Giorgio Morandi

Like so many Chinese artists and writers of his generation, Weiwei is very knowledgeable about the early Soviet experiments in art. We talked about Tatlin and the constructivists and the lives of Malevich and Lissitzky and then we moved onto Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter who died in 1964, whom Weiwei greatly admires. On the face of it, Morandi was not at all a political painter, nor was he involved in any kind of radical or conceptual work, so it would be easy to assume that Weiwei had no strong views on his work and that there was no connection between the two artists. Today, to most people, or rather to most non-painters, Morandi is not a household name and even within the international art world his reputation was not cemented until late in his career.

Perhaps his relatively modest standing has something to do with the obscure lifestyle that he forged for himself. By today's standards he appears at first glance to be thoroughly uncharismatic. He was neither a socialite nor a womaniser, he was never in the public eye and he wasn't particularly interested in commenting on anything that was happening in the outside world. His father died when he was eleven. He never married. He lived with his mother and his three sisters in the same house for fifty years. He habitually dressed in a formal suit; his hair was short, parted on the right. He was the sort of man whom one might expect to find in the same seat at the same restaurant every day, ordering the same meal. It is true that he was professor of etching at Bologna University for some years and that in the summers he would make it up into the hills of Grizzana, but there is nothing in his biography that would justify a biopic. Morandi was interested in one thing -- painting his next picture. When he was asked by a curator towards the end of his career about the whereabouts of some of his works, his reply captured his ethic perfectly:

I cannot give you any indication because I'm afraid I have never made a note of where my paintings have ended up ... I am always at work and work is my sole passion. And unfortunately I have become aware that I must always start from the beginning, and ought to burn what I've done in the past.

Consequently, for many years Morandi was mistaken for a dry, religious, almost insipid man of monkish habits and few outside interests. To make matters worse, his work appeared to some foreign curators and collectors to be thoroughly repetitious and provincial. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, he painted the same handful of pots, bottles, jars, clocks, compote bowls and mannequins, occasionally running off the odd landscape, though these were equally repetitious. Carefully, and over decades Morandi built up a collection of these humble objects, finding them in junk shops or making them himself, allowing them to stand for months to gather dust. Like Duchamp, Morandi believed in dust. Along with the elaborate system of curtains and blinds that he employed in order to create a uniform zenithal light, the dust dulled the edges of the objects and helped them on their way into the solitude and obscurity that he prized so highly. Eventually, after a lengthy period of repose, an object might finally be picked out from among the crowd and moved carefully onto a shelf, nearer to the drama of the stage, Selected objects were then arranged on a table, rearranged countless times, over weeks, until Morandi felt that the balance was right. Later in his life he worried that three weeks was never enough time to arrange a natura morte and he regretted his impatience, wishing that he had spent longer, months possibly or years, making sure that he had the light just right and the perfect selection of objects.

Here, it must have seemed, was a slightly weird, reclusive man of modest talents and little originality -- in short, a minor painter who would not leave any kind of mark on the world. Today however those who become acquainted with Morandi's work are usually astonished by what they discern within it.

Like Ai Weiwei, Morandi is a political artist in the sense that he was trying to capture his own vision of reality, a vision that was radically at odds with that of his time. And like Weiwei, he found inspiration in the ordinary or the banal. In Morandi's case, this exercise of his freedom of expression didn't put him in danger, it just meant that it took several decades for audiences to begin to fully appreciate his work, but his urge to paint springs from the same source as Ai Weiwei's -- from the urge to renovate our vision of the world and to find new meaning. And this gets to the heart of the inevitable conflict between artists and repressive regimes. In the past, I had talked with Weiwei about the great icon painters of Russia and Weiwei emphasised this same point. The forms of art are endless, what counts is the individual's engagement with the world, and their own personal attempt to find meaning.

For Ai Weiwei, or Morandi, or any other artist practising today, perspective, or realism in general, is of course a series of conventions. It is not reality. It is a schema and that is all. One schema among many. An orthography that we can choose to use, in the same way that for millennia the priests of Sais chose to use their own canonical orthography, with crocodile-headed deities and ibis beaks and the whole plethora of dynastic symbols all rendered without perspective but with something else, and some other fifth element. The cave painters of Lascaux or the conceptual artists of the late twentieth century used another. But the idea that realism is merely one way of seeing among many is anathema to Maoism.

Totalitarian regimes, like the regime in China (though it is rapidly becoming less totalitarian, not voluntarily but because its censorship mechanisms fail to cope with the internet and civil society continues to expand), cannot abide alternative articulations of reality. Mao, as an accomplished poet himself, understood very well the link between form and content, and that if you limit the forms of art you also limit the possible content. He knew full well that by controlling forms of artistic expression you are able to control people's inner lives. But it couldn't last forever. Art doesn't stand still. As time passes the old ways of seeing grow stale and only new ways of seeing will do, and there was nothing Mao nor any of his successors could do about this.

"I believe," said Morandi, "there is nothing more surreal and nothing more abstract than reality. What has value in art is an individual way of seeing things: nothing else counts at all."

"Morandi," began Weiwei, "has been very influential on so many artists, not only painters. There are so many characters in his painting. It's very -- how can you say -- religious. And also he is like Van Gogh. Because the act itself is so believable, so pure, so purified, so cut off from others. He paints what he sees. The reality he sees. We have to catch up. So he leaves us a perfect example. Yes. You can always take that kind of action as the perfect kind of quality, the most convincing quality. Everything is related to integrity. The persistence to believe, to never get confused."

"And so Morandi persisted but he wasn't in danger as you are. You find yourself in a different position because you're not just being ignored by a critical establishment, you are coming up against people who don't want to know about your way of looking at the world and instead of just traducing or ignoring your art, they are putting you in jail."

"We all somehow have to be honest enough to face our condition and of course the artist always, always is the one who recognises a certain kind of reality and tries to announce it. You know poets, writers or artists, at first they are the only ones who see it. They have to announce it. They hear a kind of voice or they see some possibilities so clearly. But that all comes from the inner core, from the kind of nature they have. If there is anything valuable then it comes out because their nature perfectly reflects everybody's nature or instinct at that time."

From Hanging Man, Barnaby Martin