Set this beside Morandi's own paintings and the lineage is plain — and plainly mischievous. Where the Bolognese hermit massed his bottles into close, breathing huddles, Meyerowitz pulls three of the master's actual objects apart and parcels them across a triptych, one per panel, each alone in its bay like a saint in an altarpiece. A dark wine bottle, near-black with a plum warmth in its shoulder; a squat ochre box, paper-skinned, the only thing that sits rather than stands; a tall pale bottle, chalk-white, its dripped coat of paint frozen mid-run. Three solos where Morandi wrote chords.
The pleasure is all in the bodies. That brown bottle has the long, tapering waist of a figure caught in profile, casting a shadow that lengthens toward the box like a glance across a room. The white one answers it, ghost to its shade, its surface scabbed and weeping with old gesso — a thing handled, primed, made strange by the painter who once owned it. Between them the cardboard cube squats, dumb and tactile, all corrugated tan against the bottles' verticals. Color stays low and earthen — bruise, oatmeal, cream — and that restraint is exactly the heat of it.
Then the wall, which is the real revelation. Meyerowitz photographs Morandi's studio paper itself: a sun-faded gold, watermarked, scribbled with faint pencil arcs at the baseboard where the painter sighted his arrangements again and again. Those loops are his thinking, left in graphite. By isolating each object against that worked ground, Meyerowitz turns reverence into something sly and sensual — letting the things keep their dignity while quietly undressing them, panel by panel, into desire.
Set this beside Morandi's own paintings and the lineage is plain — and plainly mischievous. Where the Bolognese hermit massed his bottles into close, breathing huddles, Meyerowitz pulls three of the master's actual objects apart and parcels them across a triptych, one per panel, each alone in its bay like a saint in an altarpiece. A dark wine bottle, near-black with a plum warmth in its shoulder; a squat ochre box, paper-skinned, the only thing that sits rather than stands; a tall pale bottle, chalk-white, its dripped coat of paint frozen mid-run. Three solos where Morandi wrote chords.
The pleasure is all in the bodies. That brown bottle has the long, tapering waist of a figure caught in profile, casting a shadow that lengthens toward the box like a glance across a room. The white one answers it, ghost to its shade, its surface scabbed and weeping with old gesso — a thing handled, primed, made strange by the painter who once owned it. Between them the cardboard cube squats, dumb and tactile, all corrugated tan against the bottles' verticals. Color stays low and earthen — bruise, oatmeal, cream — and that restraint is exactly the heat of it.
Then the wall, which is the real revelation. Meyerowitz photographs Morandi's studio paper itself: a sun-faded gold, watermarked, scribbled with faint pencil arcs at the baseboard where the painter sighted his arrangements again and again. Those loops are his thinking, left in graphite. By isolating each object against that worked ground, Meyerowitz turns reverence into something sly and sensual — letting the things keep their dignity while quietly undressing them, panel by panel, into desire.