Elizabeth Murray: Smartness and Sensibility

The Sun and the Moon, 2005
(Phillips Collection)

I first met with the art of Elizabeth Murray in an exhibition (From Degas to Diebenkorn) organized at Phillips Collection.

The Sun and the Moon was what I saw first. Elizabeth Murray died in 2007 after a horrifying struggle with cancer, and this Sun and Moon was telling me a lot about her attitude against destiny: as her health was deteriorating, her appetite and enthusiasm for life were growing stronger. This shaped canvas was looking like a bag generously open, showing myriads of beauties and miracles. I wanted badly to take a photo: it was not allowed. I thought I would find the image on the web later.

And I found it, only the image was missing the spatial geometry of the art work: it was liming it to bi-dimensional and all that great exuberance was lost!

Bill Alley
(Phillips Collection)

The same happened with Bill Alley, a fine rendering of New York's jazziness and of that special New York kind of joie d'vivre: that vital energy with a somehow perverse suggestion of visceral.

Only the web image of Jazz was keeping some of the artwork's architecture, the flexible universe of paper and color, with joyful shapes and delicate abstract components: Phong Bui considers Elizabeth Murray was in her way undoing the rectilinear universe of Mondrian.

Jazz, 2001
(Phillips Collection)

I was last Sunday at the National Gallery and I found this Careless Love: the words of Phong Bui were coming again to my mind, about her visceral sense of the body.

Careless Love, 1995-1996
oil on shaped canvas
(Washington DC National Gallery of Art)

This time it was allowed to take photos, and I also recorded a video, fascinated as I was by her art.

Careless Love: here is what Elizabeth Murray said in her last interview (given to Rob Storr), there's nothing like being in love!



(Contemporary Art)

(Phillips Collection)

(Washington DC National Gallery of Art)