Malcolm Morley.
Artist.
Born June 7 1931. Died June 2 2018.
Malcolm Morley, who has died aged 86, was a British painter who made his career in America winning the prestigious inaugural Turner Prize in 1984. He had an exceptional eye for what would work on a canvas combined with a keen sense of colour - Salvador Dali claimed that Malcolm Morley was the best painter of his generation. Morley’s paintings had the vibrant appearance of merging Surrealism and PopArt but he was principally known for photorealism – a style of painting with an exacting detail and precision. He maintained that “as soon as a movement is named you know it is over” and preferred the term superrealist. His pictures, however, are never mere copies and have a skill and urgency all of their own.
Malcolm John Austin Morley was born in London and after a difficult childhood attending (and often running away from) naval boarding schools he spent some time in Antwerp. In 1945 he was caught stealing and repatriated to England with years in Borstal and Wormwood Scrubs. There he joined correspondence courses in painting and it was his making. In 1952 Morley was offered a place at Camberwell School of Arts and then at the Royal College of Art. Five years later he met an American girl on a bus and followed her to New York. He was to spend the rest of his life in the city and he married the girl – it was his first of five. By 1967 he was working in photorealism and his pictures were included in the Guggenheim’s pivotal survey The Photographic Image that year.
Photorealism suited his style and energy as an artist. Morley recognised its potential and became the leading exponent of the art form. Initially in America he painted the huge ocean liners docked in New York but they proved too grand a subject - although the depiction of boats, trains and planes were to remain an obsession all his life. He was already well established in the US when his fame was recognised in the UK in a 1981 group show, A New Spirit in Painting, at the Royal Academy in London.
Prior to that exhibition he had made extensive tours of both the English and Scottish countryside which inspired him to return to landscape paintings. Such works as Landscape with Bullocks and ‘Till the Cows Come Home display his restless imagination.
In 1984 he showed at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and it was that gained him the Turner Prize. The award caused a storm of protest – as it has done ever since. Morley was unabashed but later admitted, “I saw it as a signal to go ahead and be more myself. And, in a funny way, I felt Britain didn’t let me down.”
His paintings often had a feeling of disquiet and nervous anxiety - the cows in the landscapes are contorted and ill-shaped. Morley claimed that everything in his turbulent life - prison, multiple divorces, drugs, depression, psychoanalysis – referred back to when his home was bombed in the Blitz by a V-1 rocket. Significantly, the eminent art critic Robert Hughes called Morley, “the last wild man of modern art.”
His first four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by Lida Kruisheer, whom he married in 1989.
Alasdair Steven
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