A series of five vase bouquets painted from 1942-1951 are the unexpected standouts of the current “Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964” retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through 14 December 2008. They are painted in the same softly constrained palette as the unoccupied vases and jars that cozy up to one another in typical works of his mature period. However in these pictures, the interplay is between a single vase, its comportment of flowers, and the calm but radiant ground. How to explain their haunting presence? Is it that, drawn from silk flowers rather than living ones, their tone becomes sculptural, with attention to light and dark, tipping planes of bloom, and a mounding of stemless flower heads close atop the vase that are as substantial as the ceramic that upholds them? Is it the good hearted personality of these vases, more playful and warm than his default, severely formal repertoire? Two of the vases sport blue vertical stripes and a nipped, shapely form, rather like pretty ladies’ bodices of the period. But I think the real reason these florals feel so different is because they are suffused with affection. Morandi made them as gifts for his dearest friends-- artists, poets, and musicologists.

The other cluster of small floral bouquets that springs to mind as hauntingly beautiful and intensely personal are those painted by Manet during his last fragile months. Here too close friendship suffuses the pictures. His companions brought flowers from their gardens to cheer him – lilac, carnations, peonies, tulips, clematis, pansies and rose – full of perfume and nostalgia. He made small oil paintings of them bedside that are fresh, tender and live, in his own vases and beakers and glasses. Quick, sure strokes capture their sparkle and watery reflections.

For the Morandi group, you’ll have to visit the Met show. Its accompanying catalogue toughens them. But the 16 Manet paintings, together with evocative letters and remembrances by dear friends who visited him as he ebbed, are gathered and reproduced in an exquisite book “The Last Flowers of Manet” by Robert Gorden and Andrew Forge (Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1999.)