Most fans of Elizabeth Murray's work will remember a time, only ten or twelve years ago, when the American art world decided that Painting Was Dead. Henceforth the future would belong to videotapes, "propositions," "events" and bits of string on the gallery floor. The exequies over the body were as solemn as they were premature; dust devils of argument spun through art magazines, scattering the ashes. Though no prophecy could have proved less correct -- painting has filled the horizon of American art in the '80s, almost to the point of monopoly -- a young artist needed cussedness and conviction to reject the tribal wisdom of the end of the '70s.
Luckily, Murray had both, and the sight of a dogged, idiosyncratic mind firmly engaged with its own experiences is what her traveling retrospective show -- which will open July 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, having closed late last month after a seven-week run in Boston -- has to offer. At 46, Murray has developed without shortcuts into a wonderfully articulate painter, one of the best of a generation that includes Susan Rothenberg, Neil Jenney and Brice Marden. Her show of some 45 works, a midcareer report organized by the Dallas Museum of Art with an excellent catalog essay by Art Critic Roberta Smith, will continue after Los Angeles to Des Moines and Minneapolis before finishing at the Whitney Museum in New York City next spring. It should not be missed.
At a time when so much art is ironic, distanced and parasitically given to quoting the Big Media, Murray's work goes against the grain. It presents a standoff between fracture and extreme sensuousness. It is nominally abstract, a bit hard to read at first -- until you are used to the shaping and layering of canvas planes in the paintings and of separate sheets of paper in the drawings -- but almost profligate in its flat-out appeal to the eye. The chrome yellows and leaf greens, cobalts, pinks, purples and deep, reverberant blacks that proliferate in her work are the signs of a master colorist without inhibitions. Her drawing may be ponderous and whippy by turns, but never irresolute.
The subtle friction of the yellow fingers and pink biomorphic shapes around the central void of Keyhole, 1982, has something of the quality of '40s de Kooning, sexy and calligraphic at the same time: it evokes the felt presence of the body as an obsessive subject, but obliquely. And there is a curious tension between the enormous size of Murray's canvases and the often domestic and maternal emblems that become their subject matter -- tables and chairs, cups and spoons, an arm, a breast. Murray is not a feminist artist in any ideological sense, but her work, like Louise Bourgeois's or Lee Krasner's, gives a powerful sense of womanly experience. Forms enfold one another, signaling an ambient sense of protection and sexual comfort -- an imagery of nurture, plainly felt and directly expressed, whose totem is the Kleinian breast rather than the Freudian phallus.