The Shape of a Pocket

Nicholas de Staël or Rothko. These very different painters shared only one thing: an undeviating (and to themselves unforgiving) sense of aim.
    Morandi’s three subjects were flowers, the few bottles and knick-knacks he kept on a shelf, and what he happened to see outside. The term ‘landscape’ suggests something too grand. The trees and walls and patches of grass he chose to paint are no more than what you glance at when you pause on a road to mop your brow in the afternoon heat.
    In 1925, when he was thirty-five, he painted a self-portrait. His face is not yet that of the sexton, but the solitude is already there. He sits alone on a stool, listening perhaps to the murmurs from the piazza which come through the open window (we do not see the window) and he says nothing. Nothing because no words can express the intensity of what he guesses as he listens. This kind of silence in a country where so many people sing is also very Italian. (Throughout his life he left Italy only once for a short visit to Switzerland.)
    In his left hand he holds a brush. (That he was left-handed is, I feel, important but I do not know why.) In his right hand he holds a palette on which the pigments are exactly the same colours as those that surround him as background. This artful reminder that what we are seeing, including the image of the painter himself, first began with mixing colours tells us something about what is to come.
    His art divides itself into three periods, the difference between them being subtle. From the time of the self-portrait until 1940, he paints in order to approach the object being painted – the path under the tree, the flowers in the vase, the tall bottles. We follow him closer and closer. The eventual closeness has nothing to do with detail or photographic precision. It is a question of the presence of the object, almost its body temperature being felt.
    In the second period, between 1940 and 1950, I have the impression that the painter stays still and that the objects (the same ones with an occasional sea shell added) are approaching the canvas. He waits and they arrive. Perhaps he is in hiding, so as to encourage them.
    In the final period, from 1951 until his death in 1964, the objects seem to be on the point of disappearing. Not that they are faint or far away. Rather they are weightless, in flux, on the frontier of existence.
    If we assume this is a progression – that a mastery increased as he grew older – we have to ask: What was he trying to do? The answer, often given – that Morandi is the poet of the ephemeral – doesn’t convince me. The energy of his work is neither nostalgic nor – in any personal sense – intimate. In his life he may have shut himself away. And his odious politics suggest panic. Yet his art is strangely affirmative. Of what?
    The drawings and etchings whisper an answer. Because there is no density and no colour the objects there don’t distract us. And we realise that what interests the artist is the process of the visible first becoming visible, before the thing seen has been given a name or acquired a value. The lonely life’s work of the crotchety sexton is about beginnings!
    One has to imagine the world as a sheet of paper and a creator’s hand drawing, trying out objects which don’t yet exist. Traces are not only what is left when something has gone, they can also be marks for a project, of something to come. The visible begins with light. And as soon as there is light there is shade. The hand draws shadows on the white of the paper. All drawing is a shadow around light.
    The marks weave together, quiver, alternate. And slowly the eye registers and reads the unrepeatable pattern of a particular branch of leaves trembling in front of a particular sunlit wall.
    In other words, the objects he paints can be bought in no flea market. They are not objects. They are places (everything has its place), places where some little thing is coming into being.
    When the old recluse lay in his bed in the morning, the light of the day was there before he opened his eyes, allocating shadows and brightness in the room and in the street outside. Every morning the tide of the visible carried him a little way towards the present before he opened his eyes to look at anything!
    Later in his studio he tried, through the act of painting, to refind and indicate this tide. Morandi, in his solitude, was in love, not with appearances, but with the
project
of appearances. And he was,