Giorgio Morandi at Paul Thiebaud

The Morandi exhibition at the Paul Thiebaud Gallery was exquisitely chosen and installed: seven paintings and two pencil drawings mounted in the serenely refurbished top floor of an old townhouse in the East 70s. The drawing-room scale of the work resonated in the careful spacing of each piece on the walls of the front and back galleries. The light through the windows (smallish by contemporary gallery standards) was as intimate as the paintings, which seemed to have been painted in a room of similar size. Morandi's still lifes are poised on a threshold between enclosure and exposure--between dropping us into illusionist space and making us aware of the entire surface of each painting as a site for an unusually readable accumulation of material gestures. No wonder his work is so cherished by painters. Not only could you learn to paint just by looking at his canvases (or draw by looking at his drawings), but you can also come to feel the pleasure of the activity and what it produces.

All the paintings were classic still lifes dating from 1941 through the 1950s. One of the drawings is dated 1962, two years before his death. The other, foggily delineated in a similar style but with a softer line, has no date. The dates are significant because they position the work well into the artist's great period, after he had emerged from his absorption in Cezanne, experimented with the crisper focus of his scuola metafisica period, and tried out an assortment of mediums and mark-making techniques, with inconsistent results. By the 1930s, Morandi, who lived all his life in Bologna with his mother and three sisters, had settled on a slow brush mark that trembled and feathered in a poignant comedy of deep feeling and perceptual penetration. A collector of eccentric bottles, vases, boxes and assorted other containers (some look like tops) in porcelain, glass and tin, the artist would patiently marshal his little soldiers into tabletop formations that provided the compositional basis of his art for over 40 years. Under the playful pressure of his arranging and rearranging, adjustment of viewing angles, the out-of-the-frame light source that most often recalls a late-afternoon dolor, and, above all, his animating touch, his forms often verge on wiggling out of their original identities, assuming the wildly different roles of carnivale actors on a stage or city buildings seen from the air. Morandi also painted floral still lifes in which the flowers seem to become the same ceramic as their vases, and landscapes of the old buildings and vegetation around his home that seem immersed in light as a form-dissolving mist. But it is in the mysterious role and scale shifts of his tableaux's actors that Morandi's art finds its fullest expression.

The paintings here provided an ample range of the artist's invention, wit and sensitivity to texture and light. In one remarkable painting, he lines up the little containers in a row receding from the viewer, so that a shallow irregular accumulation is produced rather than the usual horizontal spread of forms. The irregular forms show their color and singularity by peeking out to one side and just above each other, as though they were impatiently waiting for the line to move forward. In the back gallery, another painting presented a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of vessels: a slender, long-necked bottle on the left and a squat, spiral-ridged porcelain vase next to it on the right. The gleaming highlight on the porcelain would be a dull matte in most other paintings (like the dull reds that signal sunlit roof tile in a Corot landscape), but here it is perfectly calibrated to describe the rubbed polish of an old porcelain glaze in the dusty indirect light of a Bolognese afternoon. (He never moved his collection of bottles, boxes and vases unless to paint them, and never dusted them.)

The exhibition appeared at a moment and in a place ripe with art that resonates with Morandi's. His still lifes have a special appeal for post-Minimalist abstract painters because of their wobbly, gridded modularity and mixed-down colors, which nonetheless possess the special luminosity descriptive of believable atmospheric light. It is possible to read the legacy of Morandi in both the survey of Sean Scully's paintings recently at the Metropolitan Museum and the Brice Marden retrospective just over at the Museum of Modern Art. Morandi is there, at a much grander scale, in the trembling outlines of these artists' forms and the jostling, animate grids and webs they create, and he is there in their thoughtfully equivocal color, which always seems to be just catching up to shifting light conditions. Morandi is more than a bridge between the still-life legacies of Chardin, Cezanne and Manet and the breadth of the genre's current practice. (The gallery owner's father, Wayne Thiebaud, has written in praise of Morandi's clear and abundant influence.) He has affected sculpture, landscape painting, abstract painting, and notions of scale and formal dynamics that might be applied to poetics, music and architecture, if they haven't been already. As with Paul Klee, the humor and modesty of Morandi's work belie an almost supernatural intensity channeled through that most humble of feelings: tenderness.

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