Bottles, Time, and Form: The Contemplative Practice of Morandi
- Diamond Zhou
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
April 12th, 2025
Should you not have had the opportunity to view our Jack Bush exhibition, the gallery will be open this Sunday, April 13th, from 1:00 to 5:00 PM for a final viewing before the exhibition closes.
Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) is often described as a "painter's painter," but that phrase hardly captures the subtle gravity of his vision. Born in Bologna to a middle-class family, Morandi showed early artistic promise and enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Bologna in 1907. There he studied traditional 14th-century techniques but also taught himself the craft of etching by poring over books on Rembrandt. A formative trip to Florence in 1910 exposed him to the quattrocento masters Giotto, Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca, whose balanced compositions and serene atmospheres would leave a lasting impression. Morandi’s admiration for early Renaissance art, especially Piero’s “sense of timeless calm,” would later be reflected in the meditative stillness of his own works.
While rooted in Italy’s rich artistic tradition, Morandi was also keenly aware of modern developments. He briefly experimented with Futurism around 1914 and even exhibited alongside the Futurists in Bologna that year. However, the dynamic fragmentation of Futurism did not suit his temperament, and after serving in World War I (an experience that led to a nervous breakdown and discharge in 1915, he gravitated toward the pittura metafisica (Metaphysical Painting) movement. From 1918 to 1922 Morandi was associated with the Metaphysical school led by Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. In metaphysical still lifes, everyday objects are imbued with a mysterious, dreamlike atmosphere, arranged in eerie, stage-like spaces. Morandi’s own works from this period show experiments with manipulated perspective, shallow spatial depth, and unnaturally crisp light, creating that sospensione or suspension of time characteristic of Metaphysical art. This was the last major stylistic shift of Morandi’s career, because by the early 1920s he had found the idiom that would define his art for the rest of his life.
Morandi lived a quiet, outwardly uneventful life in Bologna, sharing a house with his mother and three sisters on Via Fondazza. Working in a nine square-meter studio with a single bed, Morandi, standing six foot four, built a high table so he could see his objects at eye level. He often ground his pigments and stretched the canvases, and worked obsessively on his paintings. Like Giacometti, he never cleaned his studio. Over the 40 years, Morandi’s subjects accumulated layers of dust: bottles, old pitchers, a lemon squeezer, café latte bowls, tin boxes, quaint vases.
From 1914 until 1930 he taught drawing in elementary schools, then became a professor of etching at the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, a post he held until 1956. He rarely traveled, Paris only in 1956, and maintained a reclusive routine devoted to painting, broken only by summer sojourns to the countryside village of Grizzana. His dedication did not go unnoticed, as by the 1930s he was exhibiting regularly in Italy and abroad. In 1948, Morandi won the first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale, bringing him international acclaim. A decade later he won the Grand Prize at the 1957 São Paulo Biennial, triumphing over renowned competitors like Chagall and Pollock. These honours allowed Morandi to retire from teaching and focus exclusively on his art. He continued to paint and make prints until his final years, succumbing to lung cancer in 1964 at the age of 73.
Despite living under the Fascist regime for two decades, Morandi largely avoided direct political entanglements. He was briefly arrested in 1943 due to associations with anti-Fascist friends, but generally he was perceived as an artist who “escaped the taint of fascism” by pursuing an independent path of pure painting.
So for over four decades, Morandi rearranged the same few objects—dusty bottles, clay pots, tins—scrutinizing the space between them with a slowness that bordered on reverence. He sometimes painted the actual bottles to unify their tone, dulling them so they would not reflect or distract. His palette softened to chalky whites, pale ochres, and warm greys, conjuring an atmosphere more remembered than seen. Each painting became, in essence, a meditation: on the tensions between proximity and isolation, on the thresholds between object and shadow, on the passage of light across form.
Morandi's compositions depend on the orchestration of elemental shapes of cylinders, cones, and ovals. His contours are soft, deliberate, often feathered. In oil paintings, edges dissolve into adjacent forms or melt into the background, suggesting intimacy over clarity. His drawings and etchings, by contrast, reveal a patient hand: lines that trace vessels with near-reverent attention, modulated by subtle hatching. The line, for Morandi, was not merely descriptive but experiential. Each curve, each gentle intersection, functions as a point of encounter between perception and memory. Morandi’s works on paper, though less famous than his oils, offer further insight into his art. He was an accomplished printmaker, completing 133 etchings in his lifetime, many of which revisit the same still life motifs in monochrome. In his etchings, Morandi used a dense network of fine lines and cross-hatching to model light and shadow, recalling the techniques of Rembrandt and other old masters he admired. His watercolours, often executed with thin washes of umber or grey, further simplify the scene, sometimes dissolving the objects into mere silhouettes. In these, the economy of means borders on abstraction – yet they never lose the tangible sense of observed reality.
