Christopher begins the article by shortly describing a brief biography of Giorgio Morandi and what influenced his art. Giorgio Morandi died in 1964, at the age of 73, after living a very simple life. He was born in 1890 in Bologna, Italy, and lived nearly his entire life with his whole family in a small apartment. He shared it with his three unmarried sisters and his mother until her death in 1950. His father died in 1909. Morandi attended a local fine arts college and was very head strong about refusing the temptations of various modernist art movements, such as Cubism from Paris, Futurism, and metaphysical painting of De Chirico. He eventually adopted natura morta “dead nature” in Italian but still life done in Morandi’s skill had none of the sensual “enticements” that marked the 17th century Dutch enthusiasm – “overripe fruit, bouquets of flowers, slabs of ham.” I personally thought of Morandi’s paintings as hideously dull. They were of empty boxes, silverware, and everyday items. In his time though, he was thought off as a saint. The author describes that his reputation showcased him as a “pure painter”, someone who like his role model Cezanne, was interested primarily in the “formal relations of objects as perceived in shifting light.” I do agree that light can have a significant impact on a piece of art because it can contrast and change the mood completely but I felt that Morandi’s paintings were grey and gloomy and at the same time they evoked no emotion. However, he was good at blending in objects. In one of the paintings, the author explained that Morandi melded grays and minimal contours of seven objects but at first I could only distinguish 6. After a while, I found the seventh object. In addition, Morandi painted without thought. When the author said that he only gave two interviews in his whole lifetime and when asked to respond to certain questions about his art, he answered “there are things I’ve never considered.” Thoughtless art is not a good piece of art in my opinion.
Why did Morandi insist on painting such worn, cheap, dusty, everyday objects? An early biographer argued that Morandi, as an Italian, "did not have in his background either Proust or the high fabric of French bourgeois life, which fills the apparent modesty of Bonnard with such tormented grandeur." During World War II, Morandi's interest in the "minuteness of things" shifted for a time to seashells, and he did several intensely rendered paintings of paired shells. In one of his pieces, he painted a sea shell paired with a coffee creamer cup. The author explained it like this: “a conch is paired with a coffee creamer, invites a more personal or psychological interpretation. It's hard not to read the image as a mismatched couple: The demure and self-contained creamer, carefully painted in white overlay with a frowning blue handle, turns her back on the lazily sprawling, couch-potato conch, who, for his part, seems to be sitting with one paw like foot extended while another seems to support his chin. Of course, Morandi would reject any such interpretation.” In the end it would just be another white bottle in Morandi’s eyes.
In many people’s perceptions, it is said that Morandi didn’t care about the things in the pictures. Italian art historian Roberto Longhi called them “useless objects…merely elemental forms…drained of their functions.” On the other hand, in one painting, Morandi described his bottles as "spires of a gothic cathedral" and "towers that rise above the view of a city," he wasn't just referring to the unsettling sense of scale in these compositions. He was also registering his emotional attachment to these objects that shared his life and that he looked at fixedly every single day.
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