanters, goblets, coffeepots, jugs, urns, chalices -- containers all, of virtually any type of you might name. Some vessels turn up repeatedly over decades, including a white fluted bottle, eccentrically shaped, and a wide-mouthed pitcher with a looping handle. Morandi kept them on hand in his studio, a sort of inert repertory company of working vessels that he could rearrange as he pleased.