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

How do you rein in a contemporary artist's unruly production and give it a story line, when it palpably has none, or many? This was the challenge that confronted Sarah Whitfield in curating "Malcolm Morley: In Full Colour," a slim, trim retrospective with a neo-'60s zing to it that was on view last summer at the Hayward Gallery in London. (1) Known for her scholarly but unconventional exhibitions of Magritte (including his '40s expressionist work) and Lucio Fontana (figurative ceramics and all) at the Hayward, Whitfield steered a firm course through seemingly disparate bodies of work, radically trimming anomalous elements and whole half-decade increments, to make sense of Morley's cacophonous worldview. As a result of Whitfield's selection, Morley's progress came to look more solidly based in midcentury abstraction than we'd realized, more like that of a dyed-in-the-wool modernist. (A new monograph on Morley by the French scholar Jean-Claude Lebensztejn presents a very different picture of the artist, celebrating the very fissures and inconsistencies in Morley's development that were elided in the Hayward show. (2)

Born in 1931 in London (but since 1958 a resident, and since 1990 a citizen, of the United States), Morley is one of the great wild men of modern art. Yet his work remains curiously underknown on both sides of the Atlantic (the Tate Gallery bought its first picture by Morley, Mariner, 1998, only in 1999). Although I've seen all but his earliest shows in New York, I've only really been on his case since the mid-'90s, at a point when his career was at a low ebb. I remember seeing his 1983 Whitechapel retrospective when it came to the Brooklyn Museum. The close-knit facture and picture-postcard subject matter of his '60s Super-Realist works didn't resonate that strongly against the brash painterly splendor of his '80s Neo-Expressionist works, with their loose brushwork and clashing touristic and archeological subjects. Yet today, in light of Whitfield's show, there actually seems to be a weird kind of continuity between the '60s and '80s work, between his '60s Pop imagery, with all its sybaritic overtones of tanned men and women enjoying "perfect" vacations, and the '80s Neo-Ex imagery, with its orientalist notion of the good life as pursued by the artist on his myriad tropical watercolor trips.

Where it served her purpose, Whitfield highlighted particular phases of the artist's 40-year oeuvre, emphasizing the serial nature of his '60s pictures, for example, and adding one or two striking, less familiar works. She contracted the run of the anarchic paintings he made in the '70s, and did not include some of his most English scenes, which skewer public monuments. Notably missing were Buckingham Palace with First Prize (1970), with its real red ribbon and water gun attached to the frame, and Piccadilly Circus (1973), which sports a collaged festoon of arrows shot at a sack of dripping paint appended to the canvas. Whitfield drastically conflated, to rather startling effect, separate periods and styles, namely, his loosely brushed '80s canvases and, from the '90s, several tightly finished works. She united the pictures she did select from these periods largely by subject and scale in a big gallery that looked almost English-country-house in its grandeur. (She also, wisely perhaps, omitted the more problematic early '90s paintings of boats and airplanes with large three-dimensional models affixed to them.) The resulting show not only felt smoother than Morley's work probably warrants--it was also less political, less topical and also less literally three-dimensional. There were few freestanding objects and few paintings incorporating high-relief elements. The emphasis, through all the phases of imagery on view, was on painterly calibrations.

Morley had his last major show in London in 1990, at Anthony d'Offay. He has been in and out of the limelight there since the '60s, when Lawrence Alloway included his work in the 1966 exhibition "The Photographic Image" at the Guggenheim and wrote about it in the English journal Art and Artists (February 1967). He was also feted in the 1980s. His parrots were on the poster for the 1981 show "A New Spirit in Painting" at the Royal Academy, and one of his "Catastrophe" tondos was on the cover of A.i.A.'s Neo-Expressionism issue (December 1982). In 1984, after more than 20 years in America, he was the first recipient of Britain's Turner Prize: he reentered his native land in high style and raised hell at the Ritz in a notable prelude to YBA antics. But in the last decade or so, his work has slipped from view, so the Hayward show provided a refresher course, as well as a first glimpse in Britain of the new "Picture Planes" series. Concurrently a large three-part example, Rat-tat-tat (2001), was on view at Gagosian's London branch, where, alone in a huge room, it looked oddly diminutive, suggesting a trio of playing cards or a cartoon altarpiece.

Morley's work is heftier and more rewarding, on the level of pure intellectual gamesmanship, than I first realized in the '80s. A casual glance at reproductions of his paintings (themselves reproductions of reproductions) may not disclose the brilliant conceptual thinking behind his '60s and '70s imagery, not to mention its freeze-dried recapitulation of many issues having to do with high-modernist abstraction. Especially now, when there is so much interest in the interrelationships between British and American art, not to mention .the connections between painting and popular culture in the post-World War II period (witness the Menil Collection's recent show, "Pop Art: US-UK Connections, 1956-1966"), Morley's work, with its deep meditations on what it means to have grown up during and after World War II, looks to be more crucial than ever.