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Lot Essay
‘Two words characterise my art: diversity and fidelity. Fidelity somehow binds the diversity. And although the paintings might look very different from each other, you get the feeling the same artist painted them’ (M. Morley)
Variously described as a Photo-realist, Pop artist and Abstract Expressionist, Malcolm Morley’s work defies categorisation. Throughout his career stylistic shifts have occurred without any prior warning or gradual transformation. He admits himself that ‘a valve shuts down and suddenly I lose the wherewithal to do it. It can be traumatic. One minute you're going along being successful and satisfied, the next you are falling off a cliff and thinking you're finished. Then something happens and work starts again, but I don't take it for granted. It always feels more like a lucky break’ (M. Morley, quoted in, The Guardian, 4 October 2013). Out of Africa, painted in 1999, procures images and themes from across the artistic spectrum. Literature, film, children’s toys and tourist postcards combine in billboard poster scale to create a narrative, simultaneously personal to Morley and us the spectator. The huge, brooding lion languidly looks out from the parched grasslands as the family of elephants traverse the picture plain conjuring up Karen Blixen’s autobiographical book Out of Africa and, by association, the Hollywood blockbuster starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. A nostalgic look at the final years of colonial Africa in which Finch Hatton tragically dies when his bi-plane crashes. The present work depicts such a plane but not from the 1920s. This is fresh from Morley’s model kits and is ready to perform death defying stunts, ripping up the serenity of the African planes. The initial romance and nostalgia of the picture postcard image is sullied by the inclusion of this model plane. Exotic yet mundane, monumental yet trivial; it is these dichotomies that make such a work so relevant today as we continually question our relationship with the preconceived attitudes to colonial Africa constructed from idealised tourist brochures and wildlife programmes.
In 1984 Malcolm Morley won the inaugural Turner Prize. This was controversial at the time as he had been a US resident since the late 1950s. Growing up in London during the Second World War he was evacuated after his family home was bombed. Remembering the incident and how it was to affect his later artistic output he reminisced, ‘I loved making models and I'd just finished this one and put it on a windowsill overnight ready to paint in the morning. That night we were blown up by a German V-1 bomb, a doodlebug, the whole of the wall was blown away and, of course, the model was lost, as was our home. Years later, when I was in psychoanalysis, a memory of the bombing came up and I realised that all those ships I'd done had to be to do with me trying to paint that battleship I never finished’ (M. Morley, quoted in ibid.).
Although a fanatical model maker as a child, he only discovered painting when he spent three years in Wormwood Scrubs prison for theft. Here he came across Irving Stone’s biography on Vincent Van Gogh Lust for Life which prompted him to think of art as a profession or an occupation that one could pursue seriously. On leaving prison he gained a place at Camberwell School of Art and then The Royal College of Art where his fellow students included Richard Smith, Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Frank Auerbach.
In 1957 Morley moved to New York, primarily to pursue his future first wife, however, when the relationship ended he stayed on, inspired by such diverse artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Barnett Newman. Searching for his own original output he remembers that ‘Warhol had done all those Coke bottles — there wasn’t much left. What was I going to do? What I did was paint an ocean-going liner. I went down to Pier 57 and looked at a huge liner but it was impossible to organise it as a picture. So I got a postcard of it and used the grid — which was what I’d seen at Richard Artschwager’s. He used the grid. But I used it in a particular way and finished each piece as I went’. Morley called these Super-realist paintings and they brought him huge critical acclaim in the 1960s. This technique of painstakingly gridding out the image and treating each individual square as unique gives Morley’s paintings a disconnect from the real world. By some strange contradiction these super-realist works appear otherworldy and indeed although Out of Africa is stylistically different from these earlier paintings, it is this same feeling or “Fidelity” that exudes from the painting and it is this 'Fidelity that somehow binds the diversity' in Morley’s work.
Variously described as a Photo-realist, Pop artist and Abstract Expressionist, Malcolm Morley’s work defies categorisation. Throughout his career stylistic shifts have occurred without any prior warning or gradual transformation. He admits himself that ‘a valve shuts down and suddenly I lose the wherewithal to do it. It can be traumatic. One minute you're going along being successful and satisfied, the next you are falling off a cliff and thinking you're finished. Then something happens and work starts again, but I don't take it for granted. It always feels more like a lucky break’ (M. Morley, quoted in, The Guardian, 4 October 2013). Out of Africa, painted in 1999, procures images and themes from across the artistic spectrum. Literature, film, children’s toys and tourist postcards combine in billboard poster scale to create a narrative, simultaneously personal to Morley and us the spectator. The huge, brooding lion languidly looks out from the parched grasslands as the family of elephants traverse the picture plain conjuring up Karen Blixen’s autobiographical book Out of Africa and, by association, the Hollywood blockbuster starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. A nostalgic look at the final years of colonial Africa in which Finch Hatton tragically dies when his bi-plane crashes. The present work depicts such a plane but not from the 1920s. This is fresh from Morley’s model kits and is ready to perform death defying stunts, ripping up the serenity of the African planes. The initial romance and nostalgia of the picture postcard image is sullied by the inclusion of this model plane. Exotic yet mundane, monumental yet trivial; it is these dichotomies that make such a work so relevant today as we continually question our relationship with the preconceived attitudes to colonial Africa constructed from idealised tourist brochures and wildlife programmes.
In 1984 Malcolm Morley won the inaugural Turner Prize. This was controversial at the time as he had been a US resident since the late 1950s. Growing up in London during the Second World War he was evacuated after his family home was bombed. Remembering the incident and how it was to affect his later artistic output he reminisced, ‘I loved making models and I'd just finished this one and put it on a windowsill overnight ready to paint in the morning. That night we were blown up by a German V-1 bomb, a doodlebug, the whole of the wall was blown away and, of course, the model was lost, as was our home. Years later, when I was in psychoanalysis, a memory of the bombing came up and I realised that all those ships I'd done had to be to do with me trying to paint that battleship I never finished’ (M. Morley, quoted in ibid.).
Although a fanatical model maker as a child, he only discovered painting when he spent three years in Wormwood Scrubs prison for theft. Here he came across Irving Stone’s biography on Vincent Van Gogh Lust for Life which prompted him to think of art as a profession or an occupation that one could pursue seriously. On leaving prison he gained a place at Camberwell School of Art and then The Royal College of Art where his fellow students included Richard Smith, Peter Blake, Joe Tilson and Frank Auerbach.
In 1957 Morley moved to New York, primarily to pursue his future first wife, however, when the relationship ended he stayed on, inspired by such diverse artists as Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol and Barnett Newman. Searching for his own original output he remembers that ‘Warhol had done all those Coke bottles — there wasn’t much left. What was I going to do? What I did was paint an ocean-going liner. I went down to Pier 57 and looked at a huge liner but it was impossible to organise it as a picture. So I got a postcard of it and used the grid — which was what I’d seen at Richard Artschwager’s. He used the grid. But I used it in a particular way and finished each piece as I went’. Morley called these Super-realist paintings and they brought him huge critical acclaim in the 1960s. This technique of painstakingly gridding out the image and treating each individual square as unique gives Morley’s paintings a disconnect from the real world. By some strange contradiction these super-realist works appear otherworldy and indeed although Out of Africa is stylistically different from these earlier paintings, it is this same feeling or “Fidelity” that exudes from the painting and it is this 'Fidelity that somehow binds the diversity' in Morley’s work.