Malcolm Morley

(b London, 1931).

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. (Source: No author, "Malcolm Morley," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed June 23, 2004) )