Giorgio Morandi meets Joe Goode

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The hit of the fall New York museum season has been the lovely, first-ever American retrospective of Italian still-life painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) at the Metropolitan. I’ll have a full review later. But one reason I was excited to see the show was to ponder the possible relationship between Morandi’s modest pictures of bottles, cups, bowls and biscuit tins against flat fields of color (like the one from 1954, above left) and the ‘milk bottle paintings’ by L.A. artist Joe Goode, made in 1961, when he was just 24. A connection has seemed likely, and the show confirmed it for me.

Goode’s paintings juxtapose a large, squarish canvas, more than 5 feet per side and brushed in monochrome color, with an actual glass milk bottle, usually painted the same color and standing on the floor in front of the painting. Sometimes a ‘ghost image’ of the bottle is painted on the canvas. At right is a detail of ‘Purple (Artforum Name)’ from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, focusing on the bottle. (A full image of the work is here; you can find another Goode milk bottle painting here.)

Still-life painting wasn’t exactly cutting edge in the 1960s. And Goode’s work is partly informed by other artistic developments, including Color Field abstraction, Jasper Johns’ insertion of ordinary objects into his pictures and perhaps the mass-produced collage elements that Goode’s pal, Edward Ruscha, was putting into paintings. But the humble milk bottle resonates with Morandi’s work.

Goode may well have seen the February 1961 Morandi exhibition at Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, one of the Italian artist’s last in America while he was still alive. (The Times’ review called it ‘a major art event.’) A year later Goode was included in the landmark Pasadena Museum show, ‘New Paintings of Common Objects’ -- together with Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and others -- considered the first Pop art survey. Curator Walter Hopps, who assembled the Morandi show when he worked at Ferus, also organized the Pasadena show.

Tuesday morning at the Chateau Marmont the Getty Foundation announced $2.8 million in grants to 15 Southern California exhibition venues for a coordinated series of shows, slated for 2011, exploring aspects of L.A. art history between 1945 and 1980. The Morandi-Goode-Pasadena connection is, I suspect, just the kind of rich but often overlooked historical nexus that those forthcoming exhibitions will illuminate.

--Christopher Knight