Say Ahh.(The Talk of the Town)(Malcolm Morley)

A convenient place to have fallen ill one recent evening might have been the Cheim & Read gallery, on West Twenty-fifth Street, where, milling around in front of several large abstract canvases, were a gynecologist, a urologist, a breast-cancer surgeon, an integrative internist, and two orthopedic surgeons. They had gathered at the behest of the painter Malcolm Morley, who is seventy-five. Having logged significant time in medical precincts of late, Morley was moved to found an art-appreciation club for doctors. "You get into really quite an emotional experience when you've broken your hip," he said. "I found that a lot of doctors were interested in art but didn't know how to do anything about it." For this, the group's kickoff meeting, Morley had even invited his dentist, but he was skiing in Colorado.

Morley began painting in the late nineteen-fifties; a Luftwaffe bomb wrecked his boyhood home, in South London, and, after a stint as a galley boy on the tugboat Salvonia and a spree of petty crime, he landed in Wormwood Scrubs prison, where a sympathetic warden supplied him with a set of watercolors. In 1984, he won the inaugural Turner Prize. For the doctors' introductory lesson, he had chosen to discuss the work of his late friend the Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. "I'm not just going to throw them into environmental art or performance art," he said. "I want to give them a painterly experience."

Woodson Merrell, the integrative internist, waited, glass of white wine in hand, for the session to begin. His tastes, judging from the way he described his waiting-room walls, tend toward the figurative--Peter Beard prints, a Buddha statue, Tibetan tangkas--but he said that he was curious to learn more about the creative process. "I know I'm going to be inspired," he said. "I need a lot of education in art myself, and this may give me ideas about how to incorporate it into patient care."

Morley started simple, with a discussion of the struggles of postwar American artists to free themselves from Cubism--"Like yogurt that got mixed with milk too many times, it had lost its power," he explained--that culminated in the observation that "painting is essentially an act of transporting a pigment from one place to another. You can throw it, you can ...