Elizabeth Murray was an American painter known for her colorful abstract works that broke from traditional rectangular canvases. She began drawing at a young age and was interested in expressionism and the unconscious mind. Her large-scale paintings from the 1970s-80s featured biomorphic and geometric shapes fitted together like puzzles in layered bold colors. Murray sought to blur boundaries between painting and object to create unified yet open-ended compositions exploring emotion and the psyche. She found artistic inspiration in everyday objects and scenes.

1. Thinking Critically About Art:

3. • Elizabeth Murray was born
in Chicago in 1940 and died
of lung cancer at age 66 on
August 12, 2007
• She was born to a working-
class family that struggled to
make ends meet.
• Her interest in art started at
a young age and she drew
constantly.

4. Large Still Life with a Pedestal
Table, Pablo Picasso, 1931
Cubism
Paul Cezanne, Still Life With
a Basket of Apples, 1893
Disney
The Persistence of Time,
Salvador Dali
Surrealism

5. • Cubists rejected the idea that art should copy nature and refused to adopt the traditional
techniques of perspective, modeling and foreshortening used to create realistic imagery.
• The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French
artist Georges Braque initiated the movement,
between 1907 and 1914.
• They wanted instead to emphasize the two-
dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and
fractured objects into geometric forms, and then
reassembled these within a shallow picture space so
that they appeared to be seen from many angles at
once.
• Other cubists:

6. • The Surrealist movement began in Paris in 1924
• A small group of writers and artists, influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, began looking
at the power of the unconscious mind as a means to unlock the imagination.
• In 1924, French writer André Breton, the leader of the movement, wrote Le Manifeste du
Surréalisme. In it, he defined Surrealism as:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express
verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of
thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason exempt from
any aesthetic or moral concern.
• They were interested in the involvement of the unconscious mind in chance occurrences
and dream imagery
Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, Man Ray, Paris, 1933

7. • Murray was a crucial figure in the struggle to bring painting back to life in the 1970s and
early '80s.
• In her work, she moved away from the traditional rectangular canvas format, breaking
with the art-historical convention of illusionistic space in a two-dimensional picture-plane…
• …. blurring the line between the painting as an object and the painting as a space for
depicting objects.
• She began to create supports in the wild biomorphic and geometric shapes as well as
shapes almost recognizable as domestic objects (tables, cups, chairs, etc.)….
• She would fit these together like a colorful, abstract puzzle.
• Her artworks are huge, wall sized pieces. Often, many different shaped canvases were fit
together for the overall painting
• The images were defined by layers of bold colors.
• She describes her work as an exploration of emotions and the psyche.

9. “For a couple of years I’ve been working with cutting out shapes and kind
of glomming them together and letting it go where it may, like basically
making a zigzag shape and making a rectangular shape and a circular,
bloopy, fat, cloudy shape and just putting them all together and letting
the cards fall where they may. I don’t know why I’m doing it this way
because what I want more than anything else in my life and in my
painting is for things to unify, to come together.”

10. Painter's Progress
(1981).

12. Almost Made It. 1998-
1999 Oil on three
canvases, 73 1/2 x 99”

13. Landing, 1999

14. “It is about making things, and it’s about expression, and it’s about
creation.”
“When you walk out of the studio, and you walk down the street that’s
where you find art. Or you find it at home, right in front of you. I paint
about things that surround me-things that I pick up and handle
everyday. That’s what art is. Art is an epiphany in a coffee cup.”

15. Yikes, 1982. Oil on canvas, two
panels, 9' 7" x 9' 5

16. Bop. 2002-2003.
Oil on canvas
9’10” x 10’10.5”

17. Can You Hear Me?
1984
Oil on 4 canvases
106 x 159 x 12 in.

18. Worms eye.
2002. Oil on
canvas, 97” X 92”