Elizabeth Murray 1940-2007

It was widely known that Elizabeth Murray was gravely ill with complications from lung cancer, but her death at her upstate New York home on Aug. 12 at the age of 66 still came as a blow. Until treatment left her frail, Murray seemed younger than her age. Thin, with luminous blue eyes, a wide sliding grin and a marauding mane of white hair, she was gifted with a wild physical beauty, which rendered her a downtown visual icon, as recognizable from across the street as Susan Sontag had once been. The youthful impression she gave was confirmed in the creative energies she displayed in her antic painting right up until the end.

Her first important museum retrospective, which traveled to the Whitney Museum in 1988, was a survey of the previous 15 years of her work. The show documented her transition from an abstract painter placing biomorphic forms in the standard rectangular canvas format to her stunning breakout into the quasi-sculptural relief of her shaped canvases. In 1995 the Museum of Modern Art invited her to curate "Artist's Choice--Elizabeth Murray: Modern Women" from their collection. And in the fall of 2005 MOMA mounted a full-scale retrospective of her work, an honor all too rarely bestowed by that institution upon a female artist. Robert Storr, a champion of her work who also included her painting in this year's Venice Biennale, curated the MOMA exhibition. In 1999, Murray was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served on the boards of the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. In the late '80s she designed two large mosaics for the New York subway, one in Manhattan and the other in Queens. She was known for her generosity and for mentoring younger artists, many of them women, including Dana Schutz and Joanne Greenbaum.

Murray was born into relative poverty in Chicago in 1940. Financial pressures grew, and after brief periods of homelessness the family moved to Indiana. Her parents encouraged her interest in art. By fifth grade she was selling drawings to her classmates for a quarter apiece. She wanted to be a cartoonist and even wrote Walt Disney asking for a job. An anonymous gift from a high-school teacher supported her enrollment in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which also gave her exposure to the broad culture of painting within the Institute's holdings. Artists of special significance for Murray at this time included Cezanne, de Kooning, Beckmann and the Surrealists. Contemporary painting in Chicago had for the most part retained the figure and was in transition from the Monster Roster's synthesis of Abstract Expressionism and figural Surrealism to the Imagists fusion of cartoon Pop and Other vernacular sources.

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A fascination with Beckmann inspired Murray's choice of Mills College for graduate school in the Bay Area, where Beckmann had taught for a semester. There she met Jennifer Bartlett, an undergraduate she was supposed to mentor, but who turned out be more worldly than Murray and subsequently became her lifelong best friend. During this period, Murray was exposed to Bay Area figuration and the Funk school, which was a northern California counterpart to the riotous imagery coming out of Chicago. From all her sources she was consolidating elements that, while still raw, were to be hallmarks of her mature work: an allegiance to imagery, eccentric shape, vivid color, large scale and lavish, sometimes heavily encrusted paint surfaces. She started reading art magazines in earnest and was motivated by the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to think about relocating east She had recently married an Art Institute classmate, Don Sunseri, and in 1965 the couple moved to Buffalo, where she found a teaching position at a small Catholic college. They moved to New York City in 1967, and Murray's first child, her son, Dakota, was born in 1969.

During her early years in New York, Murray was still working through Cezanne and Picasso, but by 1973 she had begun responding in characteristically vigorous fashion to Minimalism, Agnes Martin and the Post-Minimalists of her own generation with a set of roughhewn, abstract linear "figures" embedded in thickly painted, monochromatic fields. She and Sunseri were divorced that same year, and she began exhibiting with the Paula Cooper Gallery. Murray had her first solo show there in 1976, when she was firmly in the middle of the next turn in her painting. By this point, she had moved back up to a larger scale and had introduced into her work a planar biomorphic form resembling a bean, an element that she referred to as a "Tweety Bird shape. "The cartoon image of a singing, or squawking, bird head remained a presence in her work to the last, and the biomorphic abstraction she introduced in 1976 heralded much greater visibility for her in the art world. Her reinvestment in imagery would develop into narrative content and push the physical limits of the rectangular frame into more animated configurations.