ELIZABETH MURRAY: THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Soft-spoken, tousle-topped, pale and slim, Elizabeth Murray can melt right into a crowd. Her paintings, on the other hand, have punched their way to the top of the heap of contemporary art. Big oils on canvas often composed of several odd-shaped parts, the New York artist’s works pile up and twist and crack as if propelled by some uncontrollable force. Richly painted in the center, they may blast off in all directions or drip off their edges.

In “Kitchen Painting,” a giant glob of a “spoon” pokes out of a canvas that might have survived a tornado. A chartreuse exclamation point shoots from the screaming mouth of a tiny face in the center of “Can You Hear Me.” Even such a flat, properly square-cornered painting as “Sleep” is on the move. Murray describes this work, depicting an agitated purple “dog” in a claustrophobic red room, as being “about something trying to get out.”

Not all the 45 paintings and drawings in Murray’s exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary facility (through Sept. 20), are as aggressive as these, but none is entirely quiet. In this first major survey of the 47-year-old artist’s work, the big, bumptious paintings prod the TC’s airy space, while the biomorphic entities that crowd each other or simply incubate in some of the pastels throb with life.

“Painting was being declared dead about the time I got involved with it,” Murray said last week in an interview at the museum. Undaunted by detractors who characterize her as a reactionary maker of “objects on the wall, mundane commercial entities,” she said, “I really enjoy making them, and I like the thing-ness of them. It also is my nature to say, ‘You don’t like objects? Well I’ll give you objects. You’re not going to believe the object I’m working on right now.’ ”

Murray doesn’t present herself as a scrapper; quite the contrary. During an interview she thoughtfully reconsidered familiar questions and wrestled with fresh ones. But the visual tension of imposing contradictory images on shapes that seem unrelated to them has such a strong appeal for her that it has become a central tenet of her work.

The screaming face in “Can You Hear Me” floats in a room that’s superimposed on a 9-foot-wide arrangement of numeral-shaped canvases. A flattened green “table” flies over red chairs in “More Than You Know.” Coffee cups, Murray’s most persistent image in these works of the past decade, spread across the dark, forest-like forms of “Yikes” and unite chubby, bouncing shapes that might be inflatable beach toys in “Sail Baby.”

Gazing at paintings that at first appear to be pure abstractions, we soon find ourselves staring into rooms without ceilings or discovering lumpy personages that hark back to Murray’s childhood fascination with comic books. As a young fan of Donald Duck, Little Lulu, Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy, she planned to be a commercial artist and even wrote to Walt Disney to ask if she could be his secretary.

During student days at the Art Institute of Chicago and Mills College, Murray concentrated on fine art, but her work of the ‘60s includes comic-book characters and she acknowledges her early reading material as “an enormous influence,” though hardly the only one.

There was, for example, the “breakthrough” encounter with Willem de Kooning’s painting, “Excavation,” a 1950 oil in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. As a 22-year-old student, she had looked at the work repeatedly without understanding how he “moved the paint across the surface.” But one day, she said, “I suddenly saw how he did it, knew I could do it and went into the studio and did it. That was the first time that I got my head, hand and heart into it.”

After that, her development was a relatively gradual process of coming to “understand other artists and what they could do for me” while figuring out what she herself was up to. She began to “understand the shapes” and essential conflicts in her art as recently as 1981, she said, in a work called “Painters’ Progress,” which depicts a palette and brushes on a rectangle shattered into 19 separate canvases.

Confessing that she “would like to break away from the images” but remains “obsessed with them,” Murray said they have never become a predictable element. Instead of planning finished products, she starts with stretched canvas shapes and later “inflicts” images as they occur to her. In the exhibition’s excellent catalogue, she candidly accounts for the images’ evolution: a yellow splash that became fingers of a hand, a fractured beer glass that pays homage to Synthetic Cubism, a wandering arm that grew from a cup when she “was thinking about the long arm of the law and then happened to get the Laurie Anderson record where she talks about Mom’s long arm.”

Murray’s work is prized by the conservative constituency of the art community for being “real painting,” but she undermines that safe house. Rooms, furniture and figures emerge from her abstract shapes, while depicted objects are perpetually at odds with the irregular canvases that ground them. “The images don’t explain the shapes and the shapes don’t really explain the images,” she says in the catalogue.

Pursuit of conflict flies in the face of artists’ traditional search for aesthetic harmony, but Murray sees her predilection as peculiarly American. Citing an “American tendency to take the rug out from under tradition,” she said the idea of “shredding pretensions” has flourished since Pollock took the “fresh approach of putting canvas on the floor and splashing paint on it.” Pop artists and subsequent generations furthered the debate about what is and is not art--and how to construct it. The resulting “tension between (simultaneously) trying to make art and not make it” has become a dominant force in contemporary art, including her own, according to the artist who says, “It is in my nature to question.”

Murray has learned to manage potentially destructive struggles so that her work typically evokes a complex overlay of life and art rather than a battle. Her paintings acknowledge thoughts of home and children while re-examining modern art history. Starting with the spatial revolution of Cubism, she has worked through the development of shaped paintings and the merger of painting and sculpture. Her images recall Cezanne’s interiors, Gris’ still lifes, Miro’s biomorphic forms, Munch’s “Scream” and bits of popular culture.

Murray’s most significant contribution to contemporary art is probably her revitalization of still-life tradition, though that very achievement has labeled her work as feminist--and presented the threat of stuffing it into an unpopular corner. “My feelings about that are complex,” she said. “I am a feminist. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s a feminist ideology that emanates from my painting. My deep concerns with art and life and politics are in my work, but too much has been made of the issue of domesticity.”

Noting that celebrated male artists have painted interiors throughout history, she said, “Cezanne painted cups and saucers his whole life and no one has claimed he was doing domestic tragedies. I often say that real art is sexy and sexual, but it does not have a gender.”

Is there a tendency to overrate Murray in our search for female role models? Are we inclined to bend in her direction simply because she isn’t shallow? Do we cheer too enthusiastically because she demonstrates a mature capacity to merge the abstract and the figurative, the art historical and the personal? Is she, like Eric Fischl, benefiting from a lack of competition from pure painters? Yes, of course, but it’s only a question of degree that doesn’t matter much.

Murray hasn’t been an overnight success. Now that we finally have a good look at her work in Los Angeles, it’s obvious that she has grown quite slowly and steadily into one of the most satisfying and challenging painters working in America today.

Unafraid of being committed in a milieu that prizes irony and cynicism, she has fashioned an oeuvre so fundamentally warm and tough that it has to be respected. That she has done this with relatively little fanfare and earned some recognition in the process should restore faith in a system that seems bent on promoting minor talents to their level of incompetence.

Organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Elizabeth Murray” is the third of four traveling shows scheduled during MOCA’s yearlong “Individuals” exhibition.