Fiori

Multicoloured corollas – whites, oranges, greens and yellows crowd the foreground of this small canvas – emerge forcefully at the centre of the image of flowers, which is emotional, perturbed as by an existence that flows nearby, leaving upon it its impurities, its waste.
This is a rare Morandi, a precocious work. It has been little viewed and little studied, but it is significant confirmation of the swift transition to material and its shadows that marked Morandi’s crucial passage from his sun-drenched two years alongside the bright, clear, “classical” line of Valori Plastici (where he encountered De Chirico and Carrà) to the intensely personal style of the great, dramatic, darkened still lifes of late 1920 and 1921 (comprehensive catalogue numbers 52, 58, 59), a style that continued in the next couple of years, especially in paintings, like this one, that were small in size. Flowers, as the title says: and it is common knowledge that later on Morandi would often depict flowers at times of lesser concentration, quasi-relaxation. But not here. Now this reliance, as on a dare, to an overcharged material turgidity, is evidence that the reasons driving the painting of the masterpieces of his first period of solitude remain intact: that solitude that came in 1921, after his tangential contact with Cubo-Futurist visual culture, after metaphysical painting, after Valori Plastici.