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The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided writers and thinkers into foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes are interested in many things, hedgehogs in one. Foxes move from one problem to another. Hedgehogs dig deep. Dante and Proust were hedgehogs. Moliere and Pushkin were foxes. Einstein was a hedgehog. Shakespeare was a fox.
Elizabeth Murray is a hedgehog. Her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art presents the whole range of shape-shifting, dizzily colored pictures that she has been steadily producing over four decades. Murray paints cartoonish scenes on canvases that are multilayered or arranged like shards of shattered plates, or sculptured into behemoths, or combined like Tinkertoy parts that nuzzle and jostle.
The colors are noisy, the harmonies pungent; references are to body parts, household furniture, kitchen utensils and comic-book symbols, generally twisted like taffy or otherwise sneakily abstracted.
While art world fashion has drifted here and there over the years, she has stuck to her craft, with all its difficulties and at the occasional cost of failure and neglect. Organized by Robert Storr, with an ancillary display of Murray's exquisite prints and a two-volume catalogue that includes a clever (not too expensive) pop- up book, bespeaking her playful side, her show is a meaty, openhearted, eye-popping tribute to a beloved painter's painter.
A hedgehog? She has pursued a problem partly inherited from Cubism, and filtered through Surrealism and comics. It is how to get movement (translating her absorption in the sensuous push and pull of pigment) into a static image how to make a figurative painting, even when its subjects are inert objects like tables and glasses, convey instability, fracture, speed, collapse, explosion, thrust. This isn't a new problem, of course. Among others, Murray has had her great hero Cezanne to emulate.
Her inclination has been to nudge painting toward relief sculpture: to concoct and combine panels and shaped canvases that teem with goofy incident and stuff. What results can look as rickety as an old jalopy. Paint pools, congeals and drips. Sides and edges of canvases stay unfinished, like the backs of stage props, openly belying their ostensible illusions. You love them or not for their messiness.
Meanwhile, they are ingenious riffs on Cubist perspective. "Don't Be Cruel" is twisted like a crumpled tissue floating on a breeze. Its subject is a table whose legs, by virtue of the twists to the canvas, appear both from the side and below. "Wonderful World," the size of a small church bell in a bell tower, imagines a cup and spoon as if they were made of Silly Putty, the cup squashed and bent to present both its top and bottom at once.
Murray's first retrospective in New York, a traveling show, arrived at the Whitney in 1988: a big, tendentious survey of only about a decade's work, it skimmed over her earliest pictures. The first two rooms of this exhibition, making up for the previous oversight, should be required viewing for all aspiring artists. They contain mostly small or medium-size pictures, gangly, striving, heartfelt half-successes or half-failures of youth, made when Murray was a student in Chicago, then in Oakland, California, and Buffalo, New York, where she began to teach; and finally in New York, where she arrived, at 27, in 1967.
Early on she started wrestling with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and with collage and relief in works like "A Mirror," from 1963-64, which breaks out of the strict rectangle of its frame. Its pasty, pea-soup pigment belies the future extravagance of thick paint, her later gift, toward which it nevertheless clearly strains.
A few years later comes "Night Empire," painted on printed fabric, like a Sigmar Polke before nearly anybody in America had ever heard of Sigmar Polke, stretched on what looks like a card table with rounded corners. (Tables would become a regular motif in due time.) It looks toward the shaped canvases and the sheer chutzpah of Murray's maturity.
She has described wanting so much to belong to the New York art world when she came to the city that for a while she struggled to reconcile herself to Minimalism and abstraction. "But the effect," she has said, "was to disguise my interest in subject matter."
An untitled picture from 1970, a clotted, Minimalist-inflected exercise, injects cartoonish shapes to adapt a figure from Cezanne's "Card Players" so that it echoes the printed pattern of the earlier "Night Empire." A kinship with the Chicago eccentric Jim Nutt, perhaps coincidental, is hard to miss. Painted arrows drive home the impulse toward movement, the antithesis of Minimalist stasis.
