Review (via Brooklyn Rail): Elizabeth Murray Back in Town
Elizabeth Murray, A Mirror, 1963-64. Oil on canvas with shard of glass in artist's hand painted frame, 33 1/4 x 31 x 1 1/4 inches. © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Elizabeth Murray, Black Painting, 1974. Oil on canvas, 29 x 29 inches. © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Originally published by The Brooklyn Rail
By Douglas Dreishpoon
In most chronologies detailing Elizabeth Murray’s remarkable life, there might be one, maybe two, sentences footnoting her formative stint (1965–67) in Buffalo, New York—the last of three moves (Chicago–Oakland–Buffalo) before she settled in New York City. Why Buffalo? Perhaps she thought that Western New York was conveniently accessible to Manhattan? That would have been wishful thinking. What Buffalo offered was a respectable job at Rosary Hill, a Catholic women’s college (now Daemen College), where the 25-year-old graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Mills College, recently married to the sculptor Don Sunseri, honed her teaching skills. A photograph of Murray, dressed in a plaid shirt and white blouse, leaning over two students who are drawing, is one of the many archival gems featured in Back in Town, the homecoming exhibition organized by Robert Scalise and Jason Andrew at the University of Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery.
Other archival photographs document Murray’s no-frills basement studio at 77 Woodlawn Avenue on Buffalo’s east side, where an anomalous species of painted sculptures, cobbled together from cloth, wood, rope, paper, and other discarded materials, hang from the ceiling and off the walls. These were clearly exploratory years. A lot of experimental work got made over a short period, but, sadly, not much of it remains. Apparently, some of what ended up out on the curb, when the couple departed, was rescued by curious neighbors. What the artist did retain (now part of The Murray-Holman Family Trust) set the tone for this enlightening survey.
N. H. Lockwood (1964-67), Wheel, Portrait of Einstein & Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1963), and A Mirror (1964), all canvas on panels layered with cloth, paint, glass, and collage, when considered with Murray’s three-dimensional objects, defer to Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures and assemblages, as an invitation to push what painting and sculpture could be, without feeling self-conscious about the craft of perfection. The question of influence with someone like Murray is relative, particularly after she lands in Manhattan. Like any artist trying to figure out who they are in a new environment, she tuned in, covered the scene, and gleaned what she needed. Good-bye Ruby Tuesday (1967), Ohhh… You’ll Never Get to Heaven (1969), and Broken Dreams (1970), perhaps the most illustrative paintings she ever made, draw on her earlier infatuation with comic books, the tawdry Pop of Chicagoans Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, and Ed Paschke, and what appears to be an uneasiness about the metropolis. There’s something disturbingly incongruous about a phallic Empire State Building—engulfed in flames, leaning like the tower of Pisa, and severed in two—in the context of a romantic couple, or a pastoral landscape, framed by jack and the beanstalk vegetation and fairytale teddy bears. Dreams of conquest, ambition, love? Apocalyptic nightmares from the dark side? Whatever ambivalence shadowed these welcome-to-New-York tableaux was eventually sublimated into polymorphous abstractions that retain a playful, at times sardonic humor, symbolic armature, and protean invention. Even the most minimal composition included in the exhibition, Black Painting from 1974, side-steps conceptual rigor for heuristic discovery.