I zipped inside the Met determined not to linger too long near the swinging medieval bird I love, dipping down into the Lehman wing, where Giorgio Morandi’s works are being shown until December 14.
Born in Bologna, Italy, Morandi (1890-1964) lived in the same apartment with his sisters his whole life and focused his force mainly in arranging and painting bottles, pitchers, and cubes.
The arrangements are unlike anything I have seen: social and quiet, objects pressed together yet not awkward, somehow. The object in Morandi’s hands is in service to his arrangement and not to romancing its singular form, yet there is such an affinity for the empty, domestic thing that immediately reminded me of Wallace Stevens’ jar, pulling the “slovenly wilderness” around it:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
As Stevens’ narrates above, the arrival of the wilderness against the form of the jar creates a moment where things are not wild. For a second the world is in his fix. The wilderness–the bewildering mind and its moving compositions, strategies, brushstrokes–arrives in Morandi’s work to be contained for awhile. With our eye in all these containers, we are cued to think about containment, desire, and what is endlessly released.
“Nothing is more abstract than reality,” Morandi said or wrote. The quotation is hung in the exhibit, a passport.
And there are his late watercolors, where the objects are diluted, slipping, as if the wilderness or one’s relation to it is weakening.
If I wasn’t leaving the city for awhile I would be sitting there again.
[Image: Still Life (Natura morta), 1953 by Giorgio Morandi via metmuseum.org]