Morandi at the Met

Morandi really is about the making of the modernist surface. This Modern suface is really as old as painting itself.






The color and light of Morandi is related to the color of fresco, say Piero della Francesca.

We often think fresco, especially Piero is modern because of this hard surface.

Massacio seems a bit older because of the use of brown maybe but the figures are set solidly like Morandi, see the figures standing behind, like in Morandi, but all apart of the frontal surface.



This is what is thrilling, how the bottles stand in for the abstract painting surface and are still there as bottles.

This is an existential exercise philosophers in Bologna must have loved .

By the end of the show I thought, how easy then the steps to our contemporary paintings of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden.



It makes me wonder though, as we stand on the other side of this, whether we need to see the bottles again or not.

The mind twisting struggle to equate abstract surface and subject (bottles) gives such satisfaction that we feel Morandi really lived and saw in a powerful way.

The fact that he spent most of his life in that little studio makes it all the more poignant that what he found there was so satisfying and made his reality still beyond our own.

There is a great painting that has three boxes with three bottles in front of them. This painting is similar.



I thought it like the picture plane was blown up with air and was made a theater or exaggeration of the plane, as Guston does.
It made the subject profound in its clumsiness, to describe such awesome being in such seeming simplicity.

When the positive negative aspects are shown so equally one knows the picture plane is being forwarded.