When I am in London I usually make a visit to the Estorick Collection. This gallery, located in the Islington area, houses a collection of Italian modernist work, collected by its original owner, Eric Estorick. It attracts some quite prestigious loan exhibitions from Italian galleries, so there is always something new to see.* The current show is different, I think, from anything I’ve seen there before.
One of the great figures of Italian modernism was Giorgio Morandi, and on this occasion the items by him in the Estorick Collection were displayed alongside work by a contemporary British artist, Paul Coldwell, whose work is a mixture of small-scale, still-life sculptures, prints and poetry. The idea seems to have been to view the work by both artists as commenting on each other. (The term Caldwell uses is “dialogue”.) It was a nice idea, but sadly I didn’t think that it worked.
Morandi’s still life studies are drawn, painted or etched, but Coldwell assembles miniature collections of plaster objects. He doesn’t seem to me to be as concerned as his master is with the subtleties of composition. In fact they often came across as rather arbitrary. Coldwell’s use of contemporary digital printing doesn’t come anywhere near the effect of Morandi’s somewhat obsessional cross-hatching, an important characteristic of which is precisely its commitment to the enormous task of hand-drawing.
The raison d’être of the exhibition is that it emerged from Coldwell’s experience of social isolation in “lockdown”. I believe that it is supposed to convey the sense of an existence that is closed in, and by necessity focussed upon intimate and proximate objects. Is it really the case that Morandi’s entirely voluntary seclusion in his home village of Grizzana can be treated as equivalent to involuntary “lockdown” during the recent pandemic? I’m not convinced.
There are aspects of the experience, however, which lead me to commend it. It made me think, and that is something I would hope to encounter in any good exhibition. I was compelled to look at the work of Giorgio Morandi again …. which is never a bad thing. The trip to Islington was far from wasted.**
*The collection has figures quite regularly in this blog. For some explanatory comment see the post of 15/10/18.
**The Estorick has an excellent cafe, which served very good tortellini. That can’t be bad, can it?