Auction News: "Moonbeam" lands at Christie'S
Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007) Moonbeam, 1999, Oil and wax on canvas, 109 x 63 x 6 in. (276.9 x 160 x 15.2 cm)
© Murray Holman Family Trust, New York / Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY
On the occasion of Christie’s offering of Elizabeth Murray’s Moonbeam (1995-96) in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale on October 7, 2020, Estate curator Jason Andrew researched the work, offering a unique perspective on Murray’s inspiration and intention.
Though much of her work was inspired by domestic interiors—tables, chairs, windows, cups and saucers—Elizabeth Murray sought to introduce a different perspective in the making of this painting. In Moonbeam, she aspired to bring the outside world in.
Historian Joan Simon interpreted the painting like a Chinese landscape with its vertical layering and interior organization. Murray agreed, “It does, because the first thing I did to it was I built up the paint in the middle like a ridge, and then drew a line through it so there’s this diagonal thing that makes it look like land, sky tilting over. That is something I have been thinking about. I’ve been thinking about how to get the outside, the exterior, into the paintings.”[1]
“Moonbeam,” Murray said, “is a bed with two pillows.”[2] But it is certainly much more. Playing with the architectural frame, Murray takes the four corners of the bedposts and turns them back into the painting where they toss around with pillows and a bed sheet. The title of the painting refers to the moonbeam that enters the painting from the upper right and cuts a long diagonal through the center, exiting lower left.
Detail of Moonbeam from an angle featuring the diagonal mark dividing the composition.
“I saw what happened when I made that line through it,” Murray explains, “that it divided into two separate places, and it’s funny how those things come out. It’s a need I feel. I want that in my work. So it’s not just a depiction of the inside of an interior, which I think has been very much part of the work for a long time.”[3]
Moonbeam made its debut in Elizabeth Murray’s first major show at PaceWildenstein in 1997, following her move from Paula Cooper Gallery which represented her work from the mid-1970s. “The new canvases look good, seemingly unruffled by the change of venue,” wrote Roberta Smith, “They show Ms. Murray continuing to navigate the idiosyncratic line of her own invention between domesticity and abstraction.”[4]
The wrapping of structure and form from the outside in can also been seen as a kind of embrace. Similar compositions were thought out in paintings What is Love (collection of Speed Art Museum) from a year earlier, and Could Be, painted a year later. Both paintings seem to be meditations on snuggling—the simplest of comforts a couple can enjoy. “By the time Murray is finished synthesizing the image, the human element had morphed into […] a state of somnolent distress,” as described by Rob Storr, “togetherness and solitude, warmth and coldness, peace and disquiet?”[5]
These are all questions Murray asks and responds to in Moonbeam.
Detail of Moonbeam’s lower right edge.
[1] Murray, Elizabeth in An Interview with Elizabeth Murray (exhibition catalogue) New York: PaceWildenstein, 17.
[2] Murray, Elizabeth in An Interview with Elizabeth Murray (exhibition catalogue) New York: PaceWildenstein, 17.
[3] Murray, Elizabeth in An Interview with Elizabeth Murray (exhibition catalogue) New York: PaceWildenstein, 18.
[4] Smith, Roberta. "Despite Changes, a Gallery Scene That's Resilient and Vital (Elizabeth Murray at PaceWildenstein Gallery)." The New York Times, Friday, May 9, 1997, C1, C24.
[5] Storr, Robert. Shape Shifter (exhibition publication) New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005, 74.