MoMA Opens Elizabeth Murray Retrospective

Elizabeth Murray, who died in 2007, was only the fifth woman to be honored with a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. This new exhibition focuses on the pivotal period of the early 1980s, when she began to physically break apart the traditional canvas. Her early ambition was to be a cartoonist, even once writing to Walt Disney to ask for a job as his secretary. This lifelong love of comics and animation informed her later work, blending playful, cartoonish shapes with the high art seriousness of painters she admired like Paul Cézanne and Willem de Kooning. Murray arrived in New York in 1967 when the art world was dominated by the spare, severe styles of Minimalism and Conceptualism, and many had declared painting "dead." She pushed back against this trend, creating vibrant, large-scale, and emotionally resonant abstract works that embraced domestic objects and personal experiences. The title piece, "Painter's Progress," is composed of 19 separate canvases. Murray herself described the process as feeling like shattering a canvas and then making it whole again, a physical manifestation of her own feelings of being "shattered" at the time. MoMA acquired the work in 1983, partly through a gift from patron Agnes Gund. Agnes Gund, the dedicatee of the exhibition, has been a longtime champion of female artists and began collecting their work after realizing her own collection was exclusively male. She developed a friendship with Murray and has been a trustee at MoMA since 1976, serving as its president beginning in 1991. Curator Mia Matias brings experience from the Whitney Museum of American Art and a prior joint curatorial fellowship at MoMA and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work on the exhibition involved deep dives into Murray's process, noting the artist would often sketch the individual canvas shapes first, arrange them on a wall, and only then develop the final imagery and color palette.