represent

Playing what’s not there

Giorgio Morandi is a painter who, maybe more than any other, requires you to pass F. Scott Fitzgerald’s test for having a first-rate intelligence: the ability to hold two opposing points of view in mind at the same time without having to reconcile them. Someone not versed in art history might dismiss the charm of Morandi’s elementary style as an affectation. He is both very good and his late work also looks easily achieved. He embraces the paradox that being a 20th century artist often means having a beginner’s mind and, well, making what looks like a beginner’s marks. On the other hand, he understood how to make paintings that stood out because of what they didn’t do: he was a perceptual minimalist. He flirted with Cubism and Futurism and the Metaphysical School of De Chirico, but eventually he chose a way to paint where what he shows you almost isn’t visible. (Remember that band in the Pynchon story that thought all the notes rather than playing them?) He was a sort of monkish recluse, a J.D. Salinger of visual art, painting in his home, never marrying, living in a household he shared with three unmarried sisters. His isolation has the aura of a folk tale. Yet in his photographs he looks astute, stylish in his Bauhaus eyeglasses, with his handsome Italian visage. He was no naif. The two opposing points of view in Morandi’s case would be: a) this painting really is a pleasure to look at; b) this painting doesn’t appear to be showing me much at all. It’s sort of the definition of minimalism. Yet some minimalism looks even more minimal than the rest.

More than a decade ago, when she was working the desk at Viridian Artists, Lauren Purje introduced me to Simon Cerigo, an art consultant and collector who visited regularly. He told me he attended every gallery opening in Manhattan. I didn’t doubt it. He looked the part: intense, serious, a little disheveled from staying so assiduously informed. I enjoyed his company. He was unpretentious, laconic, and smart. In one conversation, he mentioned knowing Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. A lot of doors were open to Simon. He died young, at the age of 60, not long after we met, but during one of our random encounters he confided his recipe for art stardom, condensed to its simplest form. He wasn’t endorsing it, just passing it along as an observer of the scene. It went like this. First, you get your MFA. Learn everything a school can teach you. And then forget all of it and paint as if there were no rules. This, as he understood it, was the path that led to a career like Elizabeth Peyton’s. Back then, she was selling awkward, quickly-executed portraits of rock celebrities and others. It’s also a way to describe the impulses that gave birth to Modernism itself: learn how to do it the academic way and discard it and paint like a beast!

I’ve never forgotten Simon’s recipe. Amid all the self-conscious spectacle of much contemporary art and the calculated look-at-me Instagram gambits artists cook up, Simon’s intrigue was: learn everything you can and then forget it.  What was implied in this ostensible path to glory was actually appealing: an understandable yearning among art collectors for something genuine, something fresh and heedless, something authentically felt, the less professional the better. That was Elizabeth Peyton’s M.O. Also, it was good to feign or actually feel a Kurt Cobain disdain for popularity and sales. Snub the art world and its influencers. Be Bob Dylan standing with his back to the audience.

Still, I understood an art collector’s yearning for something surprisingly good—spontaneous and unpredictable and done simply for the fulfillment of having done it, not for the prestige and money and reputation. Something guileless, in comparison with so much of the calculated work shown in many galleries. The irony of course is that, in Simon’s estimation, not chasing fame became exactly the way to get it.

If I had looked at Simon and said “Giorgio Morandi,” he probably would have nodded with a wink. I think of Morandi’s paintings almost as a secret handshake for sophisticated art lovers. Peter Schjeldahl adored Morandi. As he delightfully put it in 2008: “In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: ‘Stay fit the Morandi way!’” I love and miss Schjeldahl, and I could learn to love Morandi’s work too, but I don’t know if I’m entirely ready to move beyond simply admiring it for its elementary beauty. Paradoxically Morandi plays the part of the outsider stepping out of the current of Modernism’s cerebral flow. He seems to discard all intellectual justifications for painting. He reduces his technique to a physical, finger-painting simplicity of marks—it’s almost art brut. But he’s also being sophisticated in a meta- way. His work is shrewd in its rejections, its disregard for looking difficult. Morandi’s mature style was, at least in part, a knowing way to secure his unique niche as a 20^th century minimalist, right there in the flow all along.

