25 yrs ago: At the Met with Elizabeth Murray (Oct 21, 1994)
Originally published in The New York Times on October 21, 1994, C1, C28
AT THE MET WITH ELIZABETH MURRAY
Looking for the Magic in Painting
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Elizabeth Murray's works are smart, animated and sensuously painted. Contained within the curves and angled planes of her oddly shaped canvases are figures and objects: hands, babies, tables, coffee cups, palettes, brushes. It can take a while to decode them. They are nominally abstracted forms in flux, props in mostly domestic dramas of a psychological intensity and tenderness sometimes belied by the jazzy colors that Ms. Murray prefers. Her works suggest motion, fluidity. They're full of demotic shapes drawn from the comics (she thought of becoming a commercial artist when she was young). But they're also linked with painters like Cézanne, Miro, Klee, Johns and de Kooning.
Ms. Murray is a trim woman with frizzled white hair. She is warm, down to earth and modest. Her voice is soft. But her attitude, though gentle, is energetic and assured. She's tireless. On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her eye is arrested by one unexpected thing or another, and she becomes rapt. She moves while looking at a work, so the act of seeing is physical and alive. She speaks with conviction, despite her solicitousness. She talks reverently about the craft of painting, about the transformative ability of pigment on canvas.
Ms. Murray was born in 1940 and reared in the Midwest. She studied art in Chicago and California, taught in Buffalo for a while and moved to New York City in 1967. At a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism were ascendant and not many other aspiring young artists did much else, Ms. Murray rejected fashion and began to develop her own way of painting. At first it derived from Minimalism, but increasingly it gained action and narrative.
Cézanne was the first painter I saw when I was a young art student: it was like knocking on a door and hearing an answer.
By the early 80's, the art world had come around to Ms. Murray. A traveling retrospective that topped at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988 was only one sign that she was regarded as a leading figure of her generation. Her work was used to bolster the growing fascination among younger artists with popular imagery. She was hailed as a feminist painter. But she resists easy categorization. This becomes clear during a tour with her through the Met. When she goes to the museum with her daughters, she says, they always want to visit the decorative arts and arms and armor sections. But Ms. Murray wants to concentrate during this trip on paintings, beginning with Cézanne, who inspired works by her in the early 1970's when she was beginning to get her bearings.
"Cézanne was the first painter I saw when I was a young art student: it was like knocking on a door and hearing an answer," Ms. Murray recalls, standing in a room of Cézannes in the galleries of19th-century European art, in front of his "Rocks in the Forest." "I went to art school in Chicago and took your basic art history courses and I was shocked at how boring it was. There wasn't any emotion or heart or a sense of where these things came from, why people did these paintings. You're changing at that point in your life, there's all that teen-age angst, and I was looking for some reason to be an artist. And then I saw a little still life by Cézanne and it was like a voice saying hello to me. I had seen paintings as objects, but there was something incredibly sensual and human in Cézanne's work.
Cézanne
Rocks in the Forest (c1890s) Oil on canvas, 28 7/8 x 36 3/8 in. (73.3 x 92.4 cm) Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (29.100.194)
"Ms. Murray peruses "Rocks in the Forest," a painting from the 1890's, perhaps of the Fountaine bleau forest, depicting a scrim of boulders, shaded by dense trees, beyond which is a sliver of sky and plain. "There's the color, first of all, that I react to," she says.
The landscape is darker than others in the room. "Darker but not dark," Ms. Murray continues. "It's shadowy, atmospheric. It has physicality. And its very sensuous."
Ms. Murray also perceives a "sense of transformation." There's a transformative process in Ms. Murray's art, too: abstract shapes that refer to real objects. In the Cézanne, she discerns hidden forms. If you are looking for them, you can imagine a human profile and sexual allusions in the outlines of the rocks. And just below the center of the picture, among the rocks, is an almost indecipherable mass, an ambiguous passage typical of Cézanne.
"It looks like a body," Ms. Murray suggests. "Cézanne makes everything look seamless until you start to deconstruct the image, and then everything becomes strange. Cézanne was very open, on an unconscious level I think, to associations. I think he hit on something that's really essential for artists: allowing your unconscious to take you places you may not even want to go. This can be hard for people to understand. It's hard for them just to relax and enjoy visual things without their heads getting in the way. Cézanne starts with his head and then he lets these other things emerge.
