The Light of Memory
Revisiting Giorgio Morandi
Introduction
Here in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State we experienced many heavy rainstorms and cooler than usual weather in July, 2021 and most of the photographs in this project were made either during the storms, or just after, when a strange, dark, "heavy" light lingered over the meadow beyond or backyard, and pervaded the spaces and things inside our house, the basement and the garage. That light--which may have been dimmed by the smoke drifting over to us from the wildfires in the Western States--seemed to cover everything I photographed with a haunting, numinous veil of silence.
As I was photographing the meadow and inside our house I would sometimes remember the still lifes and landscape paintings of Giorgio Morandi. I had been thinking about him off and on over the past year while I was working on my Pandemic Series of projects, and for some reason, after making the photographs for this project, I felt it was time to re-visit his wonderful work.
I became especially impressed, this time, with many of the dark paintings I saw, which as I learned later were in many cases made when Morandi was living with the stress and horrors of World War I, Mussolini's reign as Dictator of Italy's National Fascist Party, and during the Second World War after Italy's alignment with Germany . The trauma Morandi endured throughout these darkest of times in Italy must surly have come out in at least some of his paintings.
Morandi, 1921 oil painting
Morandi, 1921 oil painting
Morandi, 1941 painting
There were several mornings in July, after it had been raining heavily through the night, when I woke to discover our house immersed in a dark cloud. When the fog began to clear I made photographs as the world emerged once again from its dissolution.
The world can be amazingly silent after a heavy rain, and even more so when the world has become transformed by fog. As I made the landscape images you will see in this project, I thought of what Morandi experienced in 1943-44 in the mountainsides of Grizzana during the Second World War. He became so terrified he couldn't paint. I also know, from my own experience, that making art can be a meaningful way of exorcising those inner terrors which linger in one's memory.
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Morandi (1890-1964) would paint the same objects, flowers and landscapes over and over again, and each image would be different from the ones that came before it. I too have returned--over and over again--to favorite places, things and themes, always in the spirit of wanting to see how something would look from a different point of view, at a different time, in a different light or circumstance, etc. The photographs made during those return visits would mark changes in the things and places, but also in myself as well. If you are familiar with some of my earlier projects you might recognize--when you see the photographs in this project--the same things and places I had photographed and published in earlier blog projects. That's particularly noticeable, of course, in my Meadow Photographs and my Thing-Centered Photographs.
(See the section on my blog's Welcome Page "Collections of Theme-Related Pictures and Projects," where I have provided a long list of hyperlinked theme titles you can visit.)
Exactly eight years ago, in July, 2013, I had embarked on a year-long, multi-chaptered project entitled Still Life in which I made photographs inspired by the paintings and drawings of Giorgio Morandi. As I studied his work, read about his life and his paintings, and made the photographs for the various "chapters" of the project, I discovered many ways in which I felt kindred in spirit with Morandi. I liked the myths that propagated the idea Morandi was a reclusive "cloistered monk" who painted--in solitude--in his little bedroom studio, unaware of what was happening out in the world. But, recently, I discovered there was much more to learn about Morandi and his life than I had realized back then.
As I worked on this project I read a new book about Morandi, published in 2019 by Marilena Pasquali entitled Giorgio Morandi : The feeling of things; and I re-read the 1964 biography by Janet Abramowicz, entitled Morandi : The Art of Silence--which I had only skimmed over briefly in 2013.
I became aware of aspects of Morandi's life through reading these two books carefully that I was not prepared to focus on earlier. Abramowicz's biography (the only one available in English, and now out of print) tells a more complete and complicated story about the ambiquous life of Morandi, a story most Italian writers were unwilling to present, probably because of the great artist's involvement with Italy's (Mussolini's) Fascist Party and, surprisingly, because Morandi himself wanted to perpetuate those popular myths about himself.
