Although Robert C. Morgan is primarily known as an art historian and critic, it was as an artist that he first made his presence felt in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His practice at the time—which includes conceptual sketches, films, artists’ books, and performances as well as painting—was aligned aesthetically with Duchamp and critically with Clement Greenberg. It was a divisive and challenging moment, as a new wave of rising segregated artists (including thinkers Robert Barry and Lawrence Wiener, along with painters such as Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland) challenged the enduring influence of the New York School, championing more analytical approaches to art-making.
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Morgan’s current exhibition, on view until November 30 at the Sculli Tomasco Foundation in Chelsea, presents examples of two chronologically varying groups of work: sparse, stylized drawings from 1967 and hard-edged abstract paintings from 2010 through 2021. Illustrate other aspects of his career, the selection invites to compare Morgan’s two main modes of two-dimensional composition, his main artistic endeavors over the years.
The 1967 series Living Smoke and Clear Water Drawings, installed as a grid of 33 small framed works, indicates the artist’s continuing interest in Asian arts and philosophies. (Morgan studied with Japanese artist Kongo Abe, traveled extensively to East Asia and Indonesia, and wrote extensively about many Oriental artists, most recently in a forthcoming book on contemporary Chinese ink painters.) On paper, each portrait in the collection is masterfully drawn, featuring a blend of restraint, subtlety, and an emotional response of the moment, the gesture translating into subtle linear flourishes or pictorial haiku. The gray scale circles, vertical columns, curves, and zigzags, each spontaneous yet subtle, were created through an exhaustive traditional synthetic process, usually lasting only seconds or minutes, allowing for no second thoughts and no corrections. Morgan – who just found out Tao Te Ching (Book of the Way), the core Taoist text that espouses “easy work” – Complete the series in three days.
Almost all of the paintings produced from 2010 onwards feature more circular and precisely rectilinear treatments of rectangles, squares, triangles and circles, featuring monochromatic grounds in shades of red or black – in fact so deep they appear blacker than black. By contrast, the hues are warmed in reds and yellows, punctuated by a white ribbon or stamp, revealing Morgan’s color scheme to be the sly alternative to the canonical reds, yellows, and blues of Modernism. These works use acrylic and metallic paint, the latter adding a reflective element, such as the sheen of gold foil in medieval and Renaissance works, conveying a hint of spirituality. As the light hits the surface, the colors and shapes instantly interact, subtly enlivening the composition in a dialogue between stasis, movement, stability and flow.
The exhibition takes its name, “The Loggia Paintings,” from the most recent series on display. a Loggia It is a columned open-air gallery integrated into the building structure. It is a transitional space, a connection between the inside and the outside. The 13 unassuming tiles in the eponymous collection, all dated 2019 (though the series continues), are also painted in subdued primary colors and front all over. At the heart of the show, they convey—in the interplay of large and small entities, geometric shapes and shared lines—themes of transition, interdependence, connectedness, and disorder. Across the series, shapes used in modern paintings dance across the canvases, shifting in relation to others while maintaining their colors and volumes, possibly referring to objects moving around a room or architectural elements reassembled into different structures.
There may be a system of variations and sequences from drawing to drawing, or change may be self-evident. What matters is that each work can be savored individually, while the repetition acts as a visual chorus line, and the repetitions resonate with difference. It sucks, for example, to follow the non-red square inside loggia twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, And the XX Because it navigates the visual field, and it winds up XX loggia near the same place where it was occupied The twelfth loggia—just one example of Morgan’s extremely satisfactory fine arrangement of figures and compositions.
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