"Madame Cezanne in Rocking Chair," from 1972, a schematic cartoon in grid format, shows the French painter's stern, long-suffering wife transported through a window on a beam of light. More strictly Minimal pictures follow, arrangements of squares, blocks and lines. Having already noticed the tactile eloquence of Johns's encaustic surfaces, Murray now takes some cues from Agnes Martin and Brice Marden. Quavering, handcrafted patterns drawn into viscous textures, like incised wet plaster, organize colors that aspire to Marden's buttery yellows and jade.
The lines mutate into wobbly curves and asymmetric Mobius bands implying not just movement but movement into depth. Murray next enlarges the scale with "Pink Spiral Leap" (1975) and "Beginner" (1976). These arrive in the show as logical consequences of a long gestation. But they still look shockingly big and bold.
"Beginner" entails a pink shoelace squiggle laid on top of a huge kidney-bean glyph, a "Tweety Bird shape," as Murray calls it, which locks into a thick, stony gray field. The gray is like slate. Tweety Bird is a shimmery dark blue, like a peacock's feather or glazed ceramic. The lines are sharp, the surface rich.
This leads to more and more complex fields of blobs and zigzags that hark back to Stuart Davis at the same time that they ally Murray with friends and colleagues like Robert Moskowitz, Jennifer Bartlett and Susan Rothenberg, who defined so-called New Image painting, which was soon absorbed within the catchall of Neo- Expressionism. The art world was starting on its decade-long bender. For a while, Murray held her own in a marketplace besotted with testosterone and chest-thumping egos.
In terms of subject matter, she stuck to her territory, "despite the obvious risks that attached to her doing so because she was a woman," as Storr puts it in the show's catalogue; she painted "interiors and still lifes, turning them inside out and transforming them into her own inimitably comic, calamity-prone theater of household upheaval."
It was a magpie style that frankly rejected high modernism's dictates about purity of form an art of this plus that plus the other thing, occasionally bringing to mind Claes Oldenburg or Frank Stella or Philip Guston or graffiti art. Murray was, in other words, neither divorced from the mainstream nor fully accounted for by it.
Which has remained her fate: an outsider-insider. As a critic once put it, there are some people who want to like her work more than they do. Meanwhile, she just does what she does. That the Modern is now devoting its first show by a living painter in its redesigned museum to Murray is, among other things, proof of how modernism is renewed every once in a while by strong-willed, adulterating figures like her.
There have been periods, during the late '80s, for example, when her work became baroque and overwrought; it tried too hard to be big and bad; then briefly during the '90s, it got tight and slick, as if Murray were trying to prove to herself and perhaps to others her ability to paint smoothly.
But she always manages to find herself, because in the end she is true to her heart. "Join" (1980) exploits the design of a diptych, with the space between the panels, to picture a broken heart. "Can You Hear Me?" (1984) turns Munch's famous scream a cry of the heart into the cartoon set piece of a whirling scythe, acidly colored.
By "Tangled" (1989-90), her funky Rube Goldberg contraptions have morphed into Martian topographies, or some weird enlargements of human innards with blood and pus.
"Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure," Willem de Kooning once said. "I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity." Going a bit further than Murray's pictures do, the remark still speaks to her indecorous and restless penchant for clattery shapes and colors that gladly flirt with the melodrama of vulgarity.
The last room of the show includes recent paintings like "Do the Dance," along with studies that document their evolution. They're airy, dreamlike constructions of multiple parts: Murray's Rococo spell, after her baroque years. The emphasis is again on paint over construction. An ongoing bout with cancer is gently alluded to in a cartoonish figure with a stitched chest. But the mood is bright, breezy and full of life. It's childlike.
Only a true veteran painter could pull that off. You're left with the sense of an artist in the flush of her authority and still digging deep.
(C) 2005 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