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The last few years have been for me a particularly stressful, dark time, living and photographing through the Trump Presidency witnessing a con-man's attempt to become yet another Dictator--like Mussolini and many others. I had to endure four years of Trump's denial of science, which allowed Climate Change to ravage our planet and our nation. And Trumps intentional delays, misinformation, and other mis-handlings of the Coronavirus Pandemic has contributed to our present upsurge of hospitalizations and deaths due to the Delta variant and people's refusal to wear masks and get vaccinated. And Trump's false, unsubstantiated accusations of voter fraud during the Presidential Election, his incitement of the White Supremacists' raid on the Capitol Building on January 6, 2020 . . . all of this . . . and so much more . . . has left me feeling like I've been living in a battle zone in something close to a Fascist State.
In these difficult times, I have remained grateful for all the grace I have received from my yogic practices, the teachings of the yogic saints, and the grace that has guided my creative process in photography. The light and the silence that pervades most of Morandi's paintings have also provided me with a refuge from the darkness of our current times. His work and his life--especially as I understand it now--despite all the challenges he had to face, has been an inspiration to my photographic practice over the past seven years, and in my most recently made photographs which you will see in this project.
Part of my process in preparing for this project was to review all of the images I had published in my blog projects since the completion of the Still Life project in July, 2014. I selected some of those photographs which reminded me of Morandi's paintings (his visual structures, his tonalities and light, his intense contemplation of objects) and have presented them on a separate blog page. I invite you to see this collection of Morandi influenced images as an integral part of this project. Please visit A Collection of Morandi Inspired Photographs.
After the presentation of my most recent Morandi-inspired photographs, below, I have prepared a text entitled Revisiting Giorgio Morandi in which I share some of the recent things I have learned about the man, the artist and his life, things that have helped me dispel some of the many myths about him which I had earlier--naively--enjoyed believing in. Welcome to the project: The Light of Memory.
The Photographs
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Note: because the photographs below are pervaded by dark and subtle tonalities
I strongly suggest that you view these photographs in a darkened viewing
environment and if possible without the white border. On my viewing
device, an iMac, I can achieve the ideal viewing conditions by
clicking on the image once, and then a second time.
Image #1 Framed Photograph and plant
Image #2 Window sill planter pot
Image #3 Roll of paper towels
Image #4 Dishcloth
Image #5 Cardboard box and highlighted tape
Image #6 Metal canister
Image #8 Succulent plant
Image #9 Electric wires
Image #10 Furnace room
Image #11 Basement wall
Image #12 Bedroom door
Image #13 Basement
Image #14 Laundry room night light
Image #15 Garage Shelf
Image #16 Bedroom lamp
Image #17 Closet, jewelry cabinet
Image #18 Cutting boards, toaster oven handle
Image #19 Stainless refrigerator door, child's drawing
Image #20 Plant, lace curtain, closed window shade
Image #21 Birds and mist covered sliding door to our back deck overlooking the meadow
Image #22 Plant and mist covered window that overlooks the meadow
Image #23 Spider Plant and living room wall
Image #24 Fog, early morning, N Meadow & Pond
Image #25 Cloths line pole seen through our mist covered picture window
Image #26 House plant, meadow fog seen through our picture window
Image #27 Bird feeder, deck railings, meadow fog
Image #28 S Meadow view, fog, red humming bird feeder
Image #29 S Meadow, fog and backyard view of trees and bushes
Image #31 Mist covered sliding door touched by the warm light of the rising sun
Image #32 The rising sun's warm light seen through a lace curtained window
Image #33 S Meadow view of fog, bird feeder, tree limbs, and the warm light of the rising sun
Image #34 Early morning view of S Meadow and pond
Image #35 Dark clouds over the S meadow and pond, with late afternoon sunlight skimming the woods' treetops
Revisiting Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964)
My two most recent projects, Elegy and The Secret Cave, played a major role in awakening me to the need to revisit Morandi and his work again. The memory of his works would often be invoked when I was about to make certain photographs for those projects. Then, as I was making some of the photographs for this project, again, Morandi's presence emerged from within the dark light that pervaded the things and spaces I was photographing. It had been seven years since I completed my Morandi inspired project Still Life and once again I felt a strong impulse to re-connect with his work. In the process of doing that I also became fascinated by my discovery of a more authentic story about Morandi the man.
