This is a still life you might see in any gallery or hanging in a well-appointed kitchen today – even on the cover of a cookery book.
If you have been to Parma (where the ham comes from) you may have seen it hanging in the Magnani Rocca Foundation. I saw it at The Estorick Collection in Canonbury Square. Luigi Magnani (1906 – 1984) was a patron and friend of Giorgio Morandi (1890 – 1964) and most of the oils, water colours and etchings at the Estorick are on loan from the Magnani Rocca Foundation.
Morandi was successful in his lifetime and led a comfortable life living with his sisters in Bologna through Italy’s turbulent 20th century. While he was not an avowed fascist he was no communist and seemed to have stayed off the radar of political persecution. Certainly his chosen subjects were beyond reproach. He painted still lives of pots, jars and bottles. His style is said to be influenced by Cézanne and this is evident in his landscapes.
”The broad expanse of wall that occupies the left-hand side of this scene, viewed from Morandi’s studio, serves to animate the scene on the right. However, the latter section of the work reveals the extent to which Morandi considered landscapes and still lifes to be interchangeable. Like the trees, the buildings are treated as independent volumes: an approach that recalls Cézanne‘s spatial and formal research.” (Exhibition note at The Estorick Collection)
It’s the picture I’d most like to take home. This is a game I like to play at exhibitions. To put Italian art in the 20th century in perspective there is a room with examples of Futurism where I saw this well travelled picture. I often wonder about the air miles pictures clock up as they fly between continents and galleries. Here is a clue.
“This iconic, arresting image illustrates a passage from the 1910 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’: ‘The human face is yellow, red, green, blue violet. The pallor of a woman gazing in a jeweller’s window is more intensely iridescent than the prismatic lines of the jewels that fascinate her like a lark.’ … An extremely refined portraitist, Boccioni here created an image intended to shock audiences with its harsh, aggressive quality and unsentimental objective treatment of its subject.” (Exhibition note at The Estorick Collection)
I’m glad Morandi eschewed Futurism after a little dabble around 1914. Morandi’s pictures are small and peaceful, painted in muted colours. They are really not exceptional and if you like the style I’m sure there are artists today painting this sort of thing.
However, seeing them collected together is pleasing and the Estorick is the right scale for these quite small canvases. Afterwards we went to a good Spanish restaurant for tapas. The food was excellent but it was freezing – do restaurants turn off the heating these days?
