Every so often an artist, for good or ill, captures the imagination of the public in a way no other artist of the moment can. Last season it was Jasper Johns, exhibiting for the first time in nearly a decade. This season it was supposed to be Julian Schnabel, but his show at the Pace Gallery—his inaugural exhibition there—failed to generate much interest. Pace had substantially reconstructed its gallery space over the summer in order to accommodate Schnabel’s enormous paintings (they would not have even made it through the door had things remained as they were). Unfortunately, the art itself lacked the stature to justify this unusual development.
It was left to Robert Morris to produce the sort of “hot” show the season had lacked. Early in the new year Leo Castelli’s gallery on Greene Street and the Sonnabend Gallery on West Broadway showed Morris’s new work (Castelli included some work from the Seventies as well). What made the show a spectacle was a combination of several things: its sheer Baroque expansiveness, the volte-face it seemed to represent in Morris’s aesthetic preoccupations, and its interesting relation to current artistic concerns.
The subject of Morris’s new work is the apocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse in particular.
The subject of Morris’s new work is the apocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse in particular. It consists of paintings resembling magnified details of late Turner that are framed by densely packed reliefs of organs, skulls, skeletons, severed limbs, and vegetation—a sort of post-apocalypse
