MORANDI, WITH AND WITHOUT WORDS

Abstract

1 0 0 Y M O R A N D I , W I T H A N D W I T H O U T W O R D S B O N N I E C O S T E L L O ‘‘I am afraid of words, that is why I paint.’’ – Giorgio Morandi, in an interview ‘‘The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain the most majestic silence.’’ – Plato An unusual show at the Yale Art Gallery in early 2009, titled Picasso and the Allure of Language, left little doubt that the giant of modern art thrived in the impure mixture of word and image – exploring, exploding, and reinventing the genealogy of the sister arts. The muscular Picasso seems unfazed by those serpents of Gotthold Lessing’s Laokoon that would weaken the arts by entwining them. Picasso’s collaged newspaper clippings (‘‘le jou/la battaiille s’est engagé’’ with pasted guitar, score, and wallpaper) form just a corner of the story, which includes consorting with poets, exchanging visiting cards with Gertrude Stein, illustrating Balzac, reimagining Ovid, portraying Musketeers, and slumming 1 0 1 R with surrealists. For Picasso, Irving Babbit’s ‘‘confusion of the arts’’ was not a problem but an aesthetic strategy. Clearly, for him ‘‘the literary’’ was more seed than infectious germ. He even dropped painting altogether for a year, reenergizing himself by writing and illustrating his own poetry. Clement Greenberg, that latter-day Lessing, applauded cubism’s road to banishing ‘‘literary’’ allusion and illusion, making the arts ‘‘safe,’’ ‘‘each within its legitimate boundaries.’’ But for Picasso that road was anything but straight, and the word (as text, as sign, as story, as discourse) remained an apparently inexhaustible partner, a crucial element in his ‘‘laboratory ’’ of creative contamination. Giorgio Morandi, it would seem, was closer to anticipating Greenbergian purities, especially in his late career, as he simpli fied his images and treated them more as prompts than phenomena . Though overall his work is more naturalistic than much of Picasso’s, he has been understood almost entirely as a formalist, pursuing the tensions and ambiguities within the picture plane, emphasizing the plastic and abstract qualities of the work of art to the elimination of all pictorial, symbolic, narrative, or psychological interests, and certainly without recourse to semiotic play. It would be hard to imagine an artistic temperament that differed more from Picasso’s. Since the Morandi exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York closed just as the Picasso exhibit at Yale opened, the di√erences were on show for American visitors to discover. (Similarly, the Schoomers Gallery treated visitors to an exquisite selection of Morandi’s work in 2004, and recently a profile of Picasso’s ‘‘final decade’’ was on display at the nearby Gargossian Gallery.) The protean, virile, heterogeneous, loud forms of the stocky, audacious Spaniard (Gertrude Stein likened him to Napoleon) easily overshadow the serial, quietly modulating views and shifting still life arrangements of the humble and lanky bachelor from Bologna, whose work his student Janet Abramowitz has praised for its ‘‘art of silence.’’ What kind of verbal portrait would Gertrude Stein have made for Morandi, who found nothing more abstract than the visible world? Something like this: ‘‘He was one who was not saying he was saying; he was uncertainly one who was certainly unseeing some few uncertain things seen again unsaid.’’ But it is hard to imagine Morandi’s laconic figure among the loquacious guests in her salon. 1 0 2 C O S T E L L O Y One of the pleasures of Morandi’s work, for those who are patient enough to search out the subtleties of this understated art, is its ability to provide a world of emotional and intellectual variety that is apparently free of contingent reality or any psychological or political attachment. And yet, as those anti-Greenbergians like Tom Wolfe (The Painted Word) and Rosalind Krauss (The Optical Unconscious) have reminded us, the word is not so easily extricated from the image, and ‘‘vision alone’’ is a merely theoretical (hence, ironically, discursive) – and perhaps an undesirable – condition of art. Words...