Art: Good Man with a Bottle

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The biennial exhibition that opens at São Paulo, Brazil this week contained no less than 5,000 contemporary paintings, and of them perhaps one in ten might interest future ages. Standout shows within the show were a collection of pale and wan but faultless abstractions by Britain's Ben Nicholson, the weightless, rainbow fantasies of France's Marc Chagall, and 30 dim-dusty canvases by Italy's Giorgio Morandi. Nicholson and Chagall were considered stiff contenders for the 300,000-cruzeiro ($3,780) grand prize. After the usual frenzied politicking, the 17 international jurymen settled on Italy's Morandi.

It was whispered that the English and French members of the jury had oversold their favorites. Morandi, who specializes in painting bottles, was a disarmingly quiet candidate, and his countrymen are inclined to be as modest about their moderns as they are proud of their old masters. More important: no still-life painter now working has a subtler talent for arrangement, texture and tone. Morandi's still lifes carry forward the great traditions of Cézanne.

A presbyopic, white-thatched, gangling bachelor of 67, Morandi lives with two sisters in a Bologna apartment that smells, sweetly, of the 19th century. The furniture is Victorian, the neighborhood old and still. Morandi spends his bottle-watching days in a sunny little studio overlooking the garden. "I never go out," he says, barely exaggerating. He works slowly, repainting each canvas many times, and producing perhaps a dozen finished pictures a year. These he sells for less than $200 each. They are often resold for ten times his price, but says he, "I would consider it an immoral exploitation if I myself were to accept such a sum."

The closed-in calm of Morandi's life permits intense devotion to his art and to the tiny corner of the visual world he paints. "After all," he says, "one can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things but to look hard at what you do see."

His narrow choice of subject matter puzzles Morandi as much as anyone. "Perhaps," he says with a shrug, "the isolation in which I have found myself has led me to love solitary and silent things." Those qualities imbue his art. The timeless, table-top universe Morandi pictures may be as dry as the empty bottles that populate it, but it powerfully conveys—indeed, it creates—an atmosphere of isolation and profound quietude.