After studying all the pictures in my collection of books on Morandi, many of which were purchased back in 2o13, I reviewed all the photographs in my blog projects created since the publication of Still Life, to re-acquaint myself with images I had made which were inspired or influenced by Morandi's remarkable paintings. (click here to see a collection of those images). And I looked to see if any new books about Morandi had been published in the past seven years or so.
I purchased Marilena Pasquali's 2019 book Giorgio Morandi : The feeling of things, and after reading it, I realized I needed to go back to a book I had only skimmed over briefly in 2013: Janet Abrmowicz's biography, Giorgio Morandi : The Art of Silence. Re-reading Abrmowicz's biography, this time with concentrated attention, was a revelation. In her detailed accounts that put Morandi's life in a well documented historical context, Morandi as a real person emerged which debunked many of the conventional, idealized myths and half-truths about the wonderful dedicated Italian painter.
Abramowicz studied etching with Morandi in the 1950's at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna; and after she graduated Morandi asked her to be his teaching assistant. This provided her with a unique opportunity to work closely with Morandi, and spend time with him and his sisters and many of the painter's close friends, art critics and historians in a more informal, non-academic setting.
Morandi lived together with his three sisters practically his entire life in an old apartment building in Bologna where he painted in a small studio that also served as a bedroom for the artist. After Morandi's death in 1964, Abramowicz remained in regular contact with his surviving sisters for she had become like "family" to them. They had come to trust her over the years and would share with her valuable and revealing stories about their brother.
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Giorgio Morandi (1890-1961) lived, survived and painted through World War I (1914-1918), Benito Mussolini's rise to power as Italy's Prime Minister (1921-22), and then as the founder and Dictator of Italy's National Fascist Party (1925-45). In 1939, under Mussolini's one-party Fascist leadership, Italy alienated itself from France and Britain and aligned itself with Germany, which in 1943-44 put Morandi literally in the middle of the horrible violence and destruction of the Second World War (1939-1945).
Despite Morandi's fragile and persistent health problems (associated with rheumatism), and his bouts with depression (associated with the very real stresses and traumas he suffered throughout his life) Morandi made some of his greatest paintings during (and probably because of) those deeply troubled and dangerous Fascist and war-related times in his country.
I was very interested to learn, recently, that many of his best paintings, especially those pervaded by a light that contained the darkest memories of his life, were never exhibited or seen by others (except perhaps by a few of his closest friends) until long after his death. The works that he did exhibit publicly were usually edited and sequenced by the artist himself. In other words, he controlled what could be seen and what could not be seen. He also insisted on reviewing and editing any texts written about him and his work before granting permission to the authors to publish.
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Morandi's father died in 1909, when Giorigo was nineteen years old. Fortunately his mother recognized and supported her son's serious interest and natural talent in the visual arts, and she made sure that he--and his three sisters--would get an education that would enable them to earn a living as educators.
(Giorgio taught in elementary schools in Bologna for thirteen years before he at last, in 1930, won an assignment teaching the technics of Etching at the Academia di Belle Arti in Bologna, techniques which he learned and developed to a very sophisticated degree through his own self-efforts. Indeed he became internationally recognized as one of the best and most technically knowledgable Etcher's in the world. ~ It's important to note, here, that the teaching position granted Morandi, which he had longed for many years over, was significantly influenced by two recommendations made by respected faculty well connected within the Academia who understood the modernist achievements in Morandi's painting and the growing international recognition he was getting. Most of the faculty and local artists in Bologna were extremely conservative and rejected Morandi's extraordinary vision and resented the recognition he was getting for it.)
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In 1915, six years after Morandi's father died, he was drafted into the military and assigned to the 22nd Infantry. Abramowicz tells us that Morandi was the type of person who was "unwilling to squash even an insect in his garden," and "wanted no part" of the Great War." He was "a shy man who valued his privacy" and he was "temperamentally ill suited to communal army life."
