‘Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation’
David Zwirner Contemporary, 537 West 20th Street, New York, New York
Through February 22, 2025 

Few artists have achieved the exalted status of Giorgio Morandi, who painted still lifes of such exquisite refinement and subtle palette that to look at them too quickly is to miss them. He is a painter who rewards long and careful looking, whose meditations on form and color are among the most profound of the 20th century. The collection on display at David Zwirner Contemporary, borrowed from the Magnani-Rocca foundation at Parma, features a broad sampling of work that spans the master’s six-decade career. 

Assembled over some twenty years by Morandi’s friend and collector Luigi Magnani, this show is notable for its range. There are earlier works on paper, (his marvellously composed etchings as well as his later watercolors and drawings), a rare self-portrait, and his only commissioned work, a still life of a musical instrument. 

Through it all we can witness the evolution of the inimitable Morandi style, beginning with his indebtedness to Paul Cezanne (in a still life from 1927) towards his signature mature period in the 1940’s, and onward to the increasingly spare works at the end of his career. Morandi, never a fan of bombast, became increasingly concerned with negative space, finally using it to almost magical, Wabi Sabi effect. 

Like the very best painting, there is no rational explanation for what Morandi’s paintings achieve. You are drawn into a world so intently meditative and tender that you cannot believe you are merely looking at a grouping of bottles. This places Morandi squarely in the tradition of the metaphysical still life painters such as Zurbaran, the Spanish master of the 17th century, Pierro della Francesca, or the quiet miracles of Chardin. Morandi was an avid student of all three.  

An early still life from 1936 shows him hitting his stride. A large white bottle rounded and ribbed, is echoed by a smaller rounded object that is also ribbed. They are flanked by a china blue bowl with a white stripe and a handmade, rougher white earthenware vessel. A smaller white bowl occupies the foreground. Morandi was as much about the convergence of bodies as he was about light, color or space. 

There is something intimate, nearly anthropomorphic about the grouping, suggesting a group of figures rather than vessels. Calm light suffuses the whole, including his tendency to place his groupings towards the corner of a table, oftentimes teetering on the edge. This is not a mere painting of bottles, in other words, but a contemplative exercise on form and formlessness. 

At his height there is hardly any equal. His three white milk glass bottles, painted in 1953, have a surface translucency that is unearthly, achieved with a refined brushwork whose secrets he took to his grave. The bottles, though, also have a rootedness in space, a real three-dimensional presence that announces them as physical bodies. This was the dividing line, that Morandi straddled so intently and meditatively, between the physical and the metaphysical, where earthly forms become ideas or representations. 

Morandi’s preoccupation with the philosophy of form is evident early in his career. He was a straightforward “Metaphysical” painter early in his career, a highly polished style he shared with his peers such as De Chirico. His later work, though, shows that he eventually tired of the style’s dreamlike tenor. His one rare metaphysical painting in the show, however, is a marvel. It features a marotte, a book, and a bottle, all rendered with the superlative smoothness favored by the surrealists. 

Yet this is not where Morandi intended to go, aesthetically. He liked ethereal subtlety, but he could never relinquish the rough concreteness of real-world objects. He wanted both, and he struggled mightily with discerning where they met and how they balanced each other out. You might even say his main preoccupation was the mystery of incarnation. 

Though raised as a Catholic (he was Italian after all), Morandi after World War I embraced Gnosticism, a movement that seeks the divine through inference alone. This would explain the modest quietude of his work. He was not so much looking for miracles or signs, but radiant presence manifested in the simplest objects. His was a perennial or a deeply Platonic exercise. 

Morandi, intently devoted to his craft throughout an otherwise uneventful life, worked for most of it in obscurity. Tall, stooped, and unassuming, he never moved out of the Bologna apartment he shared with his mother and three sisters. A confirmed bachelor, he preferred to devote himself to his craft with an intensity some would call monastic.  

When he was not painting, he was a drawing instructor at the local elementary school, a position he held for fifteen years. He only skyrocketed to international fame in his later years, when Frederico Fellini included one of his paintings in “La Dolce Vita,” an example of the highest aesthetic refinement. Mostly, however, he remained indifferent to worldly affairs. He preferred his studio to the world, and now the world wishes it could occupy his studio with him. 

To view a Morandi is to be invited to participate in a way of seeing. An increasingly rare way of seeing that eschews the dross of the contemporary. His gifts to the world are modest rectangles of visual silence, small metaphysical windows that can’t help but refine the mind, the eye and the heart.