The English painter Malcolm Morley won the first Turner Prize in 1984. It was a relatively rare example of recognition in his native land. A watercolour retrospective in 1991 was relegated to the Liverpool Tate. A terrific, full-scale retrospective which showed at the Pompidou in Paris and toured several other European venues in 1993-94 wasn't, for some reason, taken up in Britain (or, for that matter, in Ireland).
Admittedly, his work is strong stuff: big, brash, garish and by no means to everyone's taste. But it is also outstanding and significant. Now, better late than never, London's Hayward Gallery is currently showing a substantial retrospective, Malcolm Morley: in Full Colour. And he is the subject of a profusely illustrated new book, Malcolm Morley: Itineraries by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn.
He was born in London in 1931 when his mother, Dorothy, was 21. He does not know who his father was, though his mother married when he was six and he acquired a stepfather of whom he was terrified. The demons of his childhood are relevant because he later underwent psychoanalysis which, he says, had a pivotal effect on his painting. A troublesome and solitary child, he developed a passion for building balsa wood model boats and aeroplanes.
Under analysis he recalled a traumatic wartime experience, perhaps bound up with his dawning sexual awareness. Aged 13, he had just completed his most ambitious model, of HMS Nelson, and went to bed. A German V-1 rocket landed in the street and demolished the front of the house, blowing his model to smithereens and turning the shocked family into refugees. He went to naval school, where he was beaten, ran away to sea and criss-crossed the Atlantic. Back in London he drifted into petty crime and served two stints behind bars. During the second, at Wormwood Scrubs, he started to paint and found a new ambition in life: to be an artist.
He went to Cornwall, and then studied at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and at the RCA. The story goes that he saw the Tate Gallery's 1956 exhibition of modern American art and, inspired, went to New York. His own more prosaic version is that he met an American woman on a bus in London and followed her back to New York, where they married. It was the first of five marriages for him. As soon as he met a woman he liked, he said, he immediately wanted to marry her, and, rashly, on occasion did. While the first marriage didn't last long, he stayed put in America.
The earliest works in the Hayward show are some extremely accomplished, semi-abstract works. They are to all intents and purposes abstract but, with hindsight, it's tempting to see in them subtle references to Morley's subsequent maritime obsessions. He then moved on to his beloved ships, with some atmospherically monochrome studies of warships. But he is best known as a proponent of what he calls superrealism (and as a precursor of 1980s' expressionist painting). In typically combative manner, he dismissed the widely used term photorealism as disparaging in intent.
Turning to postcards, brochures and other mass-produced images, he made meticulous, painted enlargements, "surgically", as he put it, using a grid system, transcribing the images, including borders and incidental pieces of text, neutrally, square by square. At first he tackled cruise liners, then went on to encompass more general imagery. What these advertising, souvenir and promotional images have in common is a quality of exaggeration. They project hysterical levels of celebration, or consumerist bliss, or national pride or whatever.
The sense of almost sickening excess, presented in absurdly heightened colours, is graphically conveyed in a 1968 painting, Coronation and Beach Scene, in which two disparate images abut each other, forming a continuous paint surface. One effect is to suggest the painter's alienation from the values implied in the images.
Exposed as grotesque overstatements, the values they encapsulate seem ridiculous. Yet Morley claimed that he was making abstract paintings, real abstract paintings. He wasn't interested in narrative or commentary.
We shouldn't necessarily take this disclaimer at face value. It's worth noting, given his interest in psychoanalysis, that unconscious motivation must have played a role in what he was doing. As someone who felt bitterly the lack of a stable family background, there is surely a personal relevance to his use of images that hype the ideal - nuclear family, material wellbeing - to the point of absurdity and emptiness. Beach Scene (1968), for example, the transcription of a holiday brochure shot of an all-American family playing happily on a sunlit beach, is clearly readable as an oedipal picture.
What is striking, though, is that the images, while thus readable in iconographic terms, are also readable as paintings qua paintings. They are extremely impressive works to encounter in reality. For those sceptical about the appeal of photorealist painting, they are an object lesson. Morley spoke of his desire to work his way over the surface without causing a ripple. As you look at them you are aware that they are all surface, not at all elegant, quite mechanical in fact, but still cunningly and painstakingly made. When he paints a Vermeer he paints not a copy of a Vermeer but of a poster reproduction, complete with the technical effects characteristic of the process of reproduction, including colours slightly out of register. He brilliantly exploits the tension between the paint surface and the open invitation to illusion offered by the image.
Morley signalled an end to the series with a big red X painted through the image of a South African racecourse. The multiple levels of meaning here are absolutely typical. With an abrupt shift of gear, he switched from acrylic to oil and began to use pigment to cause not just ripples but waves in the churned-up paint surfaces.
He had set out on a path that led him inexorably to a series of Disasters in the 1970s. These increasingly apocalyptic paintings conjoin images of toys, models, two-dimensional images and fragments of reality in jarring collages. Battered toy planes (there is a running pun on picture plane/aeroplane) crash into postcard liners. The Los Angeles Yellow Pages, rent down the middle, stands for the action of the San Andreas Fault. Nathanael West's Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust, is another point of reference.
Morley is drawn to excess and clearly cannot resist pushing things to their limit and beyond. There is an increasingly crazed, hallucinogenic quality to his work of the 1980s, not always though for the most part just about held in check by his real painterly intelligence.
Yet by the early 1990s he seems to be back in control, producing a series of paintings incorporating three-dimensional elements, including fine works with beautiful model biplanes, none of which is included in the Hayward show (but which were a definite highlight in the Pompidou retrospective). In one, Icarus is recast as a first World War fighter pilot in a biplane, and stands in for the doomed, heroic artist.
His most recent work is in a way the most disappointing. Straightforward renderings of postcards printed with the patterns of cut-out model aeroplanes, they are agreeable in an untypically laid-back way. Yet his concerns still come through. The series is called Picture Plane, and there is in it another episode in his continuing dialogue concerning realism and abstraction, flatness and depth in painting, another battle in what he sees as an ideological war. So it wouldn't do to dismiss them too easily. In 1999 he famously said that he was going to repaint everything he'd ever done. Unlikely, perhaps, but a fascinating prospect from an artist of such prodigious energy, fierce intelligence and total commitment.
Malcolm Morley: Itineraries by Jean-Claude Lebensztejn is published by Reaktion Books (£22 in UK)
Malcolm Morley: in Full Colour is at the Hayward Gallery, London, until August 27th.