Giorgio Morandi and Morwenna Thistlethwaite. The Italian master and the Cornish recluse. Bologna and Downalong, St Ives. Each could not have been further from the other. And yet, in their muted still lifes, Morandi and Morwenna prove kindred spirits – or so our editor believes...
Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, oil on canvas, 1955, private collection
The medieval city of Bologna once bristled with towers. During the 11th and 12th centuries, these great four-walled fingers, clutching at the heavens, were raised by competing aristocratic families, perhaps as demonstrations of wealth, power and importance, perhaps in pre-emptive self- defence. For 300 years they continued to rise until their integrity – or their divine authority – was questioned. Some were pulled down, others collapsed; only a handful remain intact. Many were cannibalised and remain preserved in the living mausoleum that is the city’s shaded gateways and thoroughfares. Today, as if out of penitence for their past hubris, the people of Bologna, like the disarrayed citizens of Babel, run from one arcade to the next avoiding the retribution of the open light. Its many porticoes have transformed the city into a great, labyrinthine sundial.
Giorgio Morandi, Still Life (Metaphysical), oil on canvas, 1918, © Fondazione Magnani-Rocca
The university town is now altogether more grounded, the very colour of the earth itself: terracotta and red brick, from the Basilica of San Petronio to its surviving towers. Bologna, John Berger wrote, is the city of red. A communist municipality following the Second World War, it has always leant on its strong labouring history. In The Red Tenda of Bologna, it also becomes the seat of Berger’s reminiscences, the city of his eldest uncle, a professional tourist. The red awnings that hang in the windows of its secretive arcades, some faded, some new, ‘old and young versions of the same colour’, seem entirely suited to this legendary, lonely family figure, ‘his alternative vision, his shabby and royal intransigence’. Bologna, Berger tells him, is also the city of Giorgio Morandi, and for a moment they seem almost the same man. ‘Neither of them were married: both of them had lived at various times with a spinster sister. Their noses and mouths had the same expression of seeking an intimacy that is not carnal.’
Giorgio Morandi, detail from Still Life, oil on canvas, 1942, © Fondazione Magnani-Rocca
On the Via Fondazza, the Casa Giorgio Morandi still stands, tucked behind peeling orange pillars. Inside, time appears to have stopped completely. The dust has settled, the city’s tomato reds bleached to the shades of mustard, brown paper, white enamel.
70 years ago, critics were remarking how time stood still or evaporated in Morandi’s studio; how the grey-flannelled artist and his collection of Persian oil flasks and eau- de-cologne bottles belonged to a past that had already been; that his art – from his bald still life compositions to his cautious views of from his studio window – was, ultimately, a form of sublime and insular preservation. When the photographer Luigi Ghirri arrived in the late 1980s to photograph the apartment, which had remained sealed from public view since the death of Morandi’s third sister (all four siblings lived together), what he found would have changed only minutely over the course of the last half century. Not even the maid was allowed to touch his bottles and cans and free them of their veils of dirt. ‘If ever there was an artist in an ivory tower it is Morandi’, Berger wrote: ‘[but] for an artist inhabiting an ivory tower he is remarkably humble…he allows the same light to fall on his few precious, eccentric possessions as falls on Italy outside.’
Giorgio Morandi’s studio, © Luigi Ghirri, photograph from 1989-1990
‘No other major modern painter has less to tell us about the tensions of history and the facts of the twentieth century than Giorgio Morandi’, wrote the critic Robert Hughes: ‘none, except Matisse, retired more completely from the cultural role expected of the avant-garde.’ Even his earliest attempts at joining de Chirico’s school of metaphysical painting were effected through huddles of salvaged stuff. His art was as prescriptive as it could be: paintings of pots, flowers, and straightforward landscapes of Grizzana, the village just south of the city where Morandi visited every summer, and where, in 1959, he had a house built – a comically Morandi-esque house, square and simple, like that a child might draw, that, like the Bologna studio, remains preserved inside and out to this day.