Indeed, after two months in the service Morandi was hospitalized for sever depression and physical exhaustion. According to army physicians, he had suffered a "nervous breakdown" and was sent back to Bologna with a medical discharge. Despite his precarious health, a year later (in 1916) he completed one of his most famous early paintings under the influence of de Chirico and the movement known as Pittura Metaphysica which had emerged during Italy's most politically and culturally tumultuous decade of the past one hundred years.
Morandi, 1916 oil
De Chirico was very supportive of Morandi, and the two enjoyed a period of close friendship, but after Morandi's release from the military he would suffer two near-fatal bouts of the Spanish Flu and loose contact with de Chirico.
Morandi then became caught up in Mussolini's rise to power. Over the next twenty years (1919-1939) the conservative groups in the Fascist Party attempted to restrict true artistic exploration and instead tried to channel the creative energy of some of Italy's best artists into the production of propaganda for the advancement of the Party's political-military agenda. Morandi lived "an ambiguous life," as one writer put. Indeed, he had to in order to survive Fascism and at the same time honor his own personal need to make art that came from deep within his heart.
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Though Morandi had plenty of good reasons to want to become disassociated from Fascism, "artists were inevitably involved with politics," writes Abramowicz, because of the extreme dangers of speaking out against Mussolini and Italy's National Party. "One joined the party to feed one's family" and there were (financial and professional) advantages for artists associated with Mussolini and the National Cause.
There were some liberal groups within the Party which helped artists meet and learn from each other and network with gallery owners, curators, critics and historians who, after the fall of Mussolini and the Party, would help artists to advance their post-war professional careers.
Abramowicz wrote in her Introduction: "I was surprised but intrigued to discover how much Fascist Laws and Fascist Unions had helped painters like Morandi . . . Morandi was a beneficiary of Fascism's new cultural policies: he obtained better jobs, and the new state's patronage provided him opportunities to exhibit and sell his work. In this way Morandi could bypass the conservative artist circles of Bologna that had always ignored him."
Although Morandi gradually became thought of as the "cloistered monk," Abramowicz clearly shows how Morandi had many influential, well informed friends with whom he had met regularly and enjoyed enthusiastic dialogues among themselves about modern art trends. These friends helped Morandi to cleverly and safely navigate his way through Italy's Fascist period without having to completely sacrifice his true creative talents to the Party. Nothing and nobody, however, could help Morandi during the very worst moments of Italy's alignment with Germany during the Second World War.
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Morandi, who was born and died in his beloved though extremely conservative hometown, Bologna, certainly lived an ignored and thus isolated life as an artist in Bologna, for as his international reputation as a modernist painter gradually unfolded the Accademia di Belle Arti rejected him all the more. In a letter he wrote in 1931 to his artist and writer friend Ardengo Soffici, Morandi stated that he "did not wish to be forgotten and left alone." And, according to Abramowicz, Morandi would "continue to say this throughout his life."
Pasquali, in her book Giorgio Morandi : The feeling of things, writes about Morandi's mythic solitary life from different perspectives. I especially liked her essay "The image of absence : the landscapes of the war years (1940-1944)" in which she describes quite vividly, and compassionately how depressed he became when the war began to expand beyond the cities into the countrysides, which included Morandi's beloved, peaceful mountain village, Grizzana, where he and his sisters would rent a house during the summers and Morandi would paint landscapes. The Second World War made it very difficult for Morandi to meet with his friends and talk about art, something he loved to do and desperately longed for when that became impossible because of the War with Germany.
When the War had become concentrated in the rural areas, including Grizzana, it became too frightening and dangerous for Morandi to go outside and paint. Pasquali writes: "even a simple walk to the village about a kilometer away could turn into a trap under the machine-gun fire of Allied forces." The sounds and vibrations of bombs in the distance, airplanes and machine gun fights overhead, and the grim stories Morandi was hearing from neighbors about the German soldiers on the ground who were committing horrible war crimes upon the innocent villagers . . . all this and more made it impossible for Morandi to paint.
