The Shape of his Mind

At the age of 75, in the mid-2000s, Malcolm Morley decided he wanted to learn mathematics. “Because,” he claimed at the time, “I have no idea about it.” Morley enlisted a maths tutor, who visited every Friday to teach him algebra and fractions. “The thing I really want to do is geometry,” Morley said.

Morley had begun painting using the grid some forty years earlier, toward the end of 1964. For most of his prior career he had been a mediocre abstract painter, aspiring to the greatness of then-canonical Abstract Expressionists such as Barnett Newman. In certain senses, he remained an abstract painter for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, it was with the use of the grid, somewhat counterintuitively, that figuration became a permanent feature of his work.

Nineteen sixty four was the year Sol LeWitt began making his “Structures”, painted wooden grids that both hung on the wall like paintings and stood on the floor as sculptures, and Agnes Martin – an artist Morley professed to admire – made important gridded paintings including The Tree. Minimalist and Conceptual artists were setting aside their own egos with the intention of making art that was programmatic, process-based, and as rigorous as geometry.

Morley was a terrifically ambitious young artist looking for, in his words, “a house in which no one was living” in the terrain of Western modernist painting. His friend Mark di Suvero, who had recently made his first outdoor sculpture, suggested that Morley look outside his studio window for content. His friend Mark di Suvero, who had recently made his first outdoor sculpture, suggested that Morley look outside his studio window for content. Morley liked to say that he always did what he was told; despite that statement’s tongue-in-cheek irony, this unruly and irreverent artist regularly took heed of the advice of his mentors. From his studio, Morley could see great cargo ships and cruise liners on the Hudson River. When he went down to the docks to try to paint one, he found it impossible due to the ship’s overwhelming size. Discouraged, he instead found a postcard of a ship, and painted that.

Morley did not invent the use of the grid to make a painting. In the Renaissance, Brunelleschi, Da Vinci and Dürer are documented as having used grids in order to map out scenes they were painting; there are even records of grids having been used in a similar way in Ancient Egypt. Morely had learned the technique in art school. More pertinently, his friend Richard Artschwager would enlarge source imagery by drawing horizontal and vertical lines onto the original, and transposing the contents of each square onto a canvas. Morley’s approach was to take an existing picture – generally an image from a magazine or brochure – and literally cut it up into equal squares. He divided his canvas into a corresponding number of squares and copied each piece of the original, in acrylic paint, onto the canvas. Often, he would work on his source imagery upside down, in order to reinforce his objective appraisal of it. Though mathematical, in essence, the process required no algebra, next to no geometry and only rudimentary fractions. It required little in the way of decision-making or calculus, once the source image and the size of the canvas had been selected.

The first paintings made in this way by Morley were seismic in their repercussions. A new movement was born, termed “Photorealism” by the dealer Louis K. Meisel, embraced by a phalanx of painters and sold enthusiastically across the United States. The critic Gregory Battcock, who, like Morley, preferred the term “Super Realism” (there were many variants on the nomenclature) gushed, “the new realist type of art discovered by Morley represented an authentically new development within the contemporary pictorial tradition […] easily as significant and sweeping to art as were the differences between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and between Pop art and Minimalist art.”

By the time he wrote that, in 1975, Morley had moved on, finding the field he had inadvertently established already too crowded. “As soon as a movement is named you know it’s over,” he later said.

The Line of his Life

Morley was born in London, England, in 1931 and died in Long Island, New York, in 2018. He never knew his father, but his mother remarried when Morely was a young child. Morley was terrified of his stepfather, a Welsh miner. He was sent to boarding school at age six and then a naval school, aged 13. He withdrew into making model boats and aeroplanes. This was at the height of the Second World War and military vehicles were ubiquitous. One night, during an air raid, a Doodlebug blew off the wall of Morley’s bedroom, destroying his latest and most ambitious construction, a balsawood model of HMS Nelson. The sheltering family was unhurt, but were evicted from their ruined street.

At naval college in Surrey, Morley misbehaved and suffered harsh beatings. He ran away and signed up as a ship’s boy on a tugboat bound for Newfoundland. When he returned to London, he began getting into more serious trouble. After he was caught stealing a woman’s handbag, he was sent to reformatory school for a year. Later, he spent six months in prison in Portsmouth and then two out of a three-year sentence in Wormwood Scrubs for petty theft. He was known as a “first floor man;” that is to say, he specialized in climbing into upstairs windows.

During his time incarcerated, Morley acquired various valuable skills, taking classes in weaving, bricklaying and drawing. Once freed, he resolved to become an artist, inspired by Irving Stone’s biographical novel about Van Gogh, Lust for Life (1934). He was accepted at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and then at the Royal College of Art, where his peers included Frank Auerbach and Peter Blake.

In 1958, Morley sailed from England to the United States, emigrating with his first wife, an American woman he met on a bus.

His first four marriages did not last long, although he remained with his fifth wife, whom he married in 1989, until the end of his life. He observed that he was always trying to recreate the happy family that he never had as a child; he also used this tendency to explain his close association with other artists, often senior to him. In New York, he met Barnett Newman while waiting tables and the revered Abstract Expressionist took him under his wing. Salvador Dalí supported him in the 1970s. Morley was also close with Artschwager and Roy Lichtenstein, both influences on his work in distinct ways. (From Artschwager he took the grid and the wryly dispassionate handling of mass-media imagery; from Lichtenstein he took an awareness of scale and a knack for transforming diminutive, lowbrow source material into grand and impactful paintings.)

