Date unknown, 1984: The first major retrospective of contemporary artist Malcolm Morley will open at The Brooklyn Museum February 17 and continue through April 15, 1984. The exhibition traces Morley’s development from his first public recognition in New York in the mid-sixties through his emergence as an international figure in the 1970s and early eighties. Included are 50 paintings which reveal the independence and originality of an artist who has been working at the cutting edge of some of the key issues of contemporary painting.
Malcolm Morley was born in London in 1931 and began his studies in 1952 at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts by painting landscapes. Two years later he entered the Royal College of Art, during which time he developed an interest in abstract art. Inspired by an exhibition at London’s Tate Gallery in 1956 entitled “Modern Art in the United States”, Morley was particularly influenced by the Abstract Expressionist paintings of Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. When he first visited New York in 1957, he was further exposed to the work of the Abstract Expressionists and decided to move here a year later, after completing his diploma in London.
Morley made his first ship painting based on a travel photograph in 1965, and is credited with inventing the term Super Realism. In the late sixties Super Realism became a fullfledged movement which swelled to considerable popularity in the early seventies, but by that time Morley was already moving in a different direction. While Super Realism and Photo Realism swept the galleries he was involved in questioning, attacking, and fracturing the image, permitting his own sense of personal crisis to connect with his perception of crisis in the nature of painting and in the world at large. He was working in an Expressionist mode long before the advent of “Neo - Expressionism.”
Morley in the eighties is once again at odds with the current taste for the brash, the ugly, the “bad” in painting. In the brilliance of his pastoral and tropical paintings, he is working out an iconography of primordial paradise and desire and feels at some emotional distance from his “catastrophe” paintings. He is still moving on, and the viewer can enjoy the brilliance (seldom entirely without an element of ferocity) of his more recent paintings, at the same time as we respond to his “imagination of disaster”.
In its entirety, MALCOLM MORLEY presents paintings which afford a close understanding not only of the body of Morley’s diversified work, but also of recent changing styles in today’s art--from realism to free expressionism. Although stylistically varied, when viewed collectively the works reveal Morley’s personal vision of the contemporary world, and testify to his powerful artistic invention.
MALCOLM MORLEY was organized by the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and has travelled to Basel, Rotterdam, Washington D.C. and Chicago. Its New York showing at The Brooklyn Museum, the final one of the tour, is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1971 - 1988. 1984, 012-13.
