Malcolm Morley’s career divides into three episodes. As a boy, Morley (1931-2018) makes a balsa wood model of H.M.S. Nelson only to have it obliterated by a German bomb during the Blitz. Then comes crime and incarceration for housebreaking. In prison, he reads Irving Stone’s 1934 novelization of Van Gogh’s life, and is moved by grandiloquent passages like this:
"He worked because he had to, because it kept him from suffering too much mentally, because it distracted his mind. He could do without a wife, a home, and children . . . But he could not do without something which was greater than himself, which was his life—the power and ability to create."
A prison-sponsored art program rehabilitates Morley and reveals his vocation. Initially, he is enthralled by American Abstract Expressionism, especially by the deviant variety produced by Barnett Newman, whose work eschews passionate gesture in favor of controlled Color Field painting. Morley, working as a waiter after moving to New York from London in 1958, meets Newman, who encourages and advises him.
That earliest period of Morley’s career is invisible to us—the parameters of the Petzel show are 1959–2014—but we must be aware of it because it links him to a historical apprenticeship process: just as Matisse begins painting in an academic mode and then moves on to Impressionism and Fauvism, Morley assimilates a painterly idiom, American abstraction, and then rejects it. His embrace during the sixties of figuration marks the moment he achieves his artistic identity, his personal style. New York’s “anything goes” art scene probably gave Morley that opportunity because of its anarchic nature: a style like Abstract Expressionism could dominate for a moment but would inevitably yield to Pop or Minimalism.
Morley called this new work, his second phase, Superrealism, a term that links him both to Richard Estes’s Photorealism and Andy Warhol’s Pop Art. Morley’s work is vastly different because it is always paint, always the product of an inimitable hand. During the seventies, as he enters his third and final phase, Morley becomes more flamboyant, as if an Expressionist-Futurist impulse jolted his Superrealism into motion by linking it to memory: the child creator of the model ship persists in the grown man who would always longing for that lost utopia.
The panorama contained in these thirty-three works, the chronicle of Morley’s career in New York, begins in 1959 but also includes the toy soldiers, model ships, postcards, and even the grid-covered glass he used to frame his pictures. Studio Interior (1959) is a 50 by 40-inch oil on canvas of singular importance because it marks Morley’s stepping away from non-representational painting. In composition, it recalls Velázquez’s Las Meninas in that we are looking into the studio from the same vantage point enjoyed by Velázquez’s monarchs, who are viewing the handmaids and the artist at work. There is even, as in Velázquez, a mirror inset in the armoire at the rear of the studio, but there are no human figures, no reflection of the artist painting the scene. Objectivity is key here, along with a muted palate, as if to subdue passion.
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