Giorgio Morandi, Estorick Collection review — still lifes unfold unreal universes

In Parma during the bleak autumn of 1940, soon after Italy had entered the second world war, a shy music professor with a fortune and a villa to fill encountered a reclusive 50-year-old who painted groups of bottles in endlessly shifting arrangements.

The moment when Luigi Magnani met Giorgio Morandi sparked the creation of one of Europe’s loveliest 20th-century art collections, at the Villa Magnani-Rocca in Traversetolo, Emilia-Romagna, although the initial exchange was not propitious. Magnani commissioned a painting of musical instruments; Morandi, never having worked to commission, was horrified but too embarrassed to decline. Rejecting the professor’s Venetian lute and Indian flutes in favour of an old mandolin, small trumpet and toy guitar found in a flea market, he balanced them precariously in an elongated pattern of curves and straight lines, solids and voids, “Still Life (Musical Instruments)”. Each object is stubbornly itself while constrained, even crushed, by the position of the others. The subtext is Morandi’s resistance to Magnani, who understood.

There were no more commissions, but 50 acquisitions of the choicest tabletop still lifes, plus landscapes, etchings, watercolours, drawings. Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation launches the 25th birthday celebrations at the Estorick Collection, London’s home of Italian art. These pictures seldom travel and even Morandi devotees will find something fresh here, so exhaustive was Magnani’s gathering of the unusual, as well as the supremely characteristic, of his friend’s works.

Searching back to before they met, Magnani acquired a rare “Self-portrait” against a beige ground where young Morandi presents himself as calm, resolved, as enigmatically neutral as his bottles. The brilliant early etching “Still Life with Bottles and Jug” (1915), a parade of tall blurry vessels, like fleeting figures on the move, shows Morandi the brief futurist. Motion is stilled in the marvellous, complex architectonic etchings of the 1920s-30s — “Still Life with Bread Basket”, “Large Still Life with Coffee Pot” — where he refined his chiaroscuro experiments with different intensities of brightness and tonal variations. Magnani saw how mastery of black and white in printmaking influenced the muted hues of the paintings. At the end of Morandi’s life, the collector was still treasuring the sparest sketches of such vessels, or their mere shadows, depicted in pencil outline.

But Magnani also seized Morandi’s dramas when they came, and the delight of the Estorick’s main gallery of two dozen paintings is the sudden bursts of colour and thick material renderings in a handful of unexpected compositions. They disturb and somehow enliven those more familiar pieces where tranquil, diffused light plays across near-monochrome arrays of bottles and vases.

Dusky antique pink roses in “Flowers” are plump, velvety, luscious; Morandi painted bouquets as offerings to his closest circle. In a glowing golden “Metaphysical Still Life” (1918), a bottle competes with a mannequin, a homage to de Chirico yet a statement of independence from the youthful Morandi.

Depicted in delicate nuances of red, yellow and green, pears and apples seem to vibrate in their scalloped bowl in “Still Life with Fruit”; the paint’s density yet luminosity recalls “Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup” at the opening of Tate’s current Cézanne exhibition.

Magnani’s collection would eventually span from the Renaissance (Filippo Lippi) to abstraction (Alberto Burri), but in his secret study he hung only Morandi and Cézanne, “whose works have no content”; they appealed most, he said, because “what fascinates me is form”. Of all Italian modernists, Morandi’s debt to Cézanne’s geometry of cones, cylinders and spheres is the deepest, and Magnani especially prized what he called Morandi’s “order” — the purity and apparent simplicity of his painted forms.

In the equilibrium of the 1936 “Still Life” which was Morandi’s first gift to Magnani, three white vessels of diverse heights and sheens, a blue bowl and a pale yellow lemon squeezer, although placed on a table and casting shadows, seem to float in a surreal atmosphere. The cast list of objects, the warm chromatic harmonies — the palette is Vermeer’s, also a painter of domestic intimacy, whom Morandi acknowledged as an inspiration — and the sense of a contained amplitude, slowly unfolding, characterises the works that followed through the later 1940s and 1950s, as Morandi constructed his own abstract world.

“I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see,” he said in a 1960 interview. The repertoire, though restricted, is marked by subtle changes. During wartime, greys, browns and ochres dominate, and objects are huddled into claustrophobic groups. One 1942 “Still Life” packs together vases, jugs and dark blocky rectangular containers, such as tombstones, into a tense, fearful assembly; another the same year, a row of four pitchers tilting forward, stoic and mysterious, summons to mind Giacometti’s walking figures — images of alienation, distance, unknowability.

The landscapes follow a similar trajectory: a house covered in a tangle of foliage, heavy and impenetrable, in “Landscape” (1943), then the broad view in limpid light from Morandi’s bedroom window in Bologna of tall plain buildings, lined up like bottles and vases, and transformed like them into monumental volumes, in “The Courtyard on Via Fondazza” (1954). The final paintings and watercolours, columnar vessels in scintillating whites and creams (1960-63), are still more abbreviated yet grand and stately.

Almost everything was painted in that Bologna studio-bedroom and Morandi rarely left Italy, going abroad only a few times in his later years. Of course he’s a very Italian artist: the inherent classicism; the clarity of things, going back to Piero; the metaphysics connecting him to de Chirico and other modern Italians, exhibited upstairs in the Estorick Collection. He was not widely fashionable in his lifetime — the influential American critic Clement Greenberg called him “just a bottle painter” — but unsurprisingly his particular vision of hard-won serenity, the emphatically local made universal, is becoming ever more popular now, and at global reach.

For American pop still-life painter Wayne Thiebaud, “Morandi suggests we are all single in this world, hoping for independent repose. But our best opportunity, for a community of excellence, depends upon a collection of enlightened individuals.”

On the other hand Luc Tuymans, who also paints blanched-out still lifes, finds a partner in nihilism, able to unnerve — “the stillness of these objects, and their blaring silence, irritates the hell out of me” — while Zeng Fanzhi sees a model of interiority sharing elements with Chinese painters: “Morandi doesn’t want you to understand the objects in his work as objects — he wants to show that painting itself is how he sees the world, how he lives his life, in an interior sense.” That was what Magnani wanted to live with, and what this exhibition so beautifully encapsulates.

To April 30, estorickcollection.com