Giorgio Morandi 22 May–12 August 2001
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Giorgio Morandi 22 May–12 August 2001 Supported by Maurice S Kanbar and The Murray and Isabella Rayburn Foundation Still Life 1957 Teacher and group leaders’ kit Information and practical ideas for group visits to the Morandi exhibition and the Still Life displays at Tate Modern Written by Michèle Fuirer Introduction I believe that the educational task visual arts can perform is, particularly at the present time, to communicate the images and feelings which the world arouses in us. Giogio Morandi This kit provides an introduction to Morandi’s life and Each room in the exhibition explores specific work, concentrating on his still life paintings. There are tendencies. The introductory room presents selected five thematic sheets with suggestions for gallery and canvases from across Morandi’s career. It is followed classroom activities. These include links to works in by a study of the architectonic nature of his work, the Still life/Object/Real Life display. The activities are described by a critic as the impression of ‘cathedrals for you to adapt according to the level of your students rather than bottles’. One room examines Morandi’s and your project planning. In particular the Morandi use of the edge as a stuctural device, while another exhibition provides fertile ground for work on Objects begins with a single work in the Tate Collection and and Meanings (QCA art and design scheme of work traces other paintings that use and rearrange the 5A) and Objects and Viewpoints (QCA art and design same objects. scheme of work 8A). The final room includes some of his most abstracted Curators' introduction to the Morandi paintings, in which objects seem to be on the brink of exhibition dissolving without ever quite relinquishing their Giorgio Morandi is one of the most admired Italian recognisably solid origins. Morandi once commented painters of the twentieth century, known for his subtle that ‘there is nothing more surreal than reality’. It is and contemplative paintings, largely of still lifes. From perhaps this searching investigation of the relationship the ‘metaphysical’ paintings of his early years, to the between the real and illusory that ensure that his work nearly abstract canvases made in the 1960s, Morandi continues to be relevant today. engaged in a lifelong attempt to seize reality through the familiar. The consistency and intensity of this The exhibition is curated by Donna De Salvo, Senior investigation has made him the quintessential ‘artist’s Curator at Tate Modern, and Matthew Gale, artist’. Collections Curator at Tate. Working from his studio in Bologna, a place he rarely Contradictions left for long, Morandi used the same simple elements, Morandi and his work present the viewer with a including bottles, boxes, and the view from his number of fascinating contradictions:- window, staging a seemingly endless array of variations. His paintings appear to transcend time and • He remained private and kept himself away from the place, an effect he achieved by removing labels from glare of publicity and the eyes of the world. Apparently, his bottles, faces from his clocks, and people from his too many visitors made him feel ill and nervous. landscapes. In fact, many of Morandi’s works can be However, a lot of people wanted to meet him - art read as arrangements of pure form. This is particularly dealers, critics and fellow artists, for example - and he the case for those produced after 1945, the principal needed to meet them too in order to maintain his work focus of this exhibition. The subtle variations of these as an artist. late works demonstrate Morandi’s capacity for • His paintings may appear to show reality - things as discovering immense complexity within the self- they are - yet they are highly constructed and full of imposed limitations of his practice. artifice and invention. ‘The objects were set out as if on a miniature stage, and to my eyes they looked strangely false’ (Morandi). • Morandi wasn’t really interested in selling his work, but a lot people wanted to buy it. He couldn’t make enough money to live on from sales, so he had to create complex still-life objects, neither painting nor work as a teacher in elementary schools and as sculpture, a mixture of readymade and artist-made Professor of Etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti elements. Outstanding among these is The Bride in Bologna. Stripped Bare by her Batchelors, Even (The Large Glass). Relating to these contradictions you could discuss the points below with your group:- In the 1930s Surrealism injected powerful psychological, particularly psychosexual content, into • Do you think an artist can make work which they the modern still-life object (for example Salvador Dali's keep private and never make available to