Welcome home, Malcolm Morley

The Ashmolean Museum has taken the radical step of embracing contemporary art, and is currently hosting (until 30 March 2014) a mini-retrospective of Malcolm Morley’s work, curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal and borrowed entirely from the prestigious American-based Hall Art Foundation. Morley (born London 1931) was the first winner of the ever-controversial Turner Prize (apparently David Sylvester threatened to resign as a judge if Morley was not awarded the prize), but has lived in America since 1958 and visits these shores rarely. The last time he was here was in 2001, for a full-scale retrospective of his work at the Hayward Gallery. We haven’t seen enough of his art in this country over the past decade, so this show is a most welcome event. Critics have described him as an abstract painter, a Pop artist, a photorealist, and an expressionist. Morley accepts all these designations, for really he’s just an artist, a painter who modifies his style to fit the subject. (As he puts it: ‘The imagery calls forth the surface.’) The work he is doing now is closer to the pictures of ocean liners he painted in the 1960s, which first established his name, than to the expressionist paintings he made in the 1980s. ‘There’s a sort of synthesis which has taken place’, says Morley, ‘and the paintings now are much more visionary. I work from a number of different sources [such as magazine photos] but they all get squared up and cut up into little pieces and I just look at each piece separately.’ In this way Morley distances himself from the content of the image and can concentrate on its formal abstract qualities. His philosophy might be adumbrated thus: if you look after each part with the right degree of truthfulness, the whole will look after itself.

‘I like to think of it as fidelity,’ he says.