More than a maverick: a 40-year Malcolm Morley retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London presented the self-styled "wild man" as a controlled, steadily evolving painter whose work reflects diverse but ultimately complementary formal and thematic concerns

Art in America, Dec, 2001 by Brooks Adams

A final gallery focusing on the "Picture Planes" announced a return to flatness, and a return to postcard imagery, even as it reaffirmed field-painting aspects of the early abstract work. The paintings are all based on cards illustrating patterns for models of famous World War I and II airplanes, along with the directions for how the cutout parts can be assembled. Needless to say, allusions to Picasso's and Braque's papiers colles, not to mention Duchamp's and Picabia's Dadaist word-and-image paintings, are rife, and some of the verbal instructions on the postcards sound quite lubricious. The American modernists Stuart Davis, Gerald Murphy and Patrick Henry Bruce also came to mind when I was looking at the flat, precise, interlocked renderings of disembodied airplane wings and fuselages, ready for bending and gluing.

Here, too, issues of connoisseurship pertain: it was instructive to compare Nieuport 17 (2000) at the Hayward with the central section of Rat-tat-tat (2001) at Gagosian, and Fokker DVII (2000) in the retrospective with the far-right panel of the Gagosian painting, because questions of exact replication and slight variation are at issue. I wonder whether Morley amended the original postcard design or simply used two different versions of the same source. In this group, Nieuport 17 is exceptional in that it includes, on a little shelf atop the painting, a low-relief reliquary of an airplane wing that Morley literally cut out of the canvas, stretched, glued and assembled according to the directions of the model kit, and then installed in a makeshift case. But in a broader sense, the large painting at Gagosian points the way to further spin-offs and delirious foldout versions of the original postcard imagery. (For example, in 2000 the artist supervised the fabrication of a "Picture Plane" as a freestanding metal sculpture, with partially folded wing parts; this was not included in the Hayward show.)

Thus do Morley's thought processes circle around one another and spawn an ever more eccentric art. I look forward to a retrospective that would celebrate the genres not covered in Whitfield's show, among them the recent animal pictures--lions, cheetahs and springbok--based on postcards garnered from a 1997 trip to South Africa. These might have some startling resonances with the earlier paintings of camels and flamingos, not to mention the X-ed out image of the Durban racetrack. A subsequent Morley retrospective might well concentrate on the whole notion of "found abstraction" and how it pertains in his work from the late '50s onward right through to the targets and chevrons of the "Picture Planes." And the radically subversive nature of Morley's '70s political imagery (including several Vietnam War scenes) still needs to be explored in depth. In a time of terrorism, his paintings of targeted monuments and liquidly dissolving skyscrapers all have the force of revelation.

(1.) The show did not travel. This is unfortunate, because Morley is at least as much an American artist as a British one; this show would have been a coup for any museum. Not to fear, though--Alanna Heiss may do her own U.S. Morley retrospective for P.S. 1 in the not-so-distant future.