The Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, currently the subject of an outstanding exhibition at London's Tate Modern, died in 1964. He lived most of his life in his family home, a fusty apartment in a narrow street in Bologna, which he shared with his three sisters, none of whom, like himself, ever married.
He remained protective of his sisters throughout his life as though, one observer noted, they were perpetually young women in need of guidance. To reach his studio he had to pass through their bedrooms and the sitting- room in which they spent much of their time. He always knocked and waited politely for an invitation. Only in the last few years of his life did he get round to building a house in the countryside and move into it. "I have been fortunate enough to lead ... an uneventful life," he said to Edouard Roditi, in a rare interview, in the late 1950s.
It was, in truth, uneventful, but its uneventfulness was premeditated and relished. He was born in 1890. After working briefly in his father's office in his teens, he studied art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, and thereafter taught art, most notably as a professor of etching at the Accademia. He liked teaching etching, he said, because it was purely a matter of imparting technique. Called up for military service when Italy entered the first World War in 1915, he suffered a breakdown from which he was slow to recover.
It seems likely that the trauma of this experience contributed to his subsequent caution, his exaggerated attachment to the familiar and the predictable. He prized the fixed routine of painting, domesticity and teaching. He hardly ever ventured outside Bologna, and crossed the Italian border only twice in his life, for brief visits to Switzerland. And what could be more predictable, after all, than a Morandi still-life? So much so, that the sheer predictability of those subdued arrangements of bottles and boxes drives many viewers to distraction.
He was briefly interested and involved in two avant-garde artistic movements, Futurism and, more seriously, with Giorgio de Chirico's Pittura Metafisica, but it was an encounter with 28 paintings by CΘzanne at the 1920 Venice Biennale that set him firmly on the road to his own mature style.
That style, which encompassed landscape and flower paintings, is most perfectly embodied in still life. His calm, flattish still-life images depict a limited repertoire of objects, including bottles, jars, boxes, jugs and sundry other bland containers. They utilise a stringently limited palette of toned-down, earthy colours. Edges are blunted by lack of contrast and a deliberately irresolute, wavering line, creating a paradoxical effect: a pictorial world that promises clarity and simplicity but turns out not to be so clear or simple the closer you look at it.
While, on the face of it, Morandi did nothing more than put a few bottles and boxes on a table and paint them, the reality was rather more involved than that. He placed his objects not on a table but on one of three purpose-made, adjustable surfaces, one of them cut at an angle in such a way as to reverse the effect of normal perspective. He painted the bottles he used, either inside or out, giving them quite a different visual character, and dulled down other objects through the application of dust. And he elaborately plotted the positions of each element in every composition, even using sheets of grid-patterned paper to calculate and record arrangements.
Morandi devised his personal artistic language against a background of a revival of classicism in the 1920s. This revival had specific political implications, not least in the case of its Italian manifestations, including the quasi-official state art of the Milanese Novocento group, with which Morandi was associated, and the ruralist ideology of Strapaese, with which he was also involved. Strapaese, by no means uniquely, mingled reactionary political views with nostalgia for an idealised past. The comfort of notionally eternal values, filtered through nationalism and the simple honesty of regional custom, were set against the dangerous lure of international modernism. Morandi was a keen, though not at all opportunistic exponent of this distinctly cosy version of Fascist Italy, and he certainly profited from his association with it in terms of official recognition and encouragement.
Nevertheless, partly because of his work's apparent lack of an ideological dimension, he came through the war years with his reputation relatively untainted, despite the criticism of some fellow artists. To some extent he reinvented himself as, in his own words, "a believer in art for art's sake", retrospectively distancing himself from ideological appropriation. His award-winning participation in the first Venice Biennale after the war, in 1948, established his international reputation. From then on his pictures were always in demand world-wide, and there was usually a waiting-list of museums and individual buyers.
"I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see," he said. It is true that the more he concentrates on the materiality of simple things - de Chirico memorably described him as a painter of "the metaphysics of the common object" - the more perplexingly abstract and immaterial they appear. While they are what they are, it is possible to interpret the highly organised arrangements of forms in his still-life paintings in a variety of ways. Most obviously perhaps, in relation to architecture.
The homogenised, abstracted objects might be groups of buildings. They could also be people, clustered protectively together. The pattern of theme and variations within which he worked suggests musical models.
Summing up his own concerns for Roditi he said: "I am essentially a painter of the kind of still-life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else". Rather than straightforward serenity, however, the insistent recurrence of motifs in his work suggests an underlying uncertainty and unease, something that he appears to broach directly in one celebrated series of paintings in which objects are grouped precariously at the very edge of the supporting surface, teetering on the edge of the void. Perhaps there is a tacit recognition, here, that no matter how carefully one contrives to organise one's existence, the future always threatens to be something more than a reassuring repetition of the past, something perilously unknowable.
CΘzanne, the French artist Chardin, Vermeer and the great Italian Renaissance painters were Morandi's acknowledged idols and precursors, but what of successors? An obvious successor, and one close to home, is the late Charles Brady, the expatriate American artist whose tiny, frequently witty still lifes and landscapes, quirkily individual though clearly indebted to Morandi, have an almost cult following in Ireland.
But the work of painters as diverse as the late Philip Guston in the US and the Belgian Luc Tuymans also registers the influence of the reclusive Italian.
Giorgio Morandi, an exhibition featuring paintings and drawings by Morandi, is at the Tate Modern in London until August 12th. Later this year, it travels to the MusΘe d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris