Mixed company | 19 May 2006

The pre-eminent Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) is frequently called an artists’ artist, which is usually taken to indicate that his extreme formality or painterliness (depending on who is arguing the case) appeals more to those in the know than to the man in the street. Morandi undoubtedly does have a deep and lasting appeal to artists, as this exhibition reminds us, but his profoundly unassuming and contemplative pictures also speak directly to a wider public, if the context is congenial. Morandi’s work is quiet, concentrating on groups of jars and bottles or odd corners of landscape, and in the bustle and cacophony of a mixed exhibition they can be overlooked. However, this is a mixed exhibition with a difference: it is devoted not just to Morandi’s own work, but also to his influence on later generations of British artists — specifically to those working today, though five of the 12 artists featured here are now dead.