Eliana Willis

Between the rise of artificial intelligence and the proliferation of “fake news,” living in the 21st-century can sometimes feel a bit surreal. That is why there is perhaps no better time to revisit the 20th century’s Surrealism movement, never mind that 2024 marks 100 years since the publication of André Breton’s pivotal Manifesto of Surrealism in which the French writer and poet called for a new kind of art that is guided by the unconscious and “free from any control by reason.”
To celebrate the centenary of what became a huge cultural movement that still influences artists today, the Centre Pompidou in Paris has mounted a sprawling multidisciplinary exhibition that not only showcases the French roots of Surrealism, but its global reach. Curated by Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, the show features over 500 artworks and objects, ranging from paintings, drawings to sculptures, and poems to  manuscripts.
René Magritte, Les valeurs personnelles, (1952). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase through a gift of Phyllis C. Wattis © San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Photograph Katherine Du Tiel © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
Inspired by the labyrinthine structure of Surrealist exhibitions in the past, visitors follow the exhibition through a spiral layout. On special loan from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the original manuscript of Breton’s Manifeste du surréalisme is the starting point to the exhibition, with a surrounding audiovisual installation that explores the origins and significance of the manifesto, setting the dreamlike tone for the rest of the show.
Breton was influenced by the works of Sigmund Freud, particularly the ideas surrounding the unconscious mind, dreams, and free association. He sought to create a new art movement that explored these ideas, stating, “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”
Installation view of “Surrealism” at Centre Pompidou. © CG Pompidou, J. Rodriguez-Garcia.
The exhibition layout is divided into 13 thematic sections, each exploring different facets of Surrealism. These range from the literary influences that shaped the movement, such as the works of Lautréamont and Lewis Carroll, to the mythical and fantastical elements that became central to Surrealist imagery—dreams, the philosopher’s stone, and forests, amongst many more. Reality and fantasy have been blurred within these exhibition walls, creating a space where the ordinary merges into the extraordinary.
In true Surrealist fashion, the exhibition features a wide range of media, including paintings, drawings, films, photographs, and literary documents. Many iconic works are on display, loaned from international collections. These include Salvador Dalí’s The Great Masturbator from Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía, René Magritte’s Personal Values from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Max Ernst’s The Large Forest from the Kunstmuseum in Basel, and Joan Miró’s Dog Barking at the Moon from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The works provide a comprehensive overview of the movement’s diversity, in styles and themes.
Salvador Dali, Visage du grand masturbateur, (1929). Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Legado Salvador Dalí, 1990 © Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali / Adagp, Paris 2024.
In addition to showcasing well-known male artists, the exhibition spotlights the long-overlooked contributions of women to Surrealism, mirroring a wider trend both in museums and the art market. To wit: Just this spring, Leonora Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) set an auction record for the Surrealist painter when it sold for $ 28.5 million at Sotheby’s, obliterating the artist’s previous record of $3.3 million set just two years ago.
At the Pompidou, Carrington’s Green Tea (1942), a landscape painting featuring strange, mythological creatures and floating figures set against a verdant green pasture, among other works, is featured alongside works by contemporaries Remedios Varo, Dora Maar, Ithell Colquhoun, and Dorothea Tanning, illustrating the critical role women played in shaping the movement.
Remedios Varo, Papilla estelar (1958). Colección FEMSA © FEMSA Collection © Adagp, Paris, 2024.
According to curator Marie Sarré, the show is meant to show “Surrealism in all of its diversity.” That also includes highlighting the global scope of the movement. When the Centre Pompidou last held a major exhibition on Surrealism, in 2002, it was positioned as an essentially European movement. The current show charts its expansion beyond Europe to the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and documents how artists from around the world engage with Surrealist ideas. Works by Tatsuo Ikeda from Japan, Helen Lundeberg from the United States, Rufino Tamayo from Mexico, and Wilhelm Freddie from Denmark demonstrate how Surrealism’s core principles—challenging rationality, embracing the unconscious, and exploring alternative realities—resonated with artists from vastly different cultural backgrounds.
Installation shot of “Surrealism” at Centre Pompidou. © CG Pompidou, J. Rodriguez-Garcia.
