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Malcolm Morley
English
painter active in the USA. After attending the Camberwell
School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1952 to 1953,
he studied at
the Royal College of Art, London, from 1954 to 1957.
Deeply impressed
by the Abstract Expressionist paintings in an exhibition
of American art (London, Tate, 1956), he made a brief
visit to the USA in 1957 and
settled permanently in New York in 1958. While earning
his living as a
waiter he developed an abstract idiom influenced by Barnett
Newman,
limiting himself primarily to horizontal bands in black
and white, as
in Battle of Hastings (1964; see 1983–4 exh. cat.,
p. 75).
After trying in 1964 to paint a ship
from real life Morley turned to
photographs of ships, which he copied in a meticulous
trompe l'oeil
style with the aid of a grid, as in Empire
Monarch (1965; Kansas City,
KS, Larry and Cindy Meeker priv. col.; see 1983–4
exh. cat., p. 18). As
a child Morley had made many detailed models of ships,
which may help
account for his choice of subject matter. These and
the other pictures
using ship imagery that followed, such as On
Deck (1966;
New York,
Met.), marked the beginning of Photorealism in the
USA, although Morley
preferred the term Super Realism. He moved from these
to all manner of
photographic images, including travel brochures, reproductions
of
celebrated paintings (e.g. Vermeer,
Portrait of the Artist in his
Studio, 1968; Sweden, priv. col., see 1983–4
exh. cat., p. 25) and
contemporary scenes. Often he would turn both the source
material and
canvas upside down so as to reproduce it as accurately
as possible
without stylizing it. Like the Pop artists who preceded
him, by
focusing on the repeatability of images he questioned
the basis of
artistic creativity. Replicating the original in an
almost mechanical
way and conceiving of the painting simply as a coloured
surface, Morley
undermined the distinction between the abstract and
the figurative.
Although he abandoned Photorealism as
a style in the early 1970s,
Morley continued to examine the relationship between
images and the
objective reality they purported to portray. The Photorealist
rendering
of a telephone book in St John's
Yellow Pages (1971;
Cologne, Mus.
Ludwig) is accompanied by a real electric bell that
negates the
illusion of the image by making its flatness apparent.
In Los Angeles
Yellow Pages (1971; Humlebæk, Louisiana Mus.)
the front of a torn
telephone book was painted in a mixture of acrylic
and wax encaustic so
that the tears could be represented in relief, but
this very literalism
draws attention to the image as a painted surface.
In another work,
Kodak Castle (1971; Utica, NY, Munson–Williams–Proctor
Inst.), Morley
reproduced the folded corner of his source material,
paradoxically
emphasizing the flatness of his painting by reference
to another
two-dimensional artefact. Throughout this period in
particular Morley
was influenced by the philosophy and ideas about perception
of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. Even after adopting looser, more expressionist
brushwork
in the early 1970s, Morley remained committed to the
conceptual
approach to painting that had characterized his Photorealist
works,
with their focus on the process of painting.
In the early 1970s Morley's interest
in the life and work of van Gogh
as representative of the myth of the romantic artist
led him to shoot
11 hours of film as part of a project called The Discipline
of Vincent,
the Ballroom Dancer. From 1975 to 1976 he produced
a number of pictures
depicting scenes of disaster, such as Train
Wreck (1975;
Vienna, Mus.
20. Jhts), in which he seemed to be destroying the
remnants of his own
previous style. While working in Tampa, FL, for 18
months from 1977 to
1979 he began using his own watercolours and drawings
as models for his
oil paintings, much as he had previously used found
material, claiming
that the method allowed him the freedom to incorporate
abrupt changes
of scale as a challenge to conventional hierarchies.
A series of
watercolours and drawings of the archaeology and landscape
of Crete and
Greece, which he visited in 1982, formed the basis
of some of his later
paintings, such as Albatross (1985; see 1986 exh. cat.),
painted in an
energetic style that invited comparison with the work
of younger
Neo-expressionist painters working in Europe and the
USA. In 1984
Morley was the first recipient of the Turner Prize
administered through
the Tate Gallery in London.
Bibliography
K. Levin: ‘Malcolm Morley: Post-style Illusionism',
A. Mag., xlvii/4
(1973), pp. 60–63; repr. in Super Realism: A
Critical Anthology, ed. G.
Battcock (New York, 1975), pp. 170–88
Malcolm Morley: Paintings, 1965–82 (exh. cat.
by M. Compton, Basle,
Ksthalle; Rotterdam, Boymans–van Beuningen; London,
Whitechapel A.G.;
and elsewhere; 1983–4)
Malcolm Morley (exh. cat. by J. Yau, London, Fabian
Carlsson Gal., 1985)
Malcolm Morley: New Paintings and Watercolours, 1984–1986
(exh. cat.,
New York, Xavier Fourcade, 1986)
Malcolm Morley (exh. cat., New York, Pace Gal., 1988)
Malcolm Morley (exh. cat., London, Anthony d'Offay
Gal., 1990)
Copyright material reproduced under
licence from Macmillan Publishers
Ltd, London, England
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