[Cézanne] hit on something that's really essential for artists: allowing your unconscious to take you places you may not even want to go.
"Ms. Murray also notes "the quality of the paint itself." She says: "I think there is a fear among some people, art historians especially, of how physical a painting is, of the physicality of paint. It can be incredibly scatological, outrageous, but also be so delicate. And in this landscape, I love the feathery delicacy of the paint."
Fear and Love in Cézanne
One of Ms. Murray's early works that she based on Cézanne was "Madame Cézanne in Rocking Chair" (1972). Cézanne's own "Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress," a portrait from around 1890, shows his wife, Hortense, as a stern figure, slightly askew, wedged between mantel, wall and curtain. It hangs close to "Rocks in the Forest."
Cézanne
Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (1888-90), Oil on canvas, 45 7/8 x 35 1/4 in. (116.5 x 89.5 cm) Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (62.45)
"I am fascinated by what he must have thought of Hortense, and how much you can tell from looking at this picture," she says, standing in front of the work.
“There is a mixture of fear and love," Ms. Murray continues. "She's not really sitting in the chair, and sometimes it seems as if she weighs about 500 pounds and other times she looks like a hollow dress with arms and a head sticking out of it. You can't really tell whether she's standing or whether she's sitting because she is so straight up and down. And she is tilting. The image seems to be all about uncertainty.
“And the hands: they're there and not there at the same time. They're formed and holding something -- a handkerchief or a flower, maybe, I'm not sure -- but then the longer you look the more they decompose. From a distance you think they are flesh, but when you get up close they turn into a multitude of different tones coming together to make a highly abstract form."
In Ms. Murray's work there is something of the same motion, of parts held in tense and momentary equilibrium. And there's the domestic subject of Cézanne's portrait. "I used to think of' domestic' as demeaning," she says. "But I've come to feel that being involved with my family helps my work and doesn't take me away from it. It deepens the work and adds to its physicality. I definitely relate to this portrait on a domestic level. I mean, this is very complex stuff: clearly, Hortense is regarding her husband not with disdain, but as if she's saying, 'You old fool.' And all this emotion, this angst, this frustration is in this picture."
Courbet's Light on Women
Courbet's "Young Women From the Village," a couple of galleries away, is a work, like the Cézannes, that has its own spatial peculiarities, with outsized and oddly rejiggered cows and an indefinite placement of figures in the landscape. It depicts Courbet's sisters in a valley near his native Ornans. The strangeness of the scene, its quotidian women in country costumes, prompted French critics to pan the work after its exhibition at the 1852 Paris Salon.
Ms. Murray looks at the figures and says: "The girls seem kind of poky to me, their faces are quite ordinary. But Courbet makes you admire them because he puts this incredible light on them."
"Usually, his women are beautiful, very sexual," she continues. "It seems to me that this man really, really enjoyed women. I like that about his paintings. Other feminists may think it's something to be criticized. That bothers me. It gender-classifies everything. It's important to see where these things, like male attitudes toward women in the 19th century, come from. But once you've pinpointed it, that's it. And so often these things are said to kill the work, to put a slash through it and say, 'O.K., let's never look at this again because now we know what it's about.' "
How does a woman who wants to be an artist in the early 1960's find her voice when her teachers and heroes are men and all the art that she admires is by men?
Ms. Murray sits, still looking at the Courbet. "When I was young," she goes on, "the question was, 'How does a woman who wants to be an artist in the early 1960's find her voice when her teachers and heroes are men and all the art that she admires is by men?' I found the male-female thing tended to fall away the more deeply I studied their works. Courbet is a man, Picasso's a man, and they're painting naked women, and Picasso is tearing women apart. Yet I learn so much from the way he tore them apart. If I just classify the work in terms of gender, I'm denying some real love of it inside myself."
"This is just pigment on canvas, in the end," she says. "When I bring my daughters in here and they look at a Renaissance painting, they're like, 'What is this? A man in a cocktail dress?' What this Courbet or that Cézanne does is invite you into their worlds, and when you pop out again you've got something in your life that you didn't have before. Courbet is a very political artist but his art doesn't seem rhetorical to me, the way so much political art today does. That art is like reading in the newspaper about some horrible thing; you say, 'This is awful,' but you're not renewed by the experience. I'm renewed by looking at Courbet."
