'A Homely Art'

In 1998, Guy Davenport published as a book Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature, originally delivered as the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto in 1982. The subject is still-life painting. Recast as essays, the lectures are themselves an artfully arranged still life. He takes a conventional category and out of his learning, painter’s eye and sensitivity to kinships – cultural, aesthetic, philosophical -- assembles a web of associations that enable us to see it new. His prose, as always, is focused and digressive; his mind, fresh and nimble, the opposite of bored. Davenport writes:

“Still life is a minor art, and one with a residue of didacticism that will never bleach out; a homely art. From the artist’s point of view, it has always served as a contemplative form useful for working out ideas, color schemes, opinions. It has the same relation to larger, more ambitious paintings as the sonnet to the long poem.”

Fine work done in a minor art is a major accomplishment. Think of Beerbohm’s essays or J.V. Cunningham’s epigrams. “Minor” should not be pejorative, merely a statement of scale. “One way of recognizing verities,” Davenport writes, “is to look at them as if you had never seen them before, to make an enigma of the familiar.”

That distills the charm and unlikely genius of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), the Italian painter who reclaimed the still life as a modernist and made it his own. I find only one reference to Morandi anywhere in Davenport’s work, in Eclogues: Eight Stories (1981), and it’s merely his last name. That’s a surprise. Davenport devoted an entire book to Balthus (The Balthus Notebook, 1989), a lesser artist. I would love to have heard what he had to say about Morandi, who was born 130 years ago on this date, July 20. His palette was narrow, his tonal choices subtle, his subjects – bowls, bottles, vases --- commonplace and endlessly recycled. Working with minimal means he became one of the great painters of the twentieth century. In Herakleitos and Diogenes (Grey Fox Press, 1979; included in 7 Greeks, New Directions, 1995), Davenport translates Heraclitus’ Fragment 40:

“The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”

[Naturally, Dave Lull found what I didn't. In Davenport’s Apples and Pears (1984): “After eighty years of bony French women in footbaths and Braque's mandolin and Picasso's guitar and Morandi's kitchen table and Klee's puppet theatre, we need a subject matter.” In The Balthus Notebook: “And Balthus is rich in hommages: a still life bows to Morandi, a hand holding a mirror to Utamaro, a cat to Hogarth.”]