Rebecca Morris at Museum of Contemporary Art

A review of  Rebecca Morris 2001 - 2022 , Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

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I’ve never been able to connect to the Rebecca Morris paintings periodically shown at her local gallery, Corbett Vs. Dempsey.  They felt like cold,  impersonal  experiments in pattern.  A scientist in the laboratory - not an artist in the studio.

But this twenty year retrospective has pulled in pieces that feel different.

Jam packed with tension and excitement. Feels like it started in the center and then struggled to puzzle out the corners.  Morris calls those curved knife-like shapes "lobster claws" - and they do feel formidable.

This speckled piece is more  lighthearted - but it still feels like a person trying to share what is essential and important about their life:  a carefree kind of beauty.

This one does feel experimental - the challenge being to arrange splotches whose soft-edge patterns are always unexpected.  So much anarchy- so much goofiness — highlighted by the shiny gold foil background.  Possibly inspired by the fantasies in Persian miniature painting - or maybe her mother’s clothes closet.

A similar project set against silver foil.

Reminds of the very best quilts - where ordinary fabric is transformed into something too wacky to be from planet earth.  Some women like to over-dress this way -  with deep red nail polish and turquoise cat-eye sunglasses from the 1950’s.  Masculine anarchy tends towards violence - but the feminine moves towards whimsey - and that’s the only kind we need.

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Alan Pocaro wrote a fine review of this show for New City - one of the best I’ve ever read there. He concluded that:

At first “the shock of the new” will hold our attention rapt, convincing us that there is something significant at hand, because visually there is. But late abstraction’s lifeblood is also its fatal flaw. The new colors, shapes, configurations and techniques upon which it depends inevitably become old, tired and predictable. Eventually we come face to face with peculiar-looking paintings that are about an artist making paintings that look peculiar. We can still enjoy them, but eventually we will have to admit: there’s not much to it.

 ...and, thankfully he provided celebrated examples of the opposite: "Point of Tranquility" by Morris Lewis (1959-60) "is bold and beautiful and reaches toward the sublime even as it fails to grasp it"

and "Excavation" by Willem de Kooning (1950).  "one of the greatest paintings in the history of the Western canon"

Absent any recognizable subject matter, abstract painting has always struggled to prove any value other than decorative.   Kandinsky, one of it’s earliest practitioners and promoters, introduced the notion of spirituality.  So a painting could be spiritual even if it was not representing something or someone holy.  Kant’s  notion of the sublime was later added to accommodate those more secular.  And  I suppose we should accept that ‘Excavation" is great just because it has been widely proclaimed as such. (It’s never done much for me)

What I want from an abstract painting is certainly decorative.  I want it to appeal to my eye again and again and again.  But that appeal is something apart from what might be provided by a fresh bouquet of flowers.  It’s the life loving spirit of the artist I want to see - fully realized as a singular form that I can experience.  Admittedly that may be far less than the spirits of saints or divinities that were presented by artists of the past.  And it may be less than some important innovation in concept or technique. But heretic that I am ——- I doubt it.

When Rebecca Morris painted pieces that felt clinical, I had no use for her work.   But when I feel her yearning, living spirit - I am thrilled by her company.

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This seems like a good place to park this quote from Kandinsky about non-objective painting:

A terrifying abyss of all kinds of questions, a wealth of responsibilities stretched before me. And most important of all: what is to replace the missing object? The danger of ornament revealed itself clearly to me; the dead semblance of stylized forms I found merely repugnant. . . . It took a very long time before I arrived at the correct answer to the question: What is to replace the object? I sometimes look back at the past and despair at how long this solution took me. ... Kandinsky, Reminisences, 1915