Quotes of the Day

With the death of Elizabeth Murray at age 66 on Sunday, America lost one of its smartest, slyest, most exuberant painters. Merv Griffin will get longer eulogies this week. But trust me, when The Wheel of Fortune is done spinning, she's the one who will matter a great deal more. And it's precisely at this moment, when so much of the fantasy offered to us by mass culture is calculated industrial product, in formulations arrived at by Hollywood or by whichever multinational is fine-tuning the next big video game, that her work feels especially important. She stood for the adventure of the individual mind, and for its power to reach out, all by itself, to yours.

To begin with, Murray was a crucial figure in the struggle to bring painting back to life in the 1970s and early '80s. If there was one thing that nearly everybody in the art world knew back then, it was that painting was yesterday's news. Real artists did installations, or sawed houses in half or got behind the controls of a bulldozer and piled up earthworks — anything other than pick up a hairy brush and use it to drag that ancient mud called pigment across a piece of cloth.

How had this happened? The reasons are many, but one of the most important is that after the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, advanced painting had moved down ever more restricted avenues, into Color Field pictures made by pouring paint directly onto canvas or Minimalist canvases of one color. By the early 1960s, the supremely influential critic Clement Greenberg was ordaining that painting had a historic destiny that could be realized only in work in which distinct form and deep space gave way to flat, thin washes of color. Some very good art would meet that description, by Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and so on. But a lot of it had a distinct whiff of the endgame about it.

There was always Pop Art, of course. And in the same years that abstraction was getting thinner and flatter, Pop gave artists a way to reintroduce the recognizable imagery that Greenberg thought was hopelessly retro. But by the '70s the energies of Pop were running out too. Painting appeared to have painted itself into a dead end. It was just around then that Murray, who was born in Chicago in 1940, got seriously to work. Murray had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962 and arrived in New York City five years later with her first husband, a sculptor. She would be one of a growing number of artists — Susan Rothenberg, Philip Guston, Jennifer Bartlett were some others — who were looking for new ways to make painting a dynamic form again. In that search, Murray would turn out to be a brilliant synthesizer, blending influences from Stuart Davis, from Picasso and Miro, and from the comic strips she loved as a kid. She didn't care if her inspirations were high or low, so long as they got her where she wanted to go.

And where she was headed was someplace very unusual. By the early 1980s Murray was routinely breaking out of the confines of the standard rectangular canvas, going instead for supports shaped like thunderbolts, clouds or shapes-with-no-name that she would combine sometimes into complicated puzzle pieces. Working in a jumped-up palette of citric yellows, Band-Aid pinks, acidic greens and plum purples, she made pictures that were semi-abstract, but full of teasing references to the outside world, like the outlines of shoes and tables. Or two conjoined canvases might take on the shape of a cup and saucer or a storm cloud. And everywhere there were hints of the human body. A comical bean shape might appear to reach out to an adjoining bean by means of a vaguely phallic extrusion. Circles and pellets suggested fingers or toes, mouths or eyes. The pictures were captivating, witty, so flat-out pleasurable that they made you a little nervous. Could art this delicious possibly be any good?

The answer was: you bet. Murray's work was not only a hoot, it was deeply intelligent, full of careful deliberations about the interplay of color and form and how together they produce meaning. Like Howard Hodgkin, or for that matter Matisse, she offered us a bright, beckoning palette as a point of entry into all kinds of sophisticated reckonings with form. And though her work is full of references to comic books and cartoons, she didn't put them there as lazy quotations, a means by which to lend herself pop culture street cred. She connected her memories of Disney and Dick Tracy to the tropes of Surrealism, conflating them into a parallel reality that's both funny-pages funny and uncanny in that Surrealist way.

Just look at the big, protuberant bulbs of canvas that she used so often. They hark back simultaneously to the biomorphic swellings of Arshile Gorky and Miro and to comic strip thought balloons — Surrealist fantasy inflated by the breath of Donald Duck. And by that means she offered a reminder that there's a slip-sliding dreamworld shared by Popeye and Dali — and by us, in our innermost moments — where all shapes are easily shifted.

That conflation of cartoon drawing and Surrealist biomorphism also gave Murray a brilliantly effective way to keep the human body in the picture without resorting to straight ahead representational painting. Anatomy is almost always there in her bouncy, blimpy forms, the ones that constantly invoke the swells and inlets of the body, tickling and jostling each other, or thrusting their fat bulges right at us. Even her curvy canvases are bodily, as fleshy and as bosomy as the plump goddesses in Rubens.

With her declamatory colors and her inventory of shoes and spoons, children's toys and kitchen tables, she could remind you sometimes of Bonnard, the French homebody who found paradise in his own kitchen and an iridescent grotto in his wife's bath. For all her overflowing manner, Murray was what the French call an intimiste, a painter, like Bonnard or Vuillard or even Matisse, who takes the modest precincts of domestic life as a perfectly good place to make art. Then, if they can, they floodlight the room with whatever it is we mean by genius. This is what Murray did. And she did it again and again.

For more on the art world, and Elizabeth Murray, go to Looking Around.

• Richard Lacayo