The exhibition also examines the political dimensions of Surrealism. From its early days, the movement was deeply engaged with the political struggles of its time, opposing colonialism and totalitarianism. This activist spirit is reflected in many of the works on display, underscoring the Surrealists’ commitment to both artistic and social revolution.
The exhibition will also travel internationally after its run in Paris to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Each venue will offer its own interpretation of the movement, tailored to local cultural and historical contexts.
“Surrealism” is on view until January 13, 2025, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. More

The paintings would sometimes still be wet when Berthe Weill rushed to show them at her little Parisian gallery. Why wait, she thought, hanging the fresh artworks from a clothesline with pins. Weill was famously fast and furious during the four decades she ran the Galerie B. Weill, showing only emerging modernist artists (often when they were complete nobodies). It’s no small irony, then, that it’s taken a full decade to retrace Weill’s swift steps and arrange a show about her and the iconic (and long-since dried) canvases that graced her walls.
Jules Pascin, Portrait of Madame Pascin (Hermine David) (1915–1916). Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“There’s never been an exhibition on Berthe,” says Lynn Gumpert, director of New York University’s Grey Art Museum, about the exhibition that hopes to set the record straight on Weill’s crucial role in early 20th-century modernism. The show’s title, “Make Way for Berthe Weill” is a play on the phrase she printed on her business cards—“Place aux Jeunes,” which means ‘make way for the young.’ After showing in New York it will travel to its institutional partners, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Weill’s Parisian hometown.
Marc Chagall, Bella à Mourillon (Bella in Mourillon) (1926). Private collection.
The exhibition reassembles some of the many artworks that passed through her gallery—110 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by artists such as Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Diego Rivera, Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol, Fernand Léger, Raoul Dufy, Émilie Charmy, Suzanne Valadon, and others. It also includes materials such as her correspondence, exhibition catalogues, photographs, and journals.
Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, The Wretched (1901). Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington.
One notable work in the exhibition is The Wretched (1901), a bronze sculpture by Harlem Renaissance artist Meta Vaux Warrick that Weill exhibited at her gallery’s 1901 inaugural show. A rare example of Warrick’s early work (much of which was destroyed), it’s also a testament to Weill’s efforts to platform women—of the 149 solo shows at Galerie B. Weill, 29 were dedicated to women.
Weill’s track record of giving early opportunities to the artists that now define modernist art history is unparalleled. In 1902 she showed works by Picasso and Matisse, selling Picasso’s first works in Paris and making Matisse’s first sale through a dealer. She showed Francis Picabia in 1904, around the time that she exhibited all the Fauves (before they were even nicknamed Fauves, in 1905). Weill held a debut exhibition for Suzanne Valadon in 1913, the only solo exhibition for Diego Rivera during the decade he lived in Paris, as well as the only lifetime solo show for Amedeo Modigliani.
Louis Cattiaux, La Vierge attentive (The Attentive Virgin), also known as La Vierge à l’étoile (Virgin with star) (1939). Collection Guieu, Jouques, France
In hindsight, the quality of Weill’s taste is obvious. But when she was taking endless risks on artists no one had ever heard of, nothing was clear. At the end of Weill’s autobiography, originally published in 1933 and released in English translation in 2022, she wrote that her book was a response to those who said, “‘Ah, Mademoiselle Weill, you must be rich, seeing all the things that have passed through your hands.’ Those are the same people who never dared take a chance on works by unknown artists; who pitied me for my perseverance; who sniggered at the sight of works they didn’t understand then and still don’t understand today.” (In addition to having nerve and an impeccable eye, Weill notoriously didn’t mince words.)
Kees van Dongen, La Femme au canapé (Woman on a sofa) (c. 1920). Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Weill faced the challenge of her choices being misunderstood, along with misogyny and antisemitism. Beyond being one of few women art dealers in her day, she opened her gallery in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair and was forced to shutter it during the Nazi occupation of France.