His tonal harmonies are famously subdued. Pale umbers, cool greys, muted greens, and clay-toned whites dominate his palette. Morandi’s colour is never decorative, it’s structural. It articulates space, merges silhouettes, and balances masses. He often prepared his canvases with a warm ground, letting it glow through thin, dry layers of paint. The chromatic restraint contributes to an atmosphere that is contemplative rather than expressive. As a result, the viewer is drawn inward, not dazzled but absorbed.
Space in Morandi’s work is shallow but charged. Often, there is no clear division between tabletop and wall. The horizon vanishes, replaced by tonal continuity. This erasure of conventional perspective flattens the scene, yet paradoxically deepens its ambiguity. Morandi’s objects feel neither staged nor incidental. They simply are, situated in a quiet, hovering plane that feels outside of time. He once remarked that the spatial relationships between objects were what fascinated him most, suggesting that the gaps and overlaps between forms mattered as much as the forms themselves.
Morandi's surfaces are matte, chalky, and meditative. He applied pigment dryly and thinly, allowing the weave of the canvas or paper to remain visible. There is no bravura here, no expressive gesture, just a calm, consistent presence. His brushwork is humble yet exacting, evidence of a temperament more aligned with monks than modernists. Even his failures, paintings scraped and redone, carry the softness of something pursued rather than performed.
Morandi’s art is often described as timeless and contemplative, and this springs directly from his philosophical approach to painting. He was deeply concerned with seeing – not the surface of appearances, but the underlying reality of forms and the elusive “space, light, colour, and form” that constituted his visual world, as he wrote in 1957. A grouping of dusty bottles, for him, became a visual laboratory: how light touches a surface, how tones interact, how silence can shape form. “Nothing is more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see,” he once observed, reminding us that pure observation is itself an act of abstraction.
Though Morandi remained figurative throughout his life, his paintings resonate with the logic of abstraction and the ethos of Minimalism. He reduced his motifs to essential relations: shape, interval, tone, creating an art of restraint and repetition. His still lifes are metaphysical not because they depict otherworldly content, but because they suspend time. As critic Roberto Longhi wrote, Morandi had “invented an anti-Futurist time,” a slowed temporality that resists the pace of modern life.
His theoretical stance was radical in its quietude. Morandi shunned spectacle and stripped painting to its core functions: to see, to sense, to reflect. In this, he was less a modernist technician than a visual mystic. Like a monk contemplating sacred texts, Morandi returned to his bottles as vessels of presence, humble, silent, and deeply human. His work does not explain the world, it discloses it. Slowly, subtly, and with unrelenting grace.
His influence is unusually broad for so inward-facing a painter. Philip Guston, Vija Celmins, and Wayne Thiebaud found inspiration in his rigour and restraint. Minimalists such as Donald Judd and Agnes Martin saw in his seriality and compositional clarity a precedent for their own practices. Sculptors like Rachel Whiteread. Edmund de Waal, and Joseph Cornell echoed his meditative intimacy with the object world. Even Frank Gehry acknowledged Morandi as a reference point for compositional flow.
Among contemporary artists, Barbara Astman presents a particularly resonant dialogue. In her Conversation with Empty Bottles series, Astman photographs whimsical glass bottles shaped like violins, skulls, torsos, revolvers, isolated in a formal grid. Her vessels shimmer with the precision of light and surface, yet retain a theatrical, referential quality. Where Morandi stripped his objects of identity to reach the universal, Astman allows hers to retain their eccentricity, their cultural resonance. Yet she shares his methods: repetition, tonal quiet, the sculpting of space through spacing.
Astman, like Morandi, asks the viewer to attend, to look again, and then again. Her portraits of bottles suggest voices, absences, and memory. Morandi's resist speech, insisting instead on presence. In both, the bottle becomes a proxy for the human: alone, communal, unknowable. The space between them is not empty, but filled with implication.
Morandi taught us that clarity is not simplicity. He offered us not new subjects, but new ways to see. As he once said, he sought to express "what is in the visible world" with such fidelity that the visible became metaphysical. In this, he was both modernist and mystic. His paintings do not explain, they disclose. They do not illustrate, they reveal. To spend time with them is not just to look, but to learn to see, and to remember that perception, at its most profound, is a form of devotion.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
BARBARA ASTMAN: CONCEALED/REVEALED
Opening Saturday, April 26th, 2025, 1:00PM - 5:30PM