There’s no denying his charm. He appears to live and paint strictly in a small formal arena he made his alone, creating images so deprived of visual stimulation that they are like little prayers for sensory deprivation. I love minimalism’s project of doing nearly the same thing over and over with seemingly small changes from painting to painting that govern what the painting shows you. His paintings work this way. His simple canvases are considered “contemplative,” little vows against anything gaudy and exuberant and outspoken. His repetitive format is soothing. His paintings suggest a devotion to identifying what’s most essential to painting. What’s not to like in all of that?

Painting’s pursuit of its own essence led to a lot of 20^th century cul-de-sacs. One branch of that intellectual pursuit seems to end with Morandi (how can still life become any simpler and more basic?), yet he isn’t really a dead end. Many artists found ways to find themselves with his help. Philip Guston for example and I think even William Bailey had to have admired the Italian, with Bailey’s repetitive clusters of antique, matte-surfaced pottery. Yet stylistically, Morandi represents an extremity similar to Jackson Pollock’s drips, Clement Greenberg’s theories of “flatness”, Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes or Ryman’s white paintings—they are all ne plus ultra, beyond which a painter has to reverse direction and find his or her own way of working. The notion of what’s essential to all painting doesn’t carry much weight now, beyond the tautology: a painting requires paint. We are all on our own, in our idiosyncratic efforts to find ways to paint in an art world without or guardrails or prohibitions. Morandi went about as far as one can go to simplify still life, the way Rothko stripped away everything from landscape other than generalized vectors for heaven, earth and a middle ground around the horizon. After those extremes, the pendulum swings back and forth from simple to complex, from the present into the past and back again.

Morandi comes off as someone so disinterested in impressing the viewer that he seems to have been trying to convey something quietly, personally compelling that couldn’t be put into words. That is his appeal. At the same time, you wonder if maybe Morandi took as his challenge how to convey something genuine and heartfelt with the least amount of paint possible. He doesn’t invest a lot of time in his images. His output was large. Vermeer left behind a few dozen paintings. Morandi completed 1,350. That’s quick work for a contemplative monk. Rather than repairing something that began badly, he reputedly scraped off his false starts until he arrived at alla prima success, by his own lights. His huddled assembly of familiar objects could be interpreted as stand-ins for Cezanne’s geometric building blocks of natural forms, but they feel human, more like Picasso’s saltimbanques, lonely and together all at once. His household objects sometimes look soft as putty with wavy outlines, doughy and out of shape in a congenial way. The paint handling is anything but showy. All of his recurring boxes and bottles and bowls gravitate into the center of a small picture like honeybees snuggling to stay awake in a snowstorm. It’s endearing. They don’t want to be interpreted. Yet they require it. That’s his paradox.

Those who say his work is meditative overlook that all still life tends to be meditative by definition. Stillness is right there in the name . From one painting to the next similar one, Morandi’s subject matter yields no room for interpretation, but the fact that any of his paintings exist demands commentary: “let me explain why work that looks so rudimental is so masterful.” To gaze at the work of another Italian, Piero’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels at The Clark, is also a meditative experience that carries a lot of devotional information but ironically doesn’t require any knowledge of it. It’s the reverse of a Morandi still life. It has some of the compositional qualities of a Morandi: figures gathered together at the center of a picture, everything placed in perfect balance. Piero’s uncanny level of skill working at that scale and the sense of equilibrium in every fervently rendered detail induces a serene, awed calm in the viewer. Morandi’s approach is closer to what Miles Davis said about jazz: “Don’t play what’s there; play what’s not there.” Morandi depends on the viewer’s understanding that he’s leaving nearly everything out—and making it work. Whether that last fact represents a stylistic achievement or a really impressive career move, the way Warhol’s Brillo boxes are a bit of a philosophically brilliant joke, depends on your love for 20^th century art in general. In purely sensory terms, Morandi’s pictures are a genuinely beautiful arrangement of softly rendered forms in subtle, deeply felt colors. The paintings with what seem almost generic forms have a personal quality all their own.