Learning From Vermeer
Ms. Murray moves to the galleries of Old Master paintings. Vermeer's "Young Woman With a Water Jug," from the early 1660's, depicts a scene of ethereal silence. The woman in the picture holds in one hand the shiny jug and with the other hand she opens the paned window through which the room is illuminated by a soft, clear and precise bluish light. On the table, besides the jug, is a jewel box with pearls and ribbons. The table is clothed in a patterned carpet, and on the otherwise bare wall behind it hangs a map, held down by a long and ornate blue rod."
At first," says Ms. Murray, "I thought, 'How would you ever learn how to paint from looking at this?' Because you can't see it happening; it's the ultimate magic of painting."
But it's also about intensive labor. And the more I look at it, the more it feels to me like an act of sublime love."
Vermeer
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (c1662), Oil on canvas, 18 x 16 in. (45.7 x 40.6 cm) Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (89.15.21)
She studies the figure in the painting. "I love Vermeer's depiction of women," Ms. Murray says." They have a wholeness and a humanity and a dignity. They're always doing something. They're always thoughtful and intellectual and in control. I mean, he seems to place women in a universe of their own: it's unlimited, even though the setting is a home and they're reading love letters or whatever. There's a kind of focus that he puts on them; they're at the center of a domestic universe.
In the 20th Century
Ms. Murray wants to visit the 20th-century galleries next, and seeks out Picasso's famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, from 1906. She looks at it for a while. "I don't see it as caricature," she begins. "I see Picasso really grappling with how to depict this very strange, very strong, very interesting, very smart and very beautiful woman. It's an otherworldly painting: classical and remote and painted in a beautiful, direct way, yet there's also that distortion of her features. She's sitting on a stool and in a room that's closing in on her, enfolding her."
"And at the same time, Gertrude's brutal," she says. "Her face is a mask. Yet I think he really gives her a lot of power. He obviously doesn't find Gertrude sexy. I think it's interesting to see this male painter dealing with this intellectual woman. He's fascinated. Not in her femininity, and in that sense he's not willing to deal with her as a whole person. She's in this lumpy, very asexual dress and almost the only way you know it's a feminine face is the hair. It has this aggressive energy. That little tonal change around the hair also makes the figure jump out. The color is warm and interesting, too.
Murray
Terrifying Terrain (1989-90), Oil on canvas, 84 1/2 x 85 x 11 in. (214.6 x 215.9 x 27.9 cm) Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1991.77)
"One of Ms. Murray's own works is on view in the 20th-century rooms. It is "Terrifying Terrain"(1989-90), a painting of intense reds, blues and aquamarine on layers of spiky canvases that seem about to erupt, volcano like. Ms. Murray barely looks at the work, turning instead to one across the room by a friend of hers, Susan Rothenberg. "Galisteo Creek" (1992) is a big orange canvas covered with vigorous brush strokes; near the center is an ambiguous thin white form, like a tree or a figure, and swimming across its surface, like fish, are several dark, narrow shapes. The forms seem to appear and dissolve and the work is energized by its vibrant light.
Ms. Murray takes note of art by other women in the galleries. She points out paintings by Jennifer Bartlett, another friend.
She pauses before a big four-panel landscape like abstraction in purple, black, blue and white by Joan Mitchell, "La Vie en Rose" (1979). "You've got to respect her," Ms. Murray says about Mitchell, "because she goes all the way with it. She found herself and stuck to her guns. I'm touched, too, with the idea that here is this woman who had this amazing career. She and Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler were kind of like the dolls with the boys. It's a superficial way of saying it, but these women had to deal with that issue, and they made very tough, strong paintings, like this one."
Poetic and Physical
In a room of Klees, Ms. Murray says: "I obviously took a lot from his ideas and his breaking of forms into metaphors. The work is absolutely gorgeous but I began to feel that it was too constrained, too obviously poetic."
Freud
Naked Man, Back View (1991-92), Oil on canvas, 72 × 54 in. (182.9 × 137.2 cm) Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1993.71)
Then she lingers before a painting by Lucian Freud, "Naked Man, Back View," a work from 1991-92 that depicts an enormous figure seated on a low white stool in the artist's studio, a cloth hanging in front of the figure and beyond the cloth a thick patch of multicolored paint where Mr. Freud used the studio wall as a palette.
"Before I saw the Freud show here last year, I thought, 'Yet another guy that the European art mafia is promoting,' " Ms. Murray recalls. "But I really learned something about painting in relief and about the combination of illusion and physicality that's in his work. There are these ugly, unappealing bodies and he never tries to make them appealing with color or with anything."