The importance of this dealer you’ve probably never heard of can also be determined by the artworks that aren’t in the exhibition. Several paintings that no one wanted to show when Weill did, are now too costly to borrow for an exhibition about her. Picasso’s Moulin de la Galette (ca. 1900) at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, for example, isn’t far from the Grey Art Museum but the insurance to loan this now prized painting is too prohibitive. (Weill sold it, right after it was painted, to collector and newspaper publisher Arthur Huc for 250 francs.) In fact, many of the canvases that hung from clothespins or on the walls of Weill’s little shop have ended up in illustrious institutional collections.
Henri Matisse, Liseuse en robe violette (Reading woman in a violet dress) (1898). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Reims, France.
“A legitimate question then arises,” writes French scholar and founder of the Berthe Weill Archive, Marianne Le Morvan, in the scholarly exhibition catalog accompanying the exhibition. “What would have become of all these artists without Berthe Weill’s support?”
Many of the artists she supported did famously well, moving on to more established dealers and cementing their importance in museum collections and books. Weill, on the other hand, died in poverty and obscurity, and with no heirs to care for her legacy was soon forgotten. This exhibition hopes to help change that.
“I don’t want anyone pitying my fate because, as I’ve said before, I chose this line of conduct myself,” Weill wrote in her memoir, titled Pow! Right in the Eye! “So I only have myself to blame … except that I don’t regret anything!” More

Visitors to the Natural History Museum of L.A. County’s newly reopened diorama hall might have cause to pause in their tracks. Amid realistic bays of kangaroos and snow leopards are three unlikely exhibits. In one, a pair of antelopes is positioned next to an unnatural lake of glass and graffitied boulders. Another depicts eagles against a time-lapse projection of the Los Angeles River. And yet one more is an otherworldly UV-lit scene populated with psychedelic snakes and turtles. They are, in short, not your grandma’s dioramas.
These scenes have been created by artists as part of the institution’s “Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness,” an exhibition marking the centennial of its diorama halls, while offering new ways of seeing these staple displays in natural history museums. The point, said NHMLAC’s exhibition developer Matt Davis, is less to revisit the past than to bring the diorama into the present.
“We look at these displays as old-fashioned, but when you actually survey visitors, they love dioramas,” Davis told me over the phone. “It’s maybe not the dioramas that need to change. It’s just the way we talk about them, or we need to help people read them better.”
Diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo courtesy of NHMLAC.
When the NHMLAC opened its diorama halls in the 1920s, they were a revelation. Gone were the glass cases haphazardly stacked with animal bones and hides; in their place were realistic, three-dimensional displays recreating specific habitats with lifelike models. These early dioramas included bays of bison and beavers, mountain goats and sea lions; they wowed visitors, some 50,000 of whom arrived to view the museum’s hall of African mammals, the first in the country.
These showcases were collaborative outings—exhibits that called on the collective expertise of researchers, painters, and taxidermists. Scenes had to be composed, ecosystems accurately represented, animals modeled, and backgrounds painted. In the words of the museum’s then-senior curator Melville Lincoln, “Science furnishes the material, art the finished picture.”
George Adams working on elephant miniature model, 1965. © Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Then again, the museum’s dioramas have never really been “finished.” Uniquely, its bays were enclosed with glass that could be raised, unlike the hermetic seal of most dioramas. It has allowed artists and conservators to refresh the displays over the decades, whether that is to update a taxidermy model or to revise the biodiversity in the foregrounds—or, in the case of the artists participating in “Reframing Dioramas,” to entirely reimagine these tableaux.
Dioramas at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo courtesy of NHMLAC.
“Reframing Dioramas” takes place in a hall that had been closed since the 1980s due to water damage. Following a refurbishment of its woodwork and lighting (“the dioramas are just glowing because they’ve been in darkness for almost 40 years,” per Davis), the space has reopened in time to participate in the Getty’s PST Art: Art and Science Collide initiative. Ahead of the exhibition, a diorama incubator was launched, alongside an open call for artist proposals for new natural history displays. From the deluge of submissions, three were selected.
Among them is Washington-based artist Saul Becker‘s A Peculiar Garden, a post-apocalyptic landscape populated with electroplated plants and a mound of desiccated twigs, his animals gazing Narcissus-like into a mirrored surface. The scene, Becker told me at the show’s preview, offered him the perfect opportunity to blend his nature-based sculpture and painting practices, while illustrating humanity’s indelible footprint on the environment.