the wider Lobster Telephone and Hans Bellmer's Doll) and this world? Discuss why someone might want to do this. spirit continues in the contemporary work of • Does an artist usually need to have a ‘day job’ to Lucas Samaras, Robert Gober, Jeff Koons and Cathy earn money, as well as making art? de Monchaux. • Can you think of another personality - someone you know or a celebrity or media star - who also likes to From the early 1960s Pop art and New Realism gave be private but is constantly being sought out? rise to a huge revival of still life, as artists turned their gaze on the bright new world of consumer goods and Still life/Object/Real life display popular culture that was burgeoning. Jasper John's Like landscape, still life only emerged as a distinct paintings of flags and numbers and Andy Warhol's category of painting in the seventeenth century. It soup cans marked both a revival and a revolution in developed as a celebration of the material pleasures painting the everyday world, while Claes Oldenburg's of life - food, drink, possessions. In a religious age it sculptural renderings of objects such as drainpipes also took on symbolic meaning: dead fish and game, embraced dramatically new categories of still-life flowers that will fade, fruit that will rot, objects that will subject as well as giving a new emphasis to still life as outlive us, as well as actual skulls, all becoming a major subject for sculpture. reminders of mortality. In the final decades of the twentieth century At the start of the twentieth century the use of simple Duchamp's proposal to bring reality directly into art still-life arrangements of the most ordinary objects has been widely explored. Examples of such practice enabled Cézanne, and then Picasso and Braque, to are rich and varied: Carl Andre's notorious brick piece develop new ways of representing reality in painting. Equivalent VIII; Damien Hirst's works incorporating From 1912 Picasso and Braque incorporated reality preserved dead animals to create contemporary directly into their work, first in flat Cubist collages vanitas images (reminders of mortality);Tony Cragg's using newspaper, wallpaper and the like, then in assemblages of found materials which retain their Picasso's three-dimensional Cubist constructions in identity while taking on new metamorphic meanings; some of which actual objects represented themselves. Richard Hamilton's working computer; and Susan This marked a significant moment for one of modern Hiller's remarkable From the Freud Museum, which art's central obsessions: bringing art ever closer to represents the significant practice of artists collecting reality. Marcel Duchamp closed this gap with a series and categorising objects. of works (called readymades) which presented everyday objects, most notoriously a urinal, as art. Having established this principle, Duchamp went on to 1 The Artist’s Life and Work Morandi squeezes himself like a lemon on every one of his canvases. Leo Longanesi Giorgio Morandi was born in Bologna on 20 July 1890. kind. The nobility of the colours and the textures was After his father died, the family moved to an old house obviously an invention of Morandi’s. at via Fondazza 36. Morandi lived here for the rest of Josef Herman his life, with his mother and three sisters. He worked and slept in a single room, surrounded by dust-laden Morandi had a great dog on a lead - a great shambling objects he used in his paintings. Every summer, the animal named Pluto who matched his master’s long family went to Grizzana, in the Apennines. silhouette very well. Pompilio Mandelli Morandi himself said, ‘I have been fortunate enough to lead…an uneventful life’. He spent almost all of his life Morandi began showing signs of tiredness. He handed in this town of ‘the old university, the ancient towers, over the whole portfolio to my friend and sat down on the arcades, the orderly, quiet, provincial atmosphere’. the platform at the foot of the table. I could see The house he lived in became his world. Yet Morandi now very little of his body; two very tall columns of also lived through two world wars and through a period legs, two long arms supporting the pale oval of the of social and political change in his native country, bespectacled head. Italy. He was in the army in the First World War and he Josef Herman had to live under German occupation in the Second World War. Discussion points • Discuss what you think an artist’s life might be like. Some of Morandi’s friends described visiting him:- • How and where do you think an artist might work? • Why might an artist always choose to work from I recall his house as it appeared to me the first home? time I saw it, divided into two parts - two worlds. In • Does an ordered routine help work go smoothly for the first - neat and tidy, with a mirror sheen - lived some artists? his mother and sisters.