If the folks at the Phillips Collection are looking to project a more contemporary image for their museum these days, surely they must realize that Giorgio Morandi isn’t the guy for the job. “Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life” pays tribute to an Italian painter who was hellbent on being the consummate ascetic modernist, so detached from the lives of people around him—and so driven to pursue the same subject in the same manner, over and over again—as to appear like an otherworldly, monomaniacal shut-in.

Morandi stayed away from the capitals of the art world, choosing to live out his entire life in his modest childhood home in Bologna, keeping close quarters with his mother and three sisters. In so doing, he seems to have followed the example of French painters like Edouard Vuillard and Paul Cézanne. Neither of them really left home for the sake of their art, either; both, at the height of their powers, were absorbed in domestic life, leisure time, and the collision of sensorium and memory—all typical late-19th-century obsessions in fine art.

Vuillard painted his maman sitting, sewing, or reading the newspaper (“My mother is my greatest muse!” he proclaimed), Cézanne rendered view after view of Montagne Sainte Victoire, the backdrop of his family’s home in Aix-en-Provence. Morandi went further than either of these predecessors in his withdrawal from the noise of the world.... Continued