Morandi at the Met

Published: 2009 - June/August, Cultural and Artistic Paths

When the Grand Prix for painting at the Venice Biennale of 1964 was awarded to Robert Rauschemberg, many wrote that the award went to the heavy tendency of the American Pop Art, at the same time as the Italian artist died more silent.
Giorgio Morandi (Bologna 1890-1964) has vanished in June of that year, precisely during the days of the paint of the Biennale. He painted all his life an endless series of still lives with bottles. The large retrospective exhibition that was recently dedicated the Metropolitan Museum in New York was therefore to provide a safe failure. Why, it was said, it is difficult for the American public understands and accepts an artist so distinctive and intimate. E ‘instead the opposite happened and the subtle and delicate poetry of her dusty bottles was well understood in New York. The press, in fact, noted the show with praise highly tones. The truth is that the work of Morandi raises an issue understandable to every latitude, that of reflection on the language of art. Its slowness and its silence then become recognizable elements of timeless art and cultural connotations geographical concerns and involve everyone. His vases and bottles express his imaginative vision that brings to mind a poem by Roland Barthes in which he says that the objects of our daily “do not notice when we are dead.” It happens to the bottles of Morandi expressing it in fact, a painful metaphor for life.