February 2016 – TABLE FOR SIX

For Table For Six’s winter 2016 menu, we visited Northern Italy in the 1960s. We found inspirations from both Antonioni’s first color film Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) and Giorgio Morandi’s late still life paintings (on view by appointment at Center for Italian Modern Art). Shot in Ravenna, Red Desert set out to paint an alienated industrial landscape and the internal world of its protagonist. The colors in the film were widely studied; Antonioni sometimes literally painted the scenes so the fruits on the vendor’s cart, the trees and the sidewalks could come together to achieve a very precise color palette, a palette astonishingly similar to Morandi’s still life paintings towards the end of his life. A Bologna local, Giorgio Morandi spent most of his life painting and teaching copper plate etching in Bologna. Coincidentally Red Desert was released the year Morandi died in 1964.