Word: morleys
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...