Arts: Still life with ambiguities

Was Giorgio Morandi a virgin?" I ask Alexandra Noble, the curator of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian art in Islington in London. This wild card gets the sort of dismissive response it perhaps deserves. "I'm afraid I'm not privy to that kind of information," she replies, somewhat coolly. "Perfect planning prevents pathetic performance", reads a small notice on the wall behind her giant office desk. Her longish face tilts sideways a little, quizzically, as she speaks. Modigliani's favourite angle. Perhaps human beings come to resemble their passions.

But the subject of our conversation is not Modigliani but Morandi, that strange, reserved man from the Romagna who painted bottles, jugs and coffee pots in usually muted tones; and then, a little later, bottles again, and yet more bottles, throughout his life, some squat and fluted, others tall and tapering. And almost always opaque; and often the same bottles, arranged in slightly different ways. Or painted at different times of the day so that the shadows played pleasing tricks across the surfaces on which the bottles were huddled together.

When he wasn't painting bottles, he was painting outdoor scenes of the village of Grizzana - a stretch of lane; the angle of a building stunned by sunlight - where he spent his summers. Not a human being anywhere to be seen.

A reserved man, of fixed and well-founded habits, you might say.

For the next three months, the Estorick Collection is showing a selection of Morandi's paintings that are on loan from the Giovanardi Collection of Milan. The Giovanardis were one of several Milanese families who collected modern Italian art after the Second World War. Not Morandi alone, though, but also Carra, Sirone and Campigli, painters of the Novecento movement who championed a return to the ideas of "traditional values", heroic myth and monumentality. Not Fascistic exactly, but not entirely out of line with what Mussolini might have found sympathetic.

But it was Morandi who was Augusto Giovanardi's greatest passion - his first picture was acquired in 1950, after he'd seen it hanging in the foyer of La Scala opera house, one of many paintings due to be sold at a charity auction. Both men were from the Romagna, and they struck up a friendship of sorts. The Giovanardi collection now owns the largest group of Morandis in private hands in the world, and the Estorick is currently displaying 19 of them, from a painting of bottles in the early Cubist manner of Braque and Picasso to a late still life of 1956, by which time the bottles had been joined, and even upstaged in part, by a rugged selection of hand-made cardboard boxes.

But still I don't understand the impulses of this man, and that is why I asked that silly question about his private life. What did "still life" mean to him exactly? Was it an avoidance of the political? Or is it true, as one newspaper has already rashly claimed, that Morandi was embraced by the Fascists, and that his art proved to be political in spite of any intentions on his part? Was it not also true that Sirone, most energetically urban of the Novecento painters on display in this exhibition, criticised him for his timidity? Was still life, then, a kind of political cowardice on Morandi's part?

Noble sighs. "It was certainly bordering on an obsession... but as far as the politics are concerned, I don't know..." And so she calls in her Italian colleague, Roberta Cremoncini, from next door, and between the two of them, at least, a part of the enigma is solved.

"It is not at all true that he was a recluse," says Cremoncini, punchily. "Though reserved in his habits, he was also extremely active, with a wide circle of friends, and very well-informed about contemporary developments in the arts. But to say that his work was popular with the Fascists is simply not true, and anyway, Mussolini had no clear strategy on the arts. Even Futurism was accepted at first... As for Morandi himself, he was in Bologna, a long way from Rome, a long way from everything. Nor was he in any way partial to groups. The Futurists tried to draw him in at one stage, but he had no real sympathy for them, and, frankly, the posturings of Boccioni irritated him... He was a very local man, who did nothing heroic at all."

Noble nods in quiet agreement from behind the curator's desk. "He was an aesthetic..." she adds.

"You mean an aesthete?" I ask.

"No, an aesthetic, with monkish habits. He lived with his two spinster sisters. His studio was also his bedroom."

"An ascetic?'

"Yes, an aesthetic."

"And what of the obsession with bottles? What does it all represent?" I ask Cremoncini.

"Well, I don't know," she shrugs, smiling. "Some Italian critics think that the positioning and the repositioning of the bottles from painting to painting was some kind of a statement of the development of feelings. That the white cup meant something. Other critics see them as characters."

"What, people?"

"Well, maybe..."

"What is certainly true is that he is our ticket to the international scene," says Noble. "His worldwide popularity is enormous and growing. According to the museum in Bologna, over the next five years all the Morandi exhibitions will be in the Far East. There is a huge demand for him over there."

"Why?"

"Because he is so meditative."

Meditative? I trot back downstairs to spend a few more minutes communing with the 19 that are in London. What strikes me now, as I scrutinise one small oil after another - how modest is the scale of all these canvases - is not their singular calm detachment at all, or even their striving to arrive at some Schopenhauer-like essence of bottleness, but something that I hadn't noticed at first - or even second - look.

With the exception of two or three of the very greatest of these paintings, what strikes me now is how crudely the paint has been applied, and how Morandi so often fills certain areas of the canvas with brush strokes which appear to be coming from several different directions at the same time.

Not at all an exemplum of monumentally contemplative surface calm, then, but a much more fragile, imperfect and haphazard talent needing to prove that it can, at least, do one thing well, dear God, before having supper again with those two spinster sisters.

To 19 Sept (0171-704 9522)