The beautiful colour ranges, the often daring crops, the realism [...] and the peremptory statement of a painting that exhibits the autonomous values of touch and chromatic material make these paintings a decisive episode in Morandi’s research [...]

“Who said that Morandi repeats himself? That his paintings are all the same? You blind people, rinse out your eyes! There is more imagination in those bottles and landscapes than perhaps in all the rest of contemporary Italian painting put together.”¹ Renato Guttuso’s reaction to the paintings from the collection of Carlo Cardazzo, exhibited in Rome in spring 1941, is a worthy introduction to the five canvases by Giorgio Morandi in the Cerruti Collection. Morandi was an artist who was often accused of being monotonous. During the twenty-year period spanned by these works, he experimented with an almost disconcerting variety of pictorial styles in a thematic yet stylistic manner. In terms of his execution, Morandi varies from the noticeably chiaroscuro technique, rich in tonal variations, of the Natura morta of 1945, all the way through to the matt surfaces of the piece from 1951, achieved with dense, overlapping brushstrokes. As regards the visual impact (particularly the relationship between the position of the objects in space and the decorative motif of their forms that emerges on the surface), the violent, synthetic marquetry of the Paesaggio of 1939 seems the exact opposite of the soft and luminous modulation, reminiscent of Piero della Francesca, in the Natura morta of 1958. Those who look at these five canvases alongside one another today have to admit that there is no “Morandi style”. The only link forged between them is the tension that is constantly created in the relationship between the architecture of the vision and the colour, which is always called upon to contradict this architecture. The best prepared viewers would recognise the heart of Morandi’s painterly research and his greatness in this tension. In 1939, Cesare Brandi realised that tension imposed itself in the “hot fusion” between “perspectival spatial construction and chromatic construction”, while colour always introduced a “sudden dissolving attack upon the object”.² 

The painting of Fiori from 1954 belonged to Rodolfo Pallucchini, Venice Biennale secretary from 1948 to 1956, who was a great admirer of Morandi and owned two important still lifes by the artist dating to the 1950s. The small paintings with flowers, especially those that only showed the top section of the vase with the corolla, were generally destined for a particular purpose. In fact, the artist painted them as gifts for his friends (including art historians and critics, scholars and important figures on the cultural scene in general) and as a present for his most loyal collectors. The beautiful colour ranges, the often daring crops, the realism (Morandi only painted these flowers from life, using seasonally available flowers) and the peremptory statement of a painting that exhibits the autonomous values of touch and chromatic material make these paintings a decisive episode in Morandi’s research, to which the artist devoted himself throughout his life. The work entered the Cerruti Collection in the second half of the 1990s, purchased through the Roman gallery Erica Ravenna Fiorentini Arte Contemporanea. 

Flavio Fergonzi

¹Guttuso 1941, then in Guttuso 2013, p. 181.

²Brandi 1939, p. 250.