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This extraordinarily simple painting raises fundamental issues of how we see, how we describe, and even of the history of art.
Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1959, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 35.2 cm (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) © estate of the artist. Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris
0:00:05.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: One of the most important skills in art history is the skill of describing, finding the words to express the complexity of form. We’ve chosen a modern painting, one that was painted in 1959 by Giorgio Morandi, an Italian artist, because it seems very simple and so it should be easy to find words to describe it. Okay, so let’s start. This is a relatively small painting. We actually are both standing less than three feet away, we wanna come up close and really be able to see it.
0:00:37.0 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s almost square in format, and we are clearly looking at a still life. I see what look like bottles on a table top, a cup. I’m reading that light lavender as a table meeting a horizon line of the wall, which is a light grey behind it, and these objects placed on the table, even though there is no indication of their weight. They don’t cast shadows. So these are things my mind is inferring.
0:01:07.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: I wanna start with the ground, before we even get to those objects, I see a little band of grey-yellow at the very bottom, this lavender field, and then above that, more of that yellowish grey. All of that is rendered with a fairly wet brush, so that you can actually see the paint strokes, and you get a sense that the oil paint is functioning almost like water color, it’s been thinned out, so that there are areas where the paint is almost missing and you can actually see back to the surface of the canvas behind it.
0:01:38.5 Dr. Beth Harris: What is most apparent to me is the difference between what my mind wants to do to what I’m seeing and the very stripped down information that I’m given in the painting. In the case of the small fluted bowl in the foreground center, I have more of a sense of its placement on the table because of the darker paint that surrounds it, that acts as a shadow and gives me a sense that this is a three-dimensional object, although that lavender ground gives me no indication of recession into space.
0:02:14.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: We seem to be looking across at that bowl, and yet we’re also seeing a bit of the ovoid at the top, that is, we’re looking down at the bowl at the same time, so there is a little bit of a discontinuity.
0:02:28.2 Dr. Beth Harris: Although I want to read those as bottles or carafes of some sort sitting on the table, I wonder why their necks don’t seem symmetrical. Why the purple paint seems to sometimes come in front of the yellowish white paint of what I assume to be these bottles.
0:02:45.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: If we look at the bottle on the left and we look at the right side of that bottle, you can see that there’s a grey vertical line now that might be the table top, because it’s the same color as the table top, but at the same time, I read that as a facet of the bottle itself that is of its right side receding in space. It is very slippery what’s happening here as we try to make sense of these forms in space. Another example is that green rectangle that emerges from the back edge of the bowl in front and separates the two bottles. At first, we assume that that’s a shadow, because after all it’s in between them, and perhaps one of the bottles is casting that shadow, but the top of it is flat and it wouldn’t be flat if it was a cast shadow, and so it becomes both a negative space and perhaps a form that’s in part hidden behind those bottles?
0:03:36.8 Dr. Beth Harris: The bottle on the right has a few horizontal lines of white paint that read like the reflection of glass, but the one on the left doesn’t have those and is painted in a very flat and matte way without any of that sense of reflectivity.
0:03:55.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: The thing that probably bothers me the most in this painting, and I should say bothers me in a good way, because it makes me question what I’m seeing, is back of the table, which I want to have a continuous arcing form as if this is the back of a large round table. But right around the shoulders of the bottles, that table edge seems to deform and seems to become a bit more parallel with what I take to be the shoulders of the bottles, so that the back of the table seems to edge up. Or, am I possibly looking down at the depth of the bottles? It’s impossible to know, but when I come away with is the sense that the artist seems willing to distort what he sees for the internal logic of the canvas that he wants to end up with.
0:04:42.7 Dr. Beth Harris: For me, this is about a relationship between the painting and the viewer, because it feels so much about confounding my expectations and a kind of insistence on illegibility. And so it feels like a painting that wants to surprise me and make me engage and activate it. Why do we read those two white lines as a reflection in the glass? Our mind and our eyes work together to make sense of the world, which is maybe not giving us as much information as we think it is.
0:05:18.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: So this extraordinarily simple painting of a few objects on a table—that are not telling a story, that are not depicting a likeness—is raising fundamental issues of how we see, how we describe, and even of the history of art.
0:05:33.0 Dr. Beth Harris: But the next question, why is this something of interest at this moment, in this place where the artist is? What is it about this historical moment that is calling for this kind of questioning?
0:05:46.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: But that would be the subject of another video.
This work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Laura Mattioli Rossi, editor, The Later Morandi: Still Lifes 1950–1964 (Milan: Mazzotta Edizione, 1998).
