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The show comprised eight small pictures, two
drawings and six paintings, each containing a combination of three
objects, or shapes: a bottle, a cylinder, and a cube, or cubes. According to the catalogue, the artist, Morandi, lived for several decades
with his mother in a small house in Bologna, painting and drawing the
objects, or shapes, over and over in a small room, his "studio." The
Fascists are said to have initially admired his work for its
neo-classicism -- admired it perhaps in spite of the fact that, when he
had been conscripted into World War One, Morandi had suffered a
nervous breakdown and spent several years in an asylum. Did his mother
rent out the studio, or use it for some other purpose, during his
absence?
 On December 4th, 2004, a mild day in early winter, a park
disappeared. One minute, I was sitting on a bench. To my right, across
a busy highway, I could see a few boats on the gun-metal river. It was
a wretched park, full of braying winos, catatonic homeless, zoned-out
punks and Goths, broken glass, dog droppings, graffiti, and litter
-- lots of litter, natural and man-made. Even the few
leaves still clinging to the branches of the huge plane trees were
brown and dead looking. For some reason, I felt a guilty complicity in
the state of this park, even though I had done nothing other than to
walk in and sit down on one of the few intact benches.
Morandi's many shows, associations, and official appointments in the
1920s and '30's belied his later claim to have been "considered little
more than a provincial professor of etching who sought no
recognition." It was only during World War Two that he hid away in his
house, complaining that the intense Allied bombing deprived him of
"the quiet. . . indispensable for my work." His pictures were exhibited
in official venues as late as 1943, when the police raided the house,
looking for subversive letters from friends who had by now joined the
Underground. Having prudently burned these letters, after a week in
jail Morandi was released at the behest of people in high places. In
1948, his friend and colleague Longanesi wrote: "The absence of
freedom didn't seem to be of great importance to us, but slowly as the
years went by, our consciences began to bother us. . . and we truly felt
that our imagination had dried up because our impulses to rebel had
disappeared." Not, apparently, Morandi's imagination. His huge
output both before and after the war was by no means restricted to the
three shapes, or objects, but also included landscapes, interiors, at
least one portrait, and, reportedly, some anguished Expressionist
works now in private collections. It was only after the War that the
artist began to cultivate the myth of the recluse, vigorously opposing
a biography by a former student that offered a more realistic account.
Then, the park disappeared, or, to be more accurate, I found
myself walking through a much larger, much nicer one about eight
blocks from the first. This second park had several clearly defined
sections. Two or three sanded areas with plane trees, a kiosk, and
three big rusted steel sculptures could have comprised entire small
parks in Europe -- Paris, especially. Then, there was the playground,
full of brightly painted equipment and the cheerful sounds of
children, many of them playing away in a rectangular sandbox. Perhaps
because the second park was farther from the windy river, there were
still brightly colored leaves, some even green, on the trees (oak,
maple, plane, and others that I didn't recognize -- beech, perhaps).
"A tangled web of paradoxes and silences."By about
1929, Morandi's associations with liberal, satirical elements in the
art world invited ostracism from right wing Fascists, who derided his
work as the antithesis of manly social realism. (Post-war Communists
would level the same criticism.) Imagine all those boots marching past
the small house on the cobblestoned (I imagine) Via Fondazza, with
the presumably still nervous man inside, painting away. What did he
think? Was there ever a knock at the door? The Duce,
himself, perhaps, poking his big face in for a brief look and a gruff
compliment. During the bombing of Bologna, Morandi's paintings of sea
shells took on writhing, organic qualities that have invited
comparison with prone bodies being strafed. As Giorgio Bassani,
director of the film The Garden of the
Finzi-Continis, said in a 1989 interview, "Morandi's still
lifes held a lesson for some young people of my generation, for in a
period of lies and rhetoric, he was the least rhetorical of anyone;
his work was a lesson for us in artistic integrity." Morandi himself
said that an artist need not try to see many things, but that he must
see what he does see, well.
What happened? One moment, I was sitting on the bench in the
first park; the next, I was walking through the second one. Who (if
not I) can say what happened? Since the disappearance took place a few
hours after I had visited the show, let's agree, then, that I must
have been thinking about the painter in his little room, painting his
three objects, or shapes, while jackboots echoed in the street thirty
feet away. Would it be fanciful to add that the second park -- the
leaves, the children's cries, the sandbox -- were, at this point in time,
my own little room?
Note: All facts and quotations come from either the 2004 Morandi show
catalogue at Lucas Schoormans gallery, New York, N.Y. (quoted in
several reviews), or Jane P. Abramowicz, Georgio Morandi and
The Art of Silence (Yale, New Haven and London, 2001).
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