THE CRITICS IN HIS CUPS

The intoxicating still-lifes of Giorgio Morandi.

- JACKSON ARN

In works like "Still Life" (1950-51), Morandi balanced a sublime, almost spiritual intensity with a prankish regard for the laws of physical space.

As genres go, Italian still-life painting isn't a ghost town, exactly, but it evokes more than its share of dust and tumbleweeds. It's just a fact that French fruit bowls and Dutch lemon peels get a bigger chunk of the textbook than anything of the kind from the Bel Paese. Even the great art historian Adolfo Venturi had to let down his countrymen when he admitted that the form was “regarded as the exclusive property of painters north of the Alps.” That was in 1913, to be fair, before Venturi or anybody else had heard of Giorgio Morandi, colossal exception to the Italian-still-life rule, and to most others.

If you love him, as pretty much anyone who spends long enough with his work does, New York can be a lonely place. In September, however, the Mattia De Luca Gallery brought to the Upper East Side sixty-five of his paintings, drawings, and prints, many from private collections. Another thirty-seven are now hanging at David Zwirner—more Morandis, all told, than have passed through Manhattan since the late Dubya years. That's still not enough, but sort of appropriate, since Morandi travelled even less than his art does: he rarely left Italy, rarely left his home town of Bologna, and, the way some have told it, rarely left the apartment where he lived with his sisters and died in 1964, aged seventy-three. To say that he spent all his time painting would be too glamorous. He spent his time stretching his own canvases, mixing his own paints, arranging cups and bottles to the millimetre, and destroying his own works when they failed to please him. Painting was what he did with the leftover minutes and hours.