Despite these allegiances, Morley had a tendency to self-sabotage, which may have played a part in hindering his embrace by major collectors and institutions. “I tried to destroy myself as much as possible,” he reflected. He told stories of punching collectors and slashing a canvas just after he’d sold it, then handing back the $40,000 cheque. When a painting he’d done of Buckingham Palace went up at auction in Paris in 1976, Morley arrived at the sale carrying a water pistol loaded with red paint, intending to destroy the work by writing “faux” on its surface. (He was foiled by a perceptively cautious auctioneer who had shielded the painting behind plastic.)

“A lot of what I did was done out of intense anger,” Morley said. When he began psychoanalysis later in life, he began to understand how profoundly his childhood had influenced his adult dysfunction – as well as his idiosyncratic approach to painting and the ostensibly banal subjects he favoured. The anti-art gestures of Fluxus and Conceptualism lent an intellectual context and validity, of course, but the spirit of his art may be rooted in a wartime childhood in which comfort and certainty were in constant danger of being quite literally blasted away. In light of such trauma, the maniacal control – or desire for control – involved in fastidiously repainting a small photographic image, tiny square by tiny square, seems symptomatic of an unquiet mind.

By contrast, we might correlate the gathering chaos in Morley’s paintings of the 1980s and ’90s with an artist – in part through his engagement with psychoanalysis – increasingly at ease with himself.

The Arc of his Career

The paintings in this exhibition span from 1966, when Morley was first affronting the New York art scene with his deadpan paintings of images of cruise liners cut from travel brochures, to the late 1990s, when Katy Siegel would compare him, in the pages of ArtForum, to “a rock icon who neglected to die young or burn out”. The near-midpoint of this timeframe is the moment of Morley’s most glorious critical acclaim, when a 1983 travelling survey organized by Nicholas Serota, then director of London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, led to Morley receiving the inaugural Turner Prize the following year.

Some of the most arresting paintings on show are those from the early 1970s that represent not only the content of found photographs but the objecthood of the printed media on which they appeared. Paradoxically, this approach allowed Morley to abandon the “high fidelity” precision that he achieved in his earlier paintings. In Knitting Machine (1971), the typeset caption beneath the grayscale image is perhaps the least abstracted part of the image; absent this textual hint, the painting recalls the barely legible, expressive brushwork of Morley’s former classmate Frank Auerbach. Around this time, Morley later recalled, “I started smoking a lot of pot.” He liked to look at his “Super Realist” paintings through a magnifying glass – “that’s really where the energy of the painting was.” Instead of disguising his brushstrokes, he emphasized them. “I realized I wanted to see through and into, instead of across.”

In other works, he painted accordion-fold postcard sets in their entirety. In the monumental New York City Postcard Folded-Out (1971), the banality of the familiar sights depicted, in one of the world’s most photographed cities, is subsumed within Morley’s radical attempt at revitalizing the fusty genre of landscape painting.

The images here – like so many of Morley’s subjects – are at once generic to the point of irrelevance, and deeply and specifically personal. New York was Morley’s adopted home, a place he could presumably always look at through the eyes of a tourist. The myopia of the touristic gaze is also a subject in itself; in an untitled shaped canvas from 1973, he depicts a similar accordion-fold book of postcards as a crumpled piece of trash – and thereby as a vigorously brushed abstraction.

It is possible to see Morley as falling out of love with the photograph during this period. The latest photorealist painting in the exhibition – though not, by any means, the latest in Morley’s oeuvre, which includes returns to the technique even in the 2000s – is the awkward double portrait, Couple with Dog (1976). This commission from a pair of hair stylists points up one of Photorealism’s greatest weaknesses, the capacity to convincingly portray the human face. Despite the technical precision in the grid-technique that Morley and other photorealist painters employed, faces such as these often end up feeling uncannily robotic, waxy and dead. It is quite possible that the artist recognized and embraced this quality. Couple with Dog recalls the stiltedness of society painter Thomas Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1750), which can be read as an acerbic satire on the portrait’s self-satisfied patrons.

In the 1980s Morley’s style became looser, and his subjects became more illustrational, in keeping with contemporary trends in Neo-Expressionist figuration. He moved towards self-generated imagery, such as the animals painted in Camels and Goats (1980) and Macaws, Bengals with Mullet (1981–83). Both works rely on unconventional compositional strategies, however, as if he was collaging and recombining his own drawings. In a series of bucolic landscapes featuring grazing cows, done in oil on canvas, Morley’s sources were small preparatory watercolours that he made, gridded and enlarged using the method he’d once reserved for found photographs. He used the same technique some years later in a splashy beach scene, Lifeguard (1980). The resultant large oils semi-convincingly emulate the puddled marks of watercolour – or, at the very least, they estrange oil paint from itself, an achievement of Morley’s paintings since the mid-60s.

Throughout Morley’s evolving work, there remains an inescapable preoccupation with the mechanics of representation, usually as they pertain to the printed photographic image – with occasional exceptions. Two observational self-portraits, done in dry media on paper, are remarkable primarily because they reveal the artist apparently grappling with a process of unmediated self-reflection that he once said was anathema to him. As already noted, however, it is not always wise to take him at his word. A quietly bemused line of self-reflection can be traced through much of Morley’s art, an attitude of melancholy distance from the jolly subjects that he reproduces. The photograph is modernity’s primary container for personal memorabilia, for family history and for communal sources of pride. What must it mean that photographs, as used by Morley, seem chilly, unyielding, impenetrable? What can look like vague nostalgia – the Royal parades, the grand old boats and dashing fighter planes, the rolling English countryside, the childish menagerie of animals – is actually Morley’s lifelong attempt to hold and reconcile the shattered pieces of himself.

Essay by Jonathan Griffin

Installation views by Simon Vogel