Next to the Freud is "Female Model on Eames Stool" (1978), by Philip Pearlstein, an intense and sharp rendering of a woman, seen from the torso down. Mr. Pearlstein focuses attention on the veined hands and the overlapping patterns created by the crossed limbs, the decorative rug beneath the stool and the oblique angle of wall and floor.
Freud takes you into this very physical, intense place and he never lets you out until you have really dealt with the whole thing.
“The relationship between the Pearlstein and Freud is a good one to draw because Pearlstein's paint is so thin, and Freud's is so turgid," Ms. Murray notes. "Freud takes you into this very physical, intense place and he never lets you out until you have really dealt with the whole thing. My only complaint is maybe that there's never a moment where he lets the work really get out of control."
"I didn't feel," Ms. Murray adds, "that in the show he dealt with women any differently from men. We're over sensitized about our bodies in ways men aren't, especially as we get older. Freud deals with this in a way that I find very touching and tragic."
Leaving Abstraction
The other work in this room she wants to look at is Philip Guston's "Street" (1977), a cartoonish image, with its garbage can of empty bottles; hairy arms holding can lids, like shields, and piled shoes. The color is rosy and grimy at the same time. Ms. Murray's work is linked to Guston's, too. But she admits that it took her "a long time to appreciate Guston, maybe because it was too close to what I was doing."
Guston
The Street (1977), Oil on canvas, 69 × 111 in. (175.3 × 281.9 cm) Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1983.457)
She explains: "I think he's almost too hard for most people to deal with because his work seems so obvious. At first, he was painting Abstract Expressionist pictures and then he took on this totally other character, using exactly the same soft colors and the same way of painting that he had developed before, but now with a new subject matter. It turned out the whole early career was preparation for his singing these nutty songs. They are nutty, but also sad. They have a tragedy that I think Freud gets at, too."
"Here you've got the garbage cans," says Ms. Murray, "and their lids thrust out by these weird fists, as if a battle were going on. And those old shrunken legs that are also like animal legs, or like spiders, and he somehow manages to take all these signs of death, of combat, and make something childlike, simple and direct, and yet moving and even mythical."
[Philip Guston] repeats and repeats in such a delightful way. He has a million ways of doing an oval. I think a lot of the images that I've used in my work, like the shoes, didn't start with him exactly but were connected to him.
What does Ms. Murray make of the piles of shoes, like fallen figures? They remind her of horses' hooves, she says. And about the many circles -- the lids, the cans, the shoes -- she says: "He repeats and repeats in such a delightful way. He has a million ways of doing an oval. I think a lot of the images that I've used in my work, like the shoes, didn't start with him exactly but were connected to him."
As an aside: "It's too bad there isn't a great Gorky here because I see him as a link between what I got out of de Kooning and what I got out of Walt Disney."
Guston's work can bring to mind late Giorgio de Chirico, the paintings of classical subjects, with their candied palette and their tragicomic quality.
Ms. Murray sees the connection. "But I think Guston is much better than late de Chirico," she says. "Maybe it's because he's so much more familiar to me, he's American. And his subject matter: as a young painter, you know, you adopt the mores of your peers, and when I came to New York there was Process art, which I learned a lot from, but the farthest-out stuff was Conceptual and Minimal. I was drawn to it because I wanted to be hip, too. But it was a dead end for me, and its effect was to disguise from me my own interests in subject matter.
“The importance for me of Guston is that I saw he had made this switch from abstraction, and though I didn't fully understand it then, I thought it was brave. Now I think of it as something natural and something that happens as you grow and find yourself. You begin to turn toward what comes most naturally to you. Guston couldn't help himself. And that gives me hope."
Photos: Elizabeth Murray with "The Street" by Philip Guston, which she described as "something childlike, simple and direct, and yet moving and even mythical." (Angel Franco/The New York Times) (pg. C1); The artist Elizabeth Murray in front of Cézanne's portrait of his wife from around1890, "Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress." (Angel Franco/The New York Times); "Terrifying Terrain," a 1990 work in oil on shaped canvas by Elizabeth Murray, hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. (Metropolitan Museum of Art); "Young Woman With a Water Jug," a Vermeer painting from the early 1660's. (Metropolitan Museum of Art) (pg. C28); “Naked Man, Back View,” by Lucian Freud was not published in the original article.