Giorgio Morandi’s studio, © Luigi Ghirri, photographs from 1989-1990
For Hughes, through his obsession with arrangement, his fascination with the at-once liquid and solid behaviours of paint, Morandi acquired (without knowing its name) an understanding of the Japanese notion of wabi: a profound awareness of the material quality of the world, which defines beauty by way of absence, limitation and poverty. Morandi’s paintings say nothing of greed, luxury, mortality, transience, all the typical subtexts of still life painting. They take no pride in the deft rendering of optical tricks. They do not even really tell us about the physical reality of the things that populated his studio, for many of the objects Morandi depicted were not at all, in fact, what his paintings purported them to be: flat blocks and boxes, glued and painted so as to resemble three-dimensional bottles, funnels, packets, tins; flowers made of scrunched up paper and card; copper pans daubed with a thick impasto, denying them their patination; glass bowls rinsed with paint, clouding their translucency. Morandi’s paintings are tremendously, transfiguratively opaque. And yet – somehow, in spite of this extreme austerity, with this sober, dusty palette, he arrives at something volatile. Porcelain wares become fatty, molten, raw; cartons of coffee distort and wriggle with faint menace. Far from being still and quiet, there is an electric field generated in the minute striations of hair through oil paint. His pictures live and die in this frisson on the surface of his canvases.
Giorgio Morandi, Cortile di via Fondazza, oil on canvas, 1958, © Museo Morandi
All this is plain to see in the etchings, which shiver with crosshatch precision. Far from being modest, humble, there is an exacting doggedness to Morandi’s art: his arrest of the world around him, his obliteration of all things peripheral, a tyranny of tiny adjustments. What happens if I move this a little here, turn this one against that? What if that lid were open, that one clammed shut? Here bunched, there serried uniformly in line, like soldiers awaiting their drill instructor. The hermetic character of these paintings, in which light is the only element of the outside world let in, lends the whole enterprise the feeling of a scientist repeating variations of the same experiment, in the vain hope that eventually some fundamental answer might drop into his lap – or, perhaps, driven perversely by the knowledge that it never will. And so the preservation of his studio becomes the most beautiful, extraordinary and necessary act of betrayal. We have stumbled across the apparatus of this experiment. The pencil and chalk lines drawn round each object, marking their place on Morandi’s tabletop, are but ghosts of what was here before, yet they seem so much harder and more real than the quivering surface of their realisation in paint. The spell is broken; the sub-atomic charge of his compositions is released. Measurements have been taken and recorded; the superposition of each object, suspended from one canvas to the next, collapses into nothingness again.
Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, oil on canvas, 1951, private collection
It is impossible to trace that mysterious vitality back to its origination – but we try anyway, insisting of course that these pictures must have a story to tell. That the paintings are really about Morandi and his sisters, or that pots and bottles stand in for figures; that a tin, half-turned, suggests an argument. Or that their frugality – objects that have already been rejected, elevated refuse – indicates a spiritual dimension. Or that these clusters of objects, humming in hues of amber, wine, cotton, bone, and opaline, are actually representative of Bologna herself. After all, still life, Morandi said, is its own kind of architecture.
Giorgio Morandi’s easel, © Luigi Ghirri, photographs from 1989-1990
But I suspect, like the physicist, no solve- all answer was forthcoming, and therein lay the value and the meaning of his pursuit. On the crossbar of his easel remains the accumulation of pigment and dust that Morandi once pointed to, in the presence of an interviewer, remarking of these failed paintings: ‘Here lies most of my work.’
Morandi died in 1964, aged 73. At the time, a recently widowed artist, Morwenna Thistlethwaite, was trying to catch a break: producing textiles designs for Liberties, supplying pictures to Royal Academy summer shows, in search of representation. She had been an exceptional student before the war, but a complicated domestic situation (her much older husband was still married when the two ran off together) had a pronounced effect on her career. Her first solo exhibition in London met with a lukewarm response, and within four years she was looking to relocate, settling in 1976 on a house on Victoria Place in St Ives, opposite an old family home, where she spent the last twenty years of her working life.