Saul Becker, A Peculiar Garden (2024) at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County. Photo: Min Chen.
“I wanted to highlight the strange, disorienting relationship that we have with nature,” he said. “I didn’t want to create a diorama or an image that was too pastoral; I wanted something sublime, something beautiful, but a little unnourished. Nature really shines a mirror back on humanity.”
In that same vein, L.A. artist Lauren Schoth has used projection mapping in The Ever Changing Flow to illustrate how ecological and manmade change over the ages have reshaped the course of a river that flows through the city. Its twin birds, poised over the ever-morphing vista, remain tellingly static.
Lauren Schoth, The Ever Changing Flow (2024) at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County. Photo: Min Chen.
Meanwhile, a collective composed of artists Yesenia Prieto, Joel Fernando, and Jason Chang has presented the hall’s most eye-catching display in Special Species: A Delicate Moment in Time. The composition features handcrafted Mexican folk art sculptures of endangered animals, on which projections and lights shift and dance—a representation of the spiritual realm that undergirds California’s natural habitats.
However outré these dioramas, Davis noted, they are all scientifically accurate. The artists worked in close consultation with the museum’s taxidermist Tim Bovard and curatorial team, who provided guidance on everything from species lineups to aesthetic perspectives. Davis pointed out how the Special Species group, in hoping to highlight the region’s endangered species, endeavored to hew closely to California’s list of animals of special concern. “We really care about this,” they told him.
Sierra Nevada Big Horn Sheep created for Special Species: A Delicate Moment in Time (2024) by RFX1 (Jason Chang), Joel Fernando, and Yesenia Prieto. Diorama installation. Photo courtesy of the artist and NHMLAC.
That care, in fact, is what has surprised Davis the most about the artists’ responses to the open call.
“A lot of the artists’ submissions weren’t really trying to destroy the diorama. They really liked the diorama and they wanted to just make their own diorama in their own style,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily like, ‘Here’s a critique of the diorama or an explosion of it,’ but ‘Let me try to make a diorama the way I think it could be made.’”
Mule Deer diorama at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Photo: Mario de Lopez, 2014 © Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Maybe the mold didn’t need to be broken. There is, after all, something to be said about the NHMLAC reopening a hall of dioramas at a time when high-tech, interactive exhibits are the dominant attractions in museums.
This fascination with dioramas is further captured in the exhibition’s accompanying publication, Reframing Wilderness, edited by Davis, which details the institution’s century-long diorama project (including the work of artists Duncan Spencer, Hanson Duvall Puthuff, and Frank J. MacKenzie, among others), as well as the roles of these displays in education and conservation. It’s a loving tribute to an analog art and craft, which, Davis noted, has its enduring charm.
“It’s literally the frame that you put around the diorama. It said ‘these are special,’” he explained. “Maybe not everyone gets that on a conscious level, but when you go into a big hall like ours and you sit down, you’re getting this on a very spiritual level. You know this is something to be in awe of, to look on with wonder.”
“Reframing Dioramas: The Art of Preserving Wilderness” is on view at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County, 900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles, California, through September 15, 2025. More

This December, famed Spanish artist Diego Velázquez’s Queen Mariana of Austria (1652–53) will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California for the first time in over 30 years. This will mark the painting’s West Coast debut and it will be a focal point of the exhibition titled “Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado.”
Prior to coming to the Norton Simon, the masterpiece has only been on view once before in the U.S. during a 1989 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The painting is part of a larger exhibition, organized by the museum’s chief curator Emily Talbot and associate curator Maggie Bell, which will feature other artists who were also collected by the Habsburg court. Additional works by Jusepe de Ribera, Bartolomé-Esteban Murillo and Francisco de Zurbarán, Guido Reni, and Peter Paul Rubens, among others, will also be on display, giving viewers a deeper understanding of 17th-century Spanish painting. 
