To the Editors:
In your September issue Hilton Kramer wrote a piece titled “The Malcolm Morley Retrospective.” Because the title of the piece is misinformed, I believe Mr. Kramer made a number of observations, particularly in the first three and the last paragraph(s) of the eleven he wrote, that describe the exhibition incorrectly.
Organized by Nicholas Serota, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, and currently touring America, the exhibition is a large selection of Malcolm Morley’s paintings but is by no means a retrospective. Nor does it pretend to be. The title of the catalog accompanying the exhibition is Malcolm Morley: Paintings 1965-82. In his Foreword to the catalogue Nicholas Serota writes:
Although Malcolm Morley is now fifty and has been painting for nearly thirty years this is not a retrospective exhibition of the kind conventionally given to painters in mid-career. We have chosen to show only the development of his painting from his emergence as a distinct figure within the community of painters, omitting the early landscapes and abstract paintings as well as the watercolors and drawings which have more recently become an important part of his work.
Later on in the Foreword Serota offers the raison d’être for the exhibition when he points out that “almost no one can have consistently followed his evolution,” that his paintings are “now very widely dispersed,” and that “At the most simple level the exhibition will therefore offer information and allow comparisons to be made.”
