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Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi's Still Lifes and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mod.1995.0050

1080-6601

Emily Braun,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi’s Still Lifes and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese Emily Braun (bio) Over the last two decades, numerous studies have contributed to a more thorough understanding of the cultural policies of the Italian Fascist regime and their effects on artists and intellectuals. 1 More recently, it has been shown that the pluralistic culture of Fascism was no mere by-product of the regime’s ideologies, but fundamental to the rise of the new mass politics, of image as substance. 2 At the same time, in a different area of inquiry, the history of twentieth-century art has been undergoing revision, eroding the heroic view of modernism as an inevitable progress toward abstraction and an art devoid of ideological content. 3 Three theoretical approaches have been central to this critique of formalist modernism: a detailed accounting of the political activism of the historical avant-garde; closer scrutiny of the operations of gender; and deeper investigation of the invigorating interaction of high art with popular forms and media. 4 The analysis of Fascist culture, however, is also key to the reevaluation of twentieth-century art history, and not only because it forces us to look outside the dominant French-American axis, which still constitutes the preferred locus of reading. For unlike Nazi Germany, which it preceded in power by a decade, Fascist Italy was not totalitarian in its cultural controls and it supported styles as diverse as pure geometric abstraction, expressionism, and academic neoclassicism. Because of this beguiling margin of creative freedom, the large majority of artists and intellectuals coexisted with, if not openly supported, the regime, at least until the anti-Semitic laws of 1938. The history of artistic activity under Italian [End Page 89] Fascism—one of contradiction, compromise, and multiple investments of meaning—dismantles the paradigm of teleological modernism and a heroic avant-garde once and for all. Nowhere is the dissembling character of Fascist culture better exemplified than in the art and career of Giorgio Morandi. The still lifes of Morandi, for which he is famous, negate the equation between formalist abstraction and political indifference while laying bare the mythmaking invested within even the most unassuming of genres—the still life. Morandi’s work has been interpreted as exemplary of twentieth-century modernism, of the primacy of form and the extraneous role of content. After Giorgio de Chirico, he is the best known and most widely exhibited of twentieth-century Italian artists, precisely because he falls into the French camp of pure painting, the love of the sensuous stroke and vivid materiality of the pigment. His paintings and etchings subtly reveal how understatement and simplicity are the means to visual complexity, proving the old adage that less is more. Morandi is especially valued among the pantheon of modern Italian artists because he is one of the few to have escaped the taint of Fascism: protected by his reclusive life in the provinces, so it goes, his art paradoxically escaped the provincialism that was the fate of the culture of the ventennio (the twenty-year period of the party’s rule). The art speaks for itself: it must be apolitical, if not implicitly anti-Fascist, because it is resolutely about nothing save the beauty of the brush. The critical discourse surrounding Morandi focuses overwhelmingly on his linguaggio—his formal language. 5 Departing from the lessons of Corot and Cézanne, it is argued, Morandi distilled his subject and palette into an exquisitely vibrating field of strokes, with a harmonious balance of tone and hue (fig. 1). From the works of the late teens, when he was associated with the Roman journal Valori plastici (1918–22), until his death in 1964, he was intent upon, in the words of Museum of [End Page 90] Modern Art curator James Thrall Soby, “a devout study of slight yet critical shifts in the weight of counterbalancing forms.” 6 Critics have ensured this formalist teleology by downplaying, while Morandi himself destroyed, canvases that did not fit into his established phases of stylistic development. 7 To be sure, the work is marked by periods of retrenchment and innovation, alternating between images palpably solid and those dissolving into liquified surfaces. Occasionally, a...