“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.” 

Renato Guttuso

“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 Paesaggio in the Cerruti Collection was painted in Grizzana (Morandi’s country home outside Bologna) in summer 1939, just a few months after Brandi’s words. In the Morandi room at the III Quadriennale in Rome in 1939, two of his Paesaggi (Landscapes) from the previous year were purchased by the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin and by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Towards the end of the 1930s, the exemplary importance of his landscape work was held in greater esteem than his work in the still life genre, which was considered to be less important. In these Paesaggi, Morandi experimented with formats tending towards a square (he therefore emphasised the artificial nature of the vision, crudely cropped and brought closer to the viewer’s gaze) and a substantially abstract construction, where the areas of colour (vegetation, houses, sky) interlock with one another, coming together violently. This Paesaggio preserves the characteristics of the landscapes of the years immediately prior to this. However, the paint application is less compact and the touch is leaner and more frayed, albeit richer in tonal variations, reviving the chiaroscuro style of some of his landscape engravings from the 1920s. Above all, it marks the start of the series of Paesaggi produced over the next two summers (1940 and 1941), where the vibrating brushstroke, following the example set by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot whom he admired so much, seeks to render the here and now of the atmospheric condition with respect to the more stringent architecture. The collecting history of the work is exemplary because it involves two of the biggest historic collections of Morandi’s work. The 1939 Paesaggio was first purchased, presumably just after it was painted, by the Roman lawyer Pietro Rollino, who owned the biggest collection of Morandi’s work at the time. It then went to the collection of Emilio Jesi, perhaps in the 1950s (the painting still belonged to Rollino in 1946, as recorded in the monograph by Cesare Gnudi), revealing the interest shown in this artwork by a collector who purchased the most valuable pieces of modern art and who considered Morandi a sound international reference point. The painting then passed into the hands of the Milanese Galleria dell’Annunciata. Its owner, Bruno Grossetti, was an active supporter of Morandi’s painting in Milan during the post-war period: a label glued to the back of the canvas records its presence in the Milanese gallery in its new premises on Via Manzoni, which opened in 1959. The painting, as illustrated by a label on the frame, subsequently belonged to the Genevabased gallery owner Marie-Louise Jeanneret, who organised a Morandi exhibition featuring this work in late 1977. The date the painting entered the Cerruti Collection is not known.³

Flavio Fergonzi

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

²Brandi 1939, p. 250.

³The work features in the handwritten “Inventario dei mobili, dipinti, sculture, argenti, tappeti, maioliche, porcellane e oggetti d’arte che si trovano nella villa di Rivoli alla data del 30-06-1993”, recorded in the so-called “mother’s room” (Cerruti Collection Archives).