“We were delighted when our colleagues at the Museo del Prado suggested Queen Mariana of Austria as the first loan from the Spanish national collection to the Norton Simon Museum. We have great paintings by 17th-century Spanish artists in our collection, but there are no works by Velázquez at the Norton Simon Museum or at any institution on the West Coast,” said Talbot.  “Our display contextualizes Velázquez’s extraordinary career by presenting him in the company of artists that he knew and admired, while highlighting the role that Mariana herself played in her own visual representation.”
The painting itself, which is nearly life-sized, depicts an 18-year-old Queen Mariana following the birth of her son with King Philip IV. Within it, the young queen can be seen in typical Spanish style of that era wearing an exquisite black and silver dress complimented by a guardainfante—an underskirt made up of hoops that expanded the width of a skirt and left the back flat, a common trend in 17th- and 18th-century women’s fashion. The work features rich hues of black and reds and ornate details such as the embroidery on the young queen’s dress and her ornate jewelry. 
Portrait of Diego Rodriguez de Sila y Velázquez (ca. 1640). Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
Velázquez is one of the most famous painters to emerge from Spain during the 17th century. In fact, by 1623, at the age of 24, he had already established himself as the court painter to Philip IV in Madrid. As a result, he would go on to spend the next 40 years creating works centered on royal family—most notably Las Meninas (ca. 1656), starring Philip’s only child, Margarita. 
Completed in the summer of 1651, Queen Mariana of Austria, is considered to be one of Velázquez’s most important works of art. Following an extended period abroad in Rome and upon his return to Madrid, this was his first major commission of that time, and this subject in particular would come to mark a new period in Velázquez’s work. Following the completion of this work, Velázquez would go on to depict female subjects and children in the last half of his artistic career. 
Signed works by Velázquez are increasingly rare, and today only a handful of them exist within U.S. museums. The Prado’s collection, on the other hand, comprises 48 paintings by Velázquez—an astonishing 40 percent of the artist’s total body of work. Queen Mariana is on loan to the Norton Simon as part of an ongoing exchange between the museums, which began earlier this year when Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633) traveled to Madrid.
“Mariana: Velázquez’s Portrait of a Queen from the Museo Nacional del Prado” will be on view at the Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd. at Orange Grove Boulevard, Pasadena, California, December 13, 2024–March 24, 2025. More

In the mid-2000s, young people on both sides of the Atlantic were swept up in a subculture of melancholy. Its driving force was bands with names like Bring Me the Horizon, My Chemical Romance, and Bury Tomorrow, guitar-led groups whose open-hearted lyrics gave the movement its name: emo, short for emotional.
Fair or not, the emo scene’s reputation was of mop-haired teenagers who were greatly aggrieved with the perceived ills of suburban life. To be sure, there’s nothing revolutionary about a new generation expressing its dismay with state of the world. But, in many ways, the emo scene straddled the past and the future like none before.
A scrapbook of emo images sent in by a fan for the Barbican exhibition. Photo courtesy Andrew Buckingham.
Its sound was a watered-down rehash of 1990s grunge and hardcore, its ethos took something from the DIY spirit of punk, and elements of its fashion winked at Victorian dress. At the same time, emo emerged at the dawn of a new millennium and its tools of expression were online and digital. Fans met online as well as in the mosh pit and took music with them on MP3 players and iPods.
A display case featuring items from the era’s popular bands. Photo courtesy Andrew Buckingham
This is the subject of “I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective,” an exhibition stationed inside the Barbican Music Library and organized in collaboration with the Museum of Youth Culture. The show name is the title of an early My Chemical Romance song—here’s an angsty sample: “You wear me out / What will it take to show you / That it’s not the life it seems? / I’m not okay.”
The exhibition focuses on the years 2004 to 2009 and across a series of wall panels and glass cases, we encounter a movement that seems at once ever-present and long disappeared. The selfie is here, only shot into mirrors and oftentimes with a digital camera. The mobile phones are of the flip and slide varieties. There are obsolete CDs released by bands that remain on tour today and ticket stubs marked with names of venues that no longer exist.
Many elements of emo culture have entered the mainstream. Photo: courtesy The show’s name is taken from a 2004 My Chemical Romance song. Photo: courtesy Jamie Brett.