Morandi became so desperately isolated, and inactive as an artist during the period 1943-44 that he reached out to his friends through letters that were never answered. The myths that had made Morandi into a "monk" who wanted only to paint and contemplate in solitude, became, during the war, a reality for the man who absolutely rejected war. Pasquali writes:
The solitude was real now . . . For the first time, maybe, the artist asked with some insistence for Raimondi, Archanglei and Beliossi [personal friends, and probably many others] to visit him [in Grizzana]. In his letters he offered to guide them along the route--which would have had to be covered entirely on foot, with the risk of being shot by machine-gun fire or hit by a bomb--from the stations of Pian de Setta or Vergato, up the dirt roads to the relative tranquillity of the two upstairs rooms [of the house Morandi was staying in, alone]. However, both rail stations were bombed---they were too important for the control of the area and the communications between Bologna and Florence--and the chance of getting visitors vanished; for the whole of 1944, from the icy winter that did not seem to want to end even at the end of March, to the scorching heat of the summer, burned by the fires of war, Morandi remained alone."
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Archangeli, who had been one of Morandi's best students at the Academy, later became a well respected art critic, historian, close friend and advocate of Morandi and his painting. In 1961, just three years before Morandi's death, Archangeli completed a manuscript (in Italian), a biography about his friend that was intended, writes Abramowicz, to "shatter the myth of Morandi's cloistered life and cultural isolation" and place his work "in the company of European Modernists."
Morandi asked to see Archangeli's manuscript, to review it and comment on it, and perhaps recommend some editing. When Morandi read the manuscript he became quite angry. He wanted to edit the book to such an extreme degree--that would radically change Archangeli's intent--that the author refused to accept the artist's demands. Morandi and Archangeli broke off their close relationship, causing both to suffer greatly, and it became impossible for Archangeli to publish his book until after Morandi's death.
Archangeli's book was never published in English, however Abramowicz's biography, which came out in English in 1964, the year Morandi died, was written with an intention similar to Archangeli's, though her writing was less dramatic stylistically and much more of her text was based on scholarly research and well documented published source materials.
To this day, as far as I know, it appears that only Morandi understood what was motivating his attempts to prevent the publication of Archangeli's book; and, it's possible, that even Morandi himself did not understand it. After all Morandi was a victim of terrible wartime trauma and Italy's Fascism, and at the time Archangeli showed his manuscript to his friend, in 1961, just three years before Morandi died, Morandi was suffering--probably both emotionally and physically--from lung cancer. Morandi had smoked cigarettes his entire life, and the sticky toxic tars from the tobacco became so built up in his lungs over the many years of near constant smoking that his lungs became blackened and decayed.
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[Morandi's light] was a "light of memory"
as Fellini suggested . . . rather than
the light of the moment . . .
Janet Abramowicz, from her book Giorgio Morandi : The Art of Silence
Morandi's light is a light that comes into being as things do.
Light seems to be the deep breath of things."
Emilio Tadini, from a 1990 essay cited by Marilena Pasquali in
her book Giorgio Morandi, The feeling of things
Morandi's light never appears new . . . the overall tone . . .
is that of a first morning of the world . . . His time is a
primal one, detached from history, from
everyday life, from the temporary.
Marilena Pasquali : Giorgio Morandi, The feeling of things
*
The myth that evolved around Morandi as a reclusive artist was, I admit, attractive to me, and yes, the myth is what Morandi wanted to leave us with when he died. There is no question he was a contemplative individual, but there were secrets that Morandi wanted to keep hidden. In 2013 when I was working on my project Still Life I became identified with Morandi's longing for privacy, for silence, for periods of solitude in which he could fully concentrate on his painting. And recently, my experience of Trumpism has helped me appreciate to some extent many of the choices Morandi had made in order to survive Mussolini's Fascist Regime and the two World Wars he had to endure.
Morandi did what was necessary so that he could paint in a way that was True to himself. His painting made it possible for him to give authentic, living, visual form to his experiences and his memories, his fears and terrors and the things he loved most- contemplative stillness and silence, and companionship with those who truly understood and appreciated Morandi's best works. Through his painting Morandi unveiled a transcendent vision in which silence pervades the light that revealed the inner form, the interior essence and secrets that existed within himself as well as in the things he saw and experienced.
