"2 B !" a painting long believed lost resurfaces
Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007) 2. B. !, 1990, Oil on canvas, 68 1/2 x 49 x 3 1/2 in. (174 x 124.5 x 8.9 cm)
Long believed to have been destroyed or lost, 2. B. !, a unique work completed by Elizabeth Murray in October 1990, has resurfaced in a forthcoming sale at Phillips on November 13, 2019. The publication accompanying Murray’s career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005 illustrated this work in an incorrect orientation and identified it as “Lost or no longer extant.” On the occasion of this work appearing at auction, Jason Andrew, Director of the Estate of Elizabeth Murray, inspected the work first hand.
2. B. !, belongs among a particular series of letter paintings inspired by and mimicking the bombing of bubbling letters and jagged tags of the graffiti flaring up across New York City during the 80s and 90s.
For Elizabeth Murray, graffiti was something “you couldn’t avoid in New York […] you couldn’t help but be excited by those big bloopy shapes,” as she told Robert Storr in an interview for her 2005 career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art. Murray seized on the potential of bubble-writing and quickly assimilated it into her art.
In 1990, the year this painting was made, Murray told filmmaker Michael Blackwood in his film Art in an Age of Mass Culture:
Popular culture is one part of teeming life that everybody, all of us, are involved in. Whether we know it or not, even if we try to withdraw ourselves from it, we are all really involved in it every day when we walk out into the streets and you hear a guy walking by with his box blasting a rap song at you. Or in the middle of the subway. Or walking up Broadway. I mean, it’s pouring out at you all the time.
Playfully animated, the painting’s title references the opening phrase of a soliloquy uttered in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1. In his speech, Prince Hamlet contemplates death and suicide, lamenting the pain and unfairness of life but acknowledging that the alternative might be worse. 2. B. ! plays on this psychological tenor. Of particular interest is Murray’s unique use of matches in the painting to portray open and grasping hands. Later that same year, Murray would create a companion to this painting titled Knot 2. B., thereby, in a way, completing Hamlet’s famous verse.
2. B. ! was exhibited in 1991 at the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles alongside works by artists Carroll Dunham, Peter Halley, among others. It was purchased from the Paula Cooper Gallery in January 1992 and remained in the same collection since that time.
Learn more about the influence of graffiti on Elizabeth Murray’s work here.