In the crepuscular atmosphere and uncertainty highlighted by these paintings, we can read the effects that the tragic events of the war had on the painter, placing him in a state that was both one of anxiety and of inner focus. 

“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 Natura morta of 1945 with the two blue cups, one on top of the other, the fragmented white pot, the two-tone ball of celluloid, the copper pan and the white cup with grooves running down it forms part of a series started in 1942, in which Morandi depicted small, humble objects, made from fragile materials and invested with dramatic side lighting that elongates the shadows on the tabletop. In the crepuscular atmosphere and uncertainty highlighted by these paintings, we can read the effects that the tragic events of the war had on the painter, placing him in a state that was both one of anxiety and of inner focus. The painting formed part of the collection belonging to the couple Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano, who purchased Morandi’s less canonical and more expressive pieces from the 1930s onwards, displaying them alongside anticlassical examples of Italian art from the early 20th century through to the 1960s. It seems likely that the still life was still in their collection in 1960, when it was authenticated by Morandi for the planned general catalogue (as also demonstrated by the Galleria del Milione label on the back). After being acquired by the less well-known Candiani Collection, the painting entered the Cerruti Collection in June 1993.³

Flavio Fergonzi

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

²Brandi 1939, p. 250.

³The work features in the handwritten “Inventario...” of 30 June 1993, listed among the assets in the villa entrance (Cerruti Collection Archives).