“Emo is often seen as a lost subculture due to its transatlantic nature and the way so many parts of its more radical styles and sounds became assimilated with pop culture,” Jamie Brett, the show’s curator said via email. “They were perhaps one of the last subcultures still linked to physical space, with one foot in real life and one foot online.”
It may only be 15 years since peak-emo, but many of the digital platforms used by fans have diminished or disappeared (the likes of Bebo, Myspace, Livejournal). Curating “I’m Not Okay” meant trying to recover a culture that had been wiped from servers, deleted from the internet, lost from abandoned phones. The Museum of Youth Culture, which is archiving and exhibiting 100 years of youth culture history from the 1920s, put out a call and had received more than 1,300 submissions within two weeks.
The Museum of Youth Culture’s open call for fan submissions. Courtesy of the Barbican.
These form the bulk of the exhibits on show at the Barbican. There are hand-made patches and t-shirts, sketchbooks with drawings shared on the early platform DeviantArt, bathroom selfies, personal diaries, magazines, and personal testimonies. Together they create a vivid tableaux of youth culture in the first decade of the 21st century, a world of heavy eyeliner, ratty converse, and studded belts.
Elements of emo have been swallowed up by mainstream culture (think Avril Lavigne, skinny jeans, choker necklaces), but the emos are still kicking. “My younger emo self circa 2007,” wrote one contributor, Rachel Morgan, under a selfie shot on a Sony Ericsson. “Now I’m an elder emo still stuck in that phase. The big eyeliner and even bigger hair have gone and I can see out of both eyes now.”
“I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective” is on view at the Barbican Music Library at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, through January 15, 2025. More

Celebrating 60 years since Giorgio Morandi’s death, the Galleria Mattia De Luca has brought to New York a stunning exhibition of 60 works by the Italian painter and printmaker. Surprisingly, Morandi has not had a major show in the city since 2008 when the Met held a retrospective of his work. More lauded in Europe than in the United States, his oeuvre is now given just the right venue, in a 19th century townhouse on East 63rd Street off Fifth Avenue.
Newly renovated by curator and dealer Mattia De Luca, the wooden floors and panels, white walls, and brick fireplaces, with large inviting windows, make for the perfect setting for Morandi’s small paintings. Here you can feel what it would be like to have a Morandi hanging on your own walls, which is where his work belongs. Unfortunately, most of Morandi’s work is in private hands or in museums, rarely coming up for auction. “Owners are attached to the work and you rarely see any Morandi for sale, only minor works,” Mattia said. This exhibit is a rare opportunity to be up close to the deep beauty.
Along with Marilena Pasquali, founder and director of the Giorgio Morandi Study Center in Bologna, they were able to procure 27 paintings. In the spring of 2022, “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended I” opened at the Galleria Mattia De Luca’s Rome headquarters. “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II,” in New York, is also curated by Mattia and Pasquali and will run through November 27, 2024. “A number of paintings have never been shown in New York,” Mattea said. “We are thrilled to be showing 48 paintings, five etchings, four watercolors, and some drawings.”
Installation view by Nicholas Knight
Love at First Sight
Speaking with Mattia on a tour through the exhibit, it is clear he is passionate about the artist and devoted to Morandi’s legacy. He pointed out nuances in the work that often go unnoticed. “Morandi’s signature on each painting is unique and specific. It is never casual, never random,” he said. “His signature is original to each work.”
In Fernado Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet from 1982, he writes: “The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.” This is an apt description of Morandi’s painting; So many times during our conversation talking about the work, Mattia said that “it’s hard to put [the work] into words.” That is one of the beauties and power of Morandi’s pictorial universe—the otherness. Certainly there is tenderness, devotion, rigor, skill. The more you stand still in front of a Morandi, the more you can sense this otherness.
Mattia saw his first Morandi when his parents took him to a museum when he was 13. “I fell in love. Ever since, I try to see every exhibition that shows his work. I collect the catalogs and read everything I can about him.” In 2020, lockdown was very strict in Italy. “For three months, we couldn’t go out. It was tough. At that time, I felt Morandi was more relevant than ever—this suspended feeling of his work. The quiet. So I came up with the idea of putting on a Morandi show and began researching where the works were.” He contacted museums and collectors and found out how difficult it was to convince them to lend the work for an exhibition.
