With "Maldoror I", Malcolm Morley references "Les Chants de Maldoror" by the Comte de Lautréamont. A passage in the 19th-century poetic novel, which was a favorite work of the Surrealists, describes ‘the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella’. Fuelled by the idea of the relationship between these two incongruous objects, the artist began to rifle through his collection models and to explore the painterly possibilities of free association.