142 MARCH 2016 EXHIBITION REVIEWS
making at the University of Bologna, some of which were included
in each exhibition. Morandi’s shifts in style over the 1920s and ’30s
gives the CIMA presentation a drama that was altogether lacking
at Zwirner. A few very early works on view at CIMA set the stage.
Flowers(1917) andCactus(1918) show Morandi modeling each
curved plane separately, resulting in a faux-naïf style that must have
had a greatinluence on the young Lucian Freud.
A quartet of still lifes in a hallway, made between 1923 and 1929,
manifest a stolid, academic style, jarring in its musty 19th-century
propriety. he paint is laid on with an eye to Chardin. Edges are con-
sistent and the relatively crisp objects seem more like possessions than
things in themselves. he last two of the group, painted one year apart,
depict the same set of objects. In the later work, the paint is smoother,
the brushwork is less fussy and the contrast in the background is lower
even as the objects in the foreground are lighter.
Meanwhile, all is thick browns and grays in two works hung
above aireplace, from 1929 and 1931. Objects merge into each other
and into the shadows. Table edges jog up from one side to the other
and disappear. In another 1931 still life, the table heaves. Two seashells
become blobs, one light gray, the other ocher.he paint is thick as icing
here, smothering any shadows that might appear.
In other paintings from the 1930s, Morandi’s aptitude for
experimentation within theconines of his genre is on full display.
he reddish-orange objects in a pair of paintings from 1938 seem
positively blaring, while in another piece, from 1941, we look up at
three objects whose scale makes them seem heroic, in a way all too
uncomfortably resonant with the ideals of that moment.
—Julian KreimerJOE BRAINARD
TibordeNagy
Beside the entrance to this exhibition of collages, oil paintings
and watercolors by artist and writer Joe Brainard hung two of
his small loral paintings:Untitled #247 (Pansies), 1979, andStill
Life(1970). Flowers, pansies in particular, are a recurring motif
in his work. His loral images served as aitting introduction to
the show, as they embody themes Brainard explored throughout
his practice, such as intimacy (in terms of scale and emotion)
and the value of the everyday.
Raised in Tulsa, Okla., Brainard moved to New York in the early
1960s and became a member of the second generation of New York
School poets and artists. His peers in this group included, among
others, Ron Padgett (his childhood friend), Ted Berrigan, Anne Wald-
man and Jane Freilicher. (A concurrent presentation of Freilicher’s
large, sunny still lifes and landscapes was installed in a room next to
the Brainard exhibition.) By the mid-1980s, Brainard demonstrated
his “taste for absorption,” as one writer put it in 2012, by swapping
art-making and exhibiting for “chain smoking and reading Victorian
novels.” He died in 1994 of AIDS-related pneumonia.
Brainard is well known for his miniature collages, 40 of which
were on view here, in threeshellike wall-mounted vitrines. Begun
in the mid-’70s, these pieces are like tiny preserved moments,
capturing subjects like food and ashtrays andishbowls. By nature
of their diminutive size (roughly 2 inches square), one is forced toered an “artist’s artist,” and his unassuming canvases have developed
something of a cult following.
he muted grays and browns of these modestly scaled works
can attract attentive viewers with the focused brilliance of a
diamond—small, simple and pure. he paintings teach a straight-
forward but profound lesson: as in Roman cuisine, where the
simplicity of means is a way to highlight the extraordinary quality
of well-sourced ingredients, Morandi’s poetic minimalism shows
that the act of looking at even quotidian objects and spaces can be
an extraordinarily generous experience.
Morandi’s approach was repetitive, but each of his still lifes
is remarkable in its particulars. Yet the paintings recently shown
at Zwirner, made mostly in the 1940s and ’50s (Morandi died in
1964), seemed almost too assured in their humble stature. he
silvery gray and pale yellow objects stand in stagelike settings, proud
and trembling like Watteau’s actors. Morandi had already found his
style during the two decades of his career and all the great qualities
are simply there: the quivering negative space between the bottles;
the just-so brushwork, loose without being arrogant; and the gently
heartbreaking disproportion of background to objects, the space a
bit too vast, making us empathize with the small, huddled groups.
Despite the myth of Morandi as a hermit, he was both well
traveled and well connected in Italy. His formidable reputation
as a modernist helped establish him as a leading representative of
Italian painting during the Fascist era, and he seems to have played
along with the nationalistic spin some gave to his work. If his brief
1941 incarceration for anti-Fascist ties has burnished his political
reputation in retrospect, it’s worth remembering that the artist’s
earthy, domestically tuned paintings chimed with the aesthetic line
pushed by the Fascists. After all, Giuseppe Bottai, an early Fascist
minister and later Mussolini’s Minister of Education, appointed
Morandi professor of etching at the University of Bologna in 1930
and provided him with some political protection through the war.
In the last 15 years of his life, Morandi averaged just under a
painting a week. But there were times when his average was less
than one a month in his early career, the period focused on in a
show at the Center for Italian Modern Art (on view through June
25, 2016). his was partly due to the extraordinary etchings he wasGiorgio Morandi:
Roses,1917,oilon
canvas, 22⅞ by 19⅝
inches;attheCenter
for Modern Italian
Art.