A retrospective of the cool, violent paintings of Malcolm Morley
One of the largely unnoticed facts about current art is that despite the hoopla made over some national groups of painters—mainly German and Italian—a great deal of the most inventive and solid painting in the '80s keeps being done by the English. One thinks immediately of Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin or half a dozen others. And among them, prominently, one thinks of Malcolm Morley. Morley is 52. His first retrospective—curated by Nicholas Serota, director of London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, and handsomely introduced by Art Historian Michael Compton—has spent the past year touring from Basel to London to Chicago; it opened this month at its final stop, New York City's Brooklyn Museum. With its 52 paintings, the show spans less than 20 years, from 1965 to 1982. It is a highly edited affair that says nothing about Morley's background as an abstract painter, but a great deal about his foreground as a figurative one.
In this case, the foreground counts most. It is a simplification, but not a gross one, to say that Morley and the late Philip Guston were the twin unlatchers of "new figuration," at least in America. Morley was an expressionist artist when most of the current crop of neoexpressionists were still, aesthetically speaking, in diapers. His mix of mass-media cliche with intimate confession, his abrupt shifts of gear in imagery and format, and his therapeutic desire to shovel his whole life—traumas, lusts, memories, hopes—onto the canvas, struck many younger painters as a fresh model of artistic character. In the past few years, aping this or that aspect of his work has almost become a cottage industry; West Broadway is full of painters solemnly brandishing fragments of Morley as their own, like leaf-cutting ants. He is on the way to being as influential as De Kooning (one of his own idols) was 30 years ago.
Then too his character must be reckoned into the burgeoning myth. Morley's reputation as the last wild man of the art world grows and grows. Stories about him proliferate and are often true: a jail sentence in Wormwood Scrubs as a young man, the rages in the broken-up studio, the destruction of work. One German collector gave Morley $40,000 for a painting and was nonplused to see the artist slash his canvas to ribbons before handing the check back. Such gestures establish a profile. But it is the work that matters.