A second significant exhibition at David Zwirner of more than fifty works by Morandi just ended this month: Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation. About a decade ago Zwirner mounted another comprehensive Morandi show. What’s interesting to me, given the sort of Boo Radley quality of the Morandi legend is where Morandi is valued: the highest price for one of his paintings at auction is around $4.5 million. Given the stratosphere of art valuations now, the kind of money that gets moved for a single work of art, does the price of a Morandi reflect hesitation? (A Da Vinci sold for $450 million in 2017.) Is that reserve about Morandi himself or just a matter of needing more time to pass, or a reflection that the supply of Morandi paintings is about as plentiful as the supply of diamonds in the market? There’s always more stashed away somewhere.

There’s a long, rambling essay on Morandi by Sidney Tillim in a 1967 issue of Artforum. Reading through it, you get the sense that Tillim was trying hard to maintain a Sixties drone of theoretical art criticism with talk about “flatness” and how in Morandi tone takes precedence over shape and line takes a back seat to light, and so on. Tillim knew Morandi personally so he sat down with the painter in Bologna and talked with him at length. What comes through is how shrewd Morandi seems when it comes to securing his reputation. Morandi cuts right to the chase about his role more or less as Ishmael surviving the wreck of the Pequod called representational art:

This was perhaps why Morandi was not sanguine about the possibilities of a new representational art. I visited Morandi late in the summer of 1960. To my question as to whether he thought it was possible to paint in a viable representational style today, he said, as I recall (I took no notes), that it had still been possible for painters of his generation, but that he thought that it would be extremely difficult for younger painters today, perhaps impossible. Rather than speculating, Morandi was, I suspect, speaking from experience, possibly from a dimly realized personal despair. For his art lacked the classic monumentality, in all its fullness of scale, that he understood was implicit in the flatness of contemporary painting. Flatness enforces the shapes in a composition, stressing their decorative, hence their monumental character.

First of all, Morandi’s late work is pretty darn flat, in comparison with traditional representational painting, and the monumentality of flatness, whatever that means, would have derived only from the sheer scale of so much genuinely flat minimalist paintings: those huge protractor chevrons of color from Stella for example, which really are stunning. (Tillim could have said: “Morandi is pretty flat but way smaller than most of those other flat paintings.”) The phrase “Morandi was not sanguine about the possibilities of new representational art” may indicate how cleverly the painter fenced off his stylistic garden from the allure of more traditionally representational work. Photorealism wasn’t all that far into the future. He presented a wistful sense of Gotterdammerung fatalism about the prospects of representational art–so so sad to see it wither away, but I’m still making my marks!–while silently confirming he was building a career out of his twilight struggle. He knew exactly what he was doing, in the context of 20^th century art, and he did it in a way that looked natural, effortless, and conveyed a childlike spontaneity. He likely had no idea where representational painting was going to go, but in the Sixties it really did seem as if visual art was struggling against the impossibility of further progress. It took Arthur Danto to declare that the end of progress in art was the beginning of individual freedom.

Elizabeth Peyton will likely be on deck in the near future for another show herself at Zwirner, with work that doesn’t look nearly as awkward and unfinished as it did a decade ago when Simon Cerigo was offering me his code for success. Peyton’s recent work is actually quite good, but doesn’t follow the Cerigo rules. Representational art of all kinds broke into Morandi’s fenced-off garden and took what it needed, and also found nourishment in dozens of other gardens as well, including some gardens that started growing centuries ago. Morandi may have understood that representational painting was in no danger of withering away, but he was smart enough not to say so. He knew exactly what he was doing.  Meanwhile, Morandi’s truce between representation and abstraction will always achieve its unspectacular beauty by making us notice what isn’t there. Miles Davis would approve.