Pérez Art Museum acquires a painting by EM
Just in time for the annual art fairs in Miami this week, the Pérez Art Museum has became the latest institution to acquire a work by Elizabeth Murray. The painting acquired is Falling, painted in 1976. The work, which is currently on view, is included in the “The Gift of Art", an ongoing exhibition highlighting the permanent collection during the museum’s 35th anniversary year.
In 1975, Elizabeth Murray accepted a teaching job at Cal Arts. In the recently re-mastered slide lecture from 1981, Murray described where she was at this point in her career:
“I wanted to get out of New York. I wanted to work by myself and separate myself from the art world […] and just be alone for a while […] I was able to do some things I had been thinking about for a while. I wanted to make some shapes, and I wanted to do it privately—just shapes that had been on my mind.”
One of the things I found […] in New York, there is a great emphasis on original or on new. I wasn’t so involved with that, I mean lots of people had done shaped paintings and I had my own reasons for wanting to do them. Primarily because really I was so bored with working on a rectangle or square […] so I wanted to try to see what would happen to edges and shapes inside of shapes.”
Studio Note “California Paintings 1975-1976.” Courtesy Murray-Holman Family Archive
Murray wanted to work towards “flatter” compositions, pushing the physicality of the paint and “getting more and more involved with edges” and how the various colored shapes would play off and against each other. For Murray, the driving purpose in the paintings from this time, was “holding color.” “The whole painting for me,” she said, “was about the simple division, about holding color like a color container.”
A recently uncovered studio note confirms that Falling was one of the six “California paintings” she completed while at Cal Arts. It is listed as No. 5 (originally titled “Orange Spiral”). Each painting is listed by title followed by a detailed description of the paint color used for each. Murray made a habit of recording the paint colors and mixes she used in the making of her paintings; these were either written notes or inscribed in detail on the backs of her paintings.
Falling was featured in Murray’s first solo exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in November 1976. In her review of the exhibition in the March-April 1977 issue of Art in America, Roberta Smith describes the work:
‘Falling’ is a large squarish rectangle tipped on one corner […] over-complicated, aptly titled […] on the other hand, has dead-weight shapes that never get off the ground. It epitomizes Murray’s ability to let her paintings trade on their homeliness: a ponderous read loops spans an equally gawky brown shape (something like a tear-drop with an extra point), flanked by areas of green and yellow while a too-thin blue line angles ineffectually across them all.
Falling was also featured, illustrated in black and white, in the cover story essay highlighting Murray’s work in the February 1978 issue of Artforum written by Donald Kuspit. Kuspit describes the “historicism” of her work:
which seems to borrow tidbits and inspirations from a whole range of abstractions. There are Malevichean and Nolandish moments, as well as more generally systemic and Minimalist and, more guardedly, expressionist looks—some obvious, some impacted, all summary […] She makes it both elusive and eccentric, seemingly unclear in its "formal" direction and seemingly "unruly"--unprincipled, unprogrammed.
In addition to its debut at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976, this painting was included in Elizabeth Murray Paintings, Ohio State University Gallery of Fine Art, Hopkins Gallery, Columbus, Ohio, January 1978; and Elizabeth Murray: Painting in the '70s, Pace Gallery, New York, March 2011.