It is fair, I think, to say Morandi "lived an ambiguous life," but, on the other hand, who doesn't? He longed for friendship and he longed for the quiet of solitude that would allow him to concentrate fully on his painting. He longed for freedom, and he needed the companionship and support of his sisters, friends, art critics and historians who loved and appreciated the paintings. Hi works of art continue, today, to offer a world-wide audience the experience of a quieted mind and a real sense of refuge which we all need in order to get in touch with That which is worth living for, That which is Real and True, That which exists deep within the Heart of every human being.
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In the last ten years of his life Morandi became quite aware of the fact that his body was slowly decaying from his life-long habit of constant smoking. In letters he wrote to friends he admitted that he could not (or would not?) try to free himself from the addiction that was blackening and decaying his lungs. Nonetheless some of his best and most luminous paintings were created in the last few years of his life when, though he was suffering the most from lung cancer, he was also receiving international recognition for his life's work.
I particularly love Morandi's watercolors--which he began painting only in the late years of his life. I'm fascinated by the the way some of the shapes in his watercolors become, in one moment, spaces that provide light to the entire image, and in the next moment a ghost-like presence of those beloved objects he collected, arranged into compositions and painted, things at once seen, absent, and remembered. His late oil paintings also contain ambiguous spaces in which objects merge into each or into the background, spaces which become inhabited by an otherworldly kind of light and living presence.
Morandi, watercolor
Many writers, including Abramowicz have commented on how few landscape paintings Morandi made during the Second World War (the period 1943-44), many of which were very dark in tonality and feeling. These dark images--absent of color and absent of human presence--would emerge throughout his life: following the First World War, during Italy's Fascist period, and of course during and after World War II.
Morandi, 1941 painting
North Meadow, Fog, 2021
Abramowicz quotes some of the insightful interpretations of writers, critics and historians who held a deep appreciation of Morandi's work. Some of their comments imply the presence of dark forces or memories within his paintings: for example, how the still lifes could become haunted by phantom-like presences; how his flower paintings could at times become tormented and twisted into knots and dissociated spatially from the vase in his compositions.
Abramowicz writes about the many kinds of light in Morandi's still life paintings. In one passage she quoted the great Italian film maker Federico Fellini who said Morandi captured light that was most often a "light of memory." Abramowicz continues the thought: ". . . a remembered light, more than a light of the moment."
In a striking interpretive passage Abramowicz writes about a very dark kind of light: "In 1989 while a guest at [a friend's] house in Milan, I had the opportunity to examine a haunting still life painting that was cast in the gloomy lighting of a morgue. . . [similar to another still life dated between 1944 and 1945 . . .] I wondered if Morandi's memories of the tragic events that had taken place during World War II were reflected in in those still life paintings."
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Most of Morandi's best paintings, including his darkest ones, remained in his own private possession, out of public sight, until long after he died. However the paintings he did allow to be exhibited achieved international recognition before he died. He received several top juried prizes and retrospective exhibitions at internationally respected biennials. Museums around the world mounted retrospective exhibitions of his work, several of which he managed to visit, though it must have been very difficult for him because of his health. Also in the last years of his life, when he needed peace and quiet the most because of his age and health issues, he received more commissions for his paintings than he could fulfill.
In this last part of his life Morandi was no longer plagued by the constant worries about money. Nonetheless he continued to live a cultured but modest life with his sisters in the famed, old Bologna apartment building on Via Fondazza. He painted, he took his morning walks around Bologna, stopping at his favorite cafes where he could talk with friends and enjoy the best coffee in town. And he met more frequently with collectors and visitors in his small studio. Many of his visitors were highly recognized artists, scholars, art critics and historians who were paying hommage to this great painter who was finally getting the recognition he had long deserved.
It becomes quite clear, when you look beyond the myths of Morandi's life, that he was much more than the reclusive monk-like figure that had evolved over time. Perhaps the myths were a way for people to protect him, or insure that his reputation as one of Italy's brightest lights would not become tarnished in any way after so many years in which he was an outcast by ultra conservative academics and supporters of Italy's Fascist history.
