[...] this abstract tension exists alongside a blurred luminous exactness.

“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 small Natura morta of 1958 with four objects (a cylindrical jar in the foreground, the Persian white ceramic bottle and the jug of water in the middle ground, and probably a cylindrical jar taller than the first one in the background) is a masterpiece from the final phase of Morandi’s catalogue. The excellence of this painting is demonstrated by the fact that Morandi wanted to include a colour reproduction of it in the anthology of images, carefully chosen by him, in the sumptuous book of 1964 with a preface by Lamberto Vitali. Helped by the reduction of the format (since 1958 his paintings had rarely exceeded 30 x 35 cm in size), the artist experimented with new and daring constructive solutions. The objects present on the tabletop are confined within a tight upside-down L shape and the angle of the viewpoint reveals purely abstract relations between the various parts. However, this abstract tension exists alongside a blurred luminous exactness. The objects, unlike the more geometric paintings of the early 1950s, feature velvety surfaces and indeterminate edges, coinciding with Morandi’s contemporary resumption of watercolour painting. The colour palette allows for new and beautiful ivory, violet, periwinkle and rose hues. Morandi sold the work to the Galleria del Milione (where it was assigned the progressive number 7945) and it entered the considerable collection of the Paviabased doctor Luigi Molina, before passing through the Medea and Pescali galleries in Milan and La Bussola in Turin, where it was purchased by Cerruti on 1 March 1968.³

Flavio Fergonzi

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

²Brandi 1939, p. 250.

³The work is mentioned in the handwritten “Inventario...” of 30 June 1993, recorded in the entrance to the villa (Cerruti Collection Archives).