Giorgio Morandi Natura morta (V. 907) signed: “Morandi” (lower center). Executed in 1954 (undated)
An Artist’s Artist
Whether it is one Morandi’s signature still lifes, a landscape or etching, to spend time looking at the work offers many rewards. His work compels you to stop and be still, which is one of the allures. Mattia commented that “Morandi is an artist’s artist,” and you can understand why. One wants to stare long at the visible brushstrokes in flat white and grey, the warm pastels of brick, ochre, rose, the way he animates the objects as if they each have a distinct personality, and his ability to capture the streets of Bologna where he walked every day as well as the surrounding Emilian hillside.
Philip Guston, Vija Clemins, Frank Gehry, Wayne Thiebaud, Edmund de Waal, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Fellini, Don DeLillo, all were influenced and inspired by the artist. “What makes Morandi so great is his ability to transfer emotions into objects, bringing them to life,” said Mattia. “In his early work, he was experimenting, more technical. As you move through the exhibit into his later work and toward the end of his life, you can feel his soul. In the last room, his 1960 still life with the bright white bottle in the center strongly holds the other objects. He was so grounded in his work.”
Painter Giorgio Morandi in his flat in Bologna. Photography. 1958. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images) [Der Maler Giorgio Morandi in seiner Wohnung in Bologna. Photographie. 1958.]From Bologna to the White House
The art historian, Roberto Longhi, described him as “arguably the greatest Italian painter of the 20th century.” Obama chose two oil paintings when he was president in 2009 by Morandi, now part of the White House Collection. Umberto Eco said, “Morandi reaches the peak of his spirituality as a poet of matter.”
Born in Bologna in 1890, Morandi lived through two world wars. Early in his life he traveled in Europe to study many great paintings. His hero was Cezanne. With his family, he moved to Bologna when he was 20, where he lived for the rest of his life. At 40, he became professor of etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna where he once was a student, later still becoming chair of printmaking until 1956. When he was 67, he won the Grand Prize for painting at the São Paulo Biennale, beating out Marc Chagall and Jackson Pollock. He died in the home where he lived and worked for most of his life, just shy of his 74th birthday.
Working in a nine square-meter studio with a single bed, Morandi, standing six foot four, built a high table so he could see his objects at eye level. He often ground his pigments and stretched the canvases, and worked obsessively on his paintings. Like Giacometti, he never cleaned his studio. Over the 40 years, Morandi’s subjects accumulated layers of dust: bottles, old pitchers, a lemon squeezer, café latte bowls, tin boxes, quaint vases.
Installation view by Nicholas Knight
He was also a master printmaker. “In tones of black and grey, in his mark making, the etchings, his rigour is evident,” Mattia said. “In the watercolours you can clearly see his command of negative space. The simple outlines in the drawings are like paintings, with light coming through.”
On the wall of the winding staircase his flower paintings are on view; He often used paper roses for his subject. “Morandi was never attached to his work. He never sold any of his flower paintings. They were all gifts to friends because he felt they were too intimate.”
Giorgio Morandi Natura morta (V. 1188) signed: “Morandi” (lower left). Executed in 1960 (undated)
While the first floor of the town house is dedicated to his early works, on the second floor are paintings from the 1950s up to 1964, the year he died. “His still lifes are architectural. Geometric planes. Rectangles within rectangles within rectangles, layered. You can see his hand working. In one, the white bottle is strong and precise while the others are softly leaning into her.” In the sixth room, the last one in the exhibition, his strokes become looser, the colors more blurred, as if he is fading away.
It’s as if in the repetition of painting the ordinary, Morandi uncovered what was inside; it is that which haunts you, compelling you to return. There is always more to see if you open yourself to go beyond looking and allow the work to penetrate. That otherness that typifies his work only reveals itself through vulnerability, opening yourself up, and coming to the work without preconceptions. These works are an abstraction of reality. “Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II” affords us the opportunity to intimately engage with Morandi’s gift of perception. He painted worlds.
“Giorgio Morandi – Time Suspended II” is on view Galerie Mattia de Luca. More