Morwenna Thistlethwaite, The Table, oil on board
Morwenna’s only obituary, in The St Ives Times and Echo (December 29th 2000), named Morandi as ‘her favourite artist.’ Whether she ever expressed this preference, the work was certainly sympathetic. Like Morandi, she must have looked back to Cezanne and Braque too, for her local Cornish landscapes, interior scenes and still life compositions reveal more continental influence than they do any of the bright colour and abstraction-from-landscape of her fellow St Ives painters.
Morwenna Thistlethwaite, Still Life - Jug with House Plant, watercolour
Downalong, St Ives’ old town, could hardly differ more from Bologna. Steps of cottages in granite and mortar; whitewashed wood; brine-bleached linens drying on lines in cloistered squares, tucked off the Wharf, with sight of the harbour just a few steps away. The whole area, perched on a thin strip of land between ‘the Island’ and the mainland, reflects light, with an infinite expanse of blue beyond it. Morwenna’s studio may once have served as a salting cellar. But there is nary a fishing net nor a moored boat to be seen in her pictures. The odd sail may bob on the horizon, caught in a window frame beyond a pink-lit sitting room; but like Morandi, she seemed largely unconcerned with the conventions of her peers.
Morwenna Thistlethwaite, Still Life, Pink Rose, gouache & watercolour
Morwenna, like Morandi, mutes the colours of her paintings. She, too, had her favourite subjects: a recurring jug, a glass bowl, several books and shells. Each she painted in a rich and obscure palette of sumptuous nuances that brought sweet tangerines, pinks, and dulcet blues alongside dark browns, dreamy lilacs, infinite shades of grey. But they are all subdued by a cast of milky pearlescence like that of the pilchards caught in their thousands in the bay beyond, shipped by the barrel to the Mediterranean.
On board more often than canvas, perhaps for want of money, or with delicate gouaches she would layer paints that flecked and scratched to reveal skins of colour beneath one another. This milkish film gave them an appearance of translucency – as if they could catch the light, these paintings, like cobwebs. By contrast, the later Morandi painted, the less shadow his objects seemed to cast, as if subject and environment were slowly becoming one over time. Morandi never let the light through. He cut light and space, spreading it with a palette knife like Vollon’s famously voluptuous mound of butter. But Morwenna is always looking through, watching light enter, leave, bend round and escape.
Morwenna Thistlethwaite, Still Life, Orange and Green, gouache
It was a way of seeing that produces a greater sense of life – of human life, at least – in Morwenna’s pictures than Morandi ever allowed into his hermetic (hermitic) paintings. Quite unlike Morandi, forever closing in on his compositions, eventually eliminating even the vectors of his tabletop, Morwenna always leaves us an opening: a window, a path, an edge; some sense of a world, and of a narrative, beyond. She draws us into her conspiracy like Morandi, but we conspire with, not in spite of, the absences in her pictures. ‘What’s going on here?’ she would say to visitors at her studio – half wondering, half testing, half an eye on their response. What was it they were trying to do, these two secluded artists? ‘Monastic’ is the word that returns, time and again, to writers confronting Morandi’s paintings, and there is something reclusive, intimate, sombre too in Morwenna’s work. Each one might describe as ‘quiet’ painters. But somehow that misses something of the intensity, the marvellous courage and focus each artist had in narrowing their vision and their scope, in reducing their pictures down to that delicate vibration in the paint surface that scatters the light across them and gives them that feeling of something mysteriously cautious. It was as if each were testing the objects and the settings before them, challenging them, daring them to be ordinary, to give up their secrets.
Morwenna Thistlethwaite, Still Life, watercolour with gum arabic
In last years of Morandi’s life, an apartment block was raised in the vicinity of the Via Fondazza, altering the quality and path of the light that filtered through to his studio. Like the medieval neighbour of one of Bologna’s infamous towers, he no doubt raged and cursed at this skyward intrusion before developing an new stratagem that enabled him to place his objects in a similar cast of light to that he had been working with all his life. ‘You can travel the world and see nothing’, he once quipped. Or you can exhaust a lifetime looking in the same place until the conventional seems full of enormity, the predictable hesitant, strange, disarming, intransigent.
