Went to the Met today to see the big Morandi show - the first such in America. (These pictures are all from the exhibition
website.) It was full of old friends - not just paintings I've seen (at an exhibition in Paris in 2002, in books, in Bologna), but the objects he paints, which seem like members of your extended family whom you only get to see on special
occasions - the old great aunts and uncles whom you always see as if for the last time, never knowing if they'll be around for the next family reunion. Whenever I happen on a Morandi in a museum, as most recently at the
Princeton Art Museum, I'm filled with a surge of inexplicable but pure joy, a sense of coming home. I'd have to be far more articulate
on the subject of art than I am to explain just why. But here's the last line of Peter Schjeldahl's review of the exhibition in the
New Yorker, which gets something deeply right:
The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue. (Sept 22, 2008, p93)
Went to the Met today to see the big Morandi show - the first such in America. (These pictures are all from the exhibition website.) It was full of old friends - not just paintings I've seen (at an exhibition in Paris in 2002, in books, in Bologna), but the objects he paints, which seem like members of your extended family whom you only get to see on special 
occasions - the old great aunts and uncles whom you always see as if for the last time, never knowing if they'll be around for the next family reunion. Whenever I happen on a Morandi in a museum, as most recently at the Princeton Art Museum, I'm filled with a surge of inexplicable but pure joy, a sense of coming home. I'd have to be far more articulate 
on the subject of art than I am to explain just why. But here's the last line of Peter Schjeldahl's review of the exhibition in the New Yorker, which gets something deeply right: The experience of his work is unsharable even, in a way, with oneself, like a word remembered but not remembered, on the tip of the tongue. (Sept 22, 2008, p93)
