Haunting Collisions of Imagery

By ROBERT HUGHES

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.

One can plunge into Morley's peculiar oeuvre with a painting that presents his dislocations at full stretch: Age of Catastrophe, 1976. It shows an accident that never happened. A liner on the Atlantic run is warping out of port. Its hull is literally "warped," the perspective skewed and twisty. An airliner seems to have crashed on it, an old Pan Am Constellation of the sort that went out of service decades ago. But the scale is all wrong: the plane is too big for the boat, and it looks more like an effigy stuck to the painting. In fact, Morley did paint it from a tin airplane, picked from his vast collection of models and toys. A U-boat, suspended beneath the painted sea on painted sticks, is also done from a toy. As a document of catastrophe, the scene is far from believable, but its curious power as an image comes partly from the sheer blatancy of its fiction. The fact that the plane, the liner and the sub are sso toylike carries one back to the I mock battles of the nursery, to the child's delight in constructing harmless miniature wrecks that dis charge the aggressions of child? hood. "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." So the real subject of Morley's painting is not so much the death of people or the destruction of machinery as the general, "ineradicable ground of adult violence in the infant psyche.

The paint on the canvas looks sluggish and frozen, like cake icing. (In the early '60s, Morley did put the pigment on with icing nozzles.) Its dull turbulence parodies the violence implicit in expressionist paint handling. The heavy brush stroke is no longer an index of earnestness; it quotes strong feeling without necessarily endorsing it. Morley's blend of coolness and violence has some of the hypnotic impact of early Warhol. But it is far more complicated and nuanced, and it is free from overtones of chic.

Instead of accepting the glossy impact and impersonality of mass media at face value, Morley rants against them. That is the main difference between him and the Pop artists with whom he was associated in the 1960s. It was not obvious at once. When he first emerged as a painter, it was with images that looked utterly deadpan: paintings of ocean liners, enlarged from postcards and publicity brochures. But their method was peculiarly systematic, a parody of system, in fact. Squaring the postcard image up to canvas size, Morley would work on it patch by patch, sometimes upside down, stippling away so that each bit of water or hull looked abstract to him, as patterns do when they are isolated and magnified. What counted was not so much the liner as the process of painting it, a concretion of gratuitous labor. If Canaletto had been exposed to minimalism and to early Warhol, he might have come up looking like early Morley. In reproduction, of course, the paintings become postcards again. But on canvas they have a disconcerting air; above their anonymous imagery the paint is beginning to assert itself, its texture and weight anxiously at odds with the bland scenes of middle-class pleasure they describe.

By the early '70s Morley's painting was largely about violence happening to a spuriously calm surface. In Los Angeles Yellow Pages, 1971, a jagged rip appears in a huge Los Angeles phone-directory cover, thus eerily predicting the city's real 1971 earthquake. A postcard scene of Piccadilly Circus, 1973, is incoherently violated by blurts and blobs of paint; they include a quantity of gray that has leaked from a bunch of bags hanging from the top of the canvas. Morley invited some friends to shoot arrows into them and re lease the paint, and the arrows remain stuck in the picture, thus supplying a missing figure: Eros, the god of love, with his bow, who stands on the fountain at the middle of the actual Piccadilly Circus. The image is a memorial to Morley's marriage, which had collapsed in bitter disarray a short time before.

More recently, the work has become, if not exactly more amiable, less wrenched by signs of aggression. It preserves its haunting collisions of imagery; who knows what the elephant is doing beside the field-hospital tent in M.A.S.H., 1978, or why the white figure is on its head--an effigy of his father, according to Morley--or why they are all in the Florida greenery? His paintings hop between memory and desire; infantile recollection, fragments of autobiography, references to historical art, all get crushed together. In the process he will quote anyone from Pollaiuolo (in La Plage, 1980) to the ineffable LeRoy Neiman.

When Morley is spinning his fables around a core of imagery that the viewer cannot quite grasp, his real successes occur. A painting like Underneath the Lemon Tree, 1981, cannot be fully read. One knows it is about aggression: Morley's toy soldiers again, two ancient Egyptians and a modern member of the Horse Guards, plus a scrawled, emblematic castle. But what are they doing in the green space that is Morley's sign for paradise? The probable answer is that they are there because they are in the artist; the combinations of aggro-and-bother with glimpses of lush relaxation and childhood escape epitomize his own conflicts. When painting "straight" landscape, Morley is less convincing, producing huge pictures of wobbly livestock under a crude Constable sky. At such moments he reminds one that there is not only good art and bad art but bad "bad painting" and good "bad painting." Fortunately, most of Morley falls in the first and the last of these four categories. --By Robert Hughes