There may have been secrets that needed to be kept for reasons we will never know or be able to understand. In any case, after reading Abramowicz's Giorgio Morandi : The Art of Silence with a searching desire to better understand Morandi the man, I came to appreciate her attempt to break through the traditional idealizations about Morandi and get in touch--in a compassionate, honest, well documented scholarly way--with the real sufferings of this sensitive, intelligent, ambitious, secretive man, but also the real joys he experienced as a great artist and someone who was loved by his three sisters and his closest, most devoted, supportive, protective friends.
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Marilena Pasquali begins her 2019 book Giorgio Morandi : The Feeling of Things with an essay written by Tullio Pericoli in which he briefly mentions a letter that Morandi had written to the American jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk in 1961, just three years before he died. It was the first time I had ever heard of the letter. As the story goes, Morandi was in Milan, attending to some some business, and was staying with a friend who happened to have tickets to a live concert in which Monk would be performing on the night of April 21, 1961. The friend invited Morandi to come to the concert with him and Morandi accepted the invitation, even though he had never before heard the music of Thelonius Monk.
Morandi was deeply moved by his experience of Monk's music. In his letter to Monk, Morandi expressed his enthusiastic, heartfelt gratitude for what he had heard and experienced that evening. The experience provided Morandi with some epiphany-like revelations about questions he had been asking himself regarding his own creative process as a painter; and he also noted in the letter that his experience of Monk's music affirmed his belief in the power of art to communicate in ways that transcended the apparent boundaries and differences of culture, language, and artistic mediums (i.e., jazz music and oil painting).
I found the letter online (written in Italian with a poor translation into English). It's rough reading, but I was impressed by Morandi's response to Monk's music, in part because I personally have loved Monk's music since the 1980's and had created a photography project in hommage to this great jazz artist (click here).
In late September, 2021 I published a project that pays hommage to both artists and their painting and music. I invite you to visit The Letter Giorgio Morandi Wrote To Thelonious Monk.
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I dedicate this project to the memory of Giorgio Morandi and his life, the memory of his light and the secrets which he kept hidden from all of us. And, I pay hommage to the Truth, the "Light [that] scintillates and shimmers everywhere" including the wonderful meditative, transformative paintings Morandi made throughout his life--both the darker ones and the most luminous ones. For, even in the darkest of Morandi's paintings, the light of the spirit of this remarkable man and artist remains present and shines forth from within . . .
Epilogue
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Image #36 (Symmetrical Photograph)
The great modern day yogic saint, Swami Muktananda would invite questions
and comments at the end of the meditation programs he gave during
his two world tours in the mid and late 1970's. One person
made the following statement:
"Lately I feel as though everything is a memory, and it feels very strange."
Muktananda responded:
Yes, that's what it all is--it's memory.
And when all memories disappear,
God alone remains.
*
The truth is that this whole world is made of light . . .
everything is nothing but light. . . This has been the
experience of the saints: they see a conscious light
all around them ... Inside everyone lies supreme
light . . . everything is filled with it. The light
we see in a room and think of as light is
not really light; compared with inner
light it is nothing but darkness. The
true light scintillates and shimmers everywhere--before you
and behind you, above you and below you. The great sage
Shivaji said that in this very body exists self-born
brilliant light which is nothing but God.
Sometimes God manifests as that light
or in a form made of that light.
Swami Muktananda, From the Finite to the Infinite, Vol. II
This project was announced on my blog's
Welcome Page August 17, 2021
Related Project Links:
The Letter Giorgio Morandi Wrote To Thelonious Monk September, 2021
Still Life July 2013 - July 2014 A multi-chaptered project in Hommge to Giorigo Morandi
A Collection of Morandi-influenced photographs selected from projects dated August 2014 to July 2021
Welcome Page to The Departing Landscape blog, which includes the complete hyperlinked listing of my online photography projects dating from the most recent to those dating back to the 1960's. You will also find on the Welcome Page my resume, contact information . . . and much more.
