Still Life, 1956 Museo Morandi, Bologna, copyright 2008, Artists’ Rights Society (ARS), New York, SIAE, Rome. (Image at the Met’s Web site)

Like a lot of artists, I first discovered the painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) when I was young and agog. Morandi’s not-there-there paintings, consisting of simple, barely variegated bottles, cups, blocks, pestles, and pitchers that are hard to distinguish from their backgrounds, come in muted browns, grays, and ochres. With their wobbly contours and odd shapes, they convey anxiety, fleetingness, and the tenderness that comes when an artist loves his subject. They are still lifes that are simultaneously about the small and the big. They’re about nothing much at all — bottles — yet they’re also about how deeply we invest meaning in the material things that we surround ourselves with during our brief stints on earth.

Morandi’s pictures remind me of formal family portraits. The bottles, like people, lean toward one another, or stand awkwardly in the background, trying to hide from the viewer. Morandi’s bottles can be like old grandmas who come over on Sundays, and his cups like the kind of children who somehow never quite fit in the family. The alignment of objects is often tricky—an edge of one lining up with an edge of another that’s behind it, as if, impossibly, they occupy the same space.

While living quietly in a house with his three sisters in Bologna, Italy, Morandi survived two world wars, all the while churning out one small still life after another. Even during the glory days of American abstract expressionism (the 1940s and early ’50s), he pursued figurative — not abstract — art.

While alive, Morandi had his admirers and detractors — as he does today. There are those who repudiate his pursuit of “art for art’s sake” (his bottles are a retreat from political engagement), or those who think he’s too bourgeois (his bottles make boring people feel self-satisfied). His subject matter may be deeply traditional (the genre of the still life has been going strong ever since the 17th century), but his approach — giving priority to the picture plane and confronting the deep uncertainty of knowledge — is profoundly modern.

I’ve probably seen too much Morandi at this point in my life. Overexposure results in visual exhaustion. It now takes work for me to see Morandi. I have to first break out of my habit of having seen him so many times before. (This problem pertains to a lot of artists I’ve seen a lot, from Leonardo to Monet — especially Monet!) Still, I stopped by the Met last week (as I’ve said, the pleasure of $60 Met membership is that you can do drop-ins) to check out the current Morandi exhibition, up through December 14th.

I’m happy to report that Morandi is still great. Go see his paintings if you’re in New York over the holidays.

But I’m sorry to report that when looking at these Morandis, you have the right to know something that I found out only about five years ago — something that won’t be found on any of the wall plaques at the Met. Morandi was a fascist sympathizer. He’s on record expressing his delight that Il Duce himself purchased a painting, and he noted that his great faith in fascism “from the outset” stayed with him “even in the darkest and stormiest of days.”

I leave it to scholars to document the extent to which Morandi was a fascist (was he “merely” a sympathizer?), but it’s interesting that artists, unlike writers, always get a free ride when it comes to moral condemnation for bad behavior. No art historian I’ve encountered seems to give a damn that Caravaggio killed a man. In fact, they’ve always seemed to relish the delight in surprising their audience with this fact.

Where the literary world has confronted the problem of morality versus art, struggling with the profound disparity between the writings of Ezra Pound and Paul de Man and their heinous fascist sympathies, the art world barely bothers itself with the matter. Several great artists were openly sympathetic with the Nazis. In 1941, for example, André Derain, along with several other famous French artists, made a splashy visit to the oversized studio of the Nazi sculptor Arno Brecker. And here we have Morandi, basking in the great honor conveyed on him by the Metropolitan Museum of art.

As I wandered from one Morandi to another, I couldn’t fight off the feeling that I ought not to permit myself to experience too much beauty from looking at these pictures. I became caught in the great, sad gulf that exists between the realm of moral action and the realm of art.