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But this longed-for integration is always jolted by the fracture and splitting of the paintings, their discontinuous surfaces, their eccentric formats. There are times when Murray's shaping of the canvas gets too sculptural and becomes an awkward hybrid. The space her color evokes so well can be overstrained by so much twisting and jutting, though that never happens in the drawings. But the sense of controlled disorder does not matter: "I want the panels to look as if they had been thrown against the wall and that's how they stuck together," she says. This sense of improvisation lets Murray make "abstract" art that includes experience of the body and is filled with tender awkwardness, but in a colloquial way.
False rhetoric is not one of her problems. She goes in for titles like Yikes and Can You Hear Me?, and the shapes in her paintings have a cartoony flavor; there are speed lines and zap-zigzags from the comics in several of them, and speech balloons too. One of her favorite forms, a swelling lobe pinched at the ends, looks like Popeye's biceps ready to take on the world after the transforming gulp of spinach. This fondness for the demotic shape has been with Murray since her childhood in Bloomington, Ill., when she used to draw her own comic books and pass them around among her friends. But today the effect in no way resembles that of pop quotation. Murray transforms these signs rather as Miro did those of Catalan folk culture. Indeed, one of the presiding influences on her work clearly is Miro's, for her art is about dreaming and free association, the goofy insecurity of objects that slide through the looking glass of her tactile sensibility and peek out, transformed, on the other side.
The other artist one thinks of in connection with Murray is Juan Gris, the quiet master of analytical cubism, with his smooth Ingresque planes and profiles of a teacup, gueridon and spoon, their lights and darks fitting together like notches of a key in the wards of a lock. But Murray's work is less composed. Its messages include the direct psychological narrative, the contact with anxiety (including the anxieties of stylistic irresolution that must be faced with every new picture) that Gris' still lifes were designed to bury. You sense, when you look at it, that a whole temperament is strenuously engaged in conveying what it is like to be in the world. The effort goes beyond style, beyond pat categories of abstract and figurative; and it gives her work its sweet, rambunctious and very American life.