Elizabeth Murray











Elizabeth Murray (September 6, 1940 – August 12, 2007)[1] was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art,[2] the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,[3] the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Life and work[edit]

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Murray graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1958-1962. She earned her Master of Fine Artsdegree from Mills College in 1964.[4] As a student, she was influenced by painters ranging from Cézanne to Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.[5]
In 1967, Murray moved to New York City, and first exhibited in 1971 in the Whitney Museum of American Art Annual Exhibition. One of her first mature works included "Children Meeting," 1978 (now in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum), an oil on canvas painting evoking human characteristics, personalities, or pure feeling through an interaction of non-figurative shapes, colour and lines.[5] She is particularly noted for her shaped canvas paintings.[6]
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.[7] In 1999, Murray was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.[8] This grant led directly to opening of theBowery Poetry Club, a Lower East Side performance arts venue run by her husband, Bob Holman.[9]
In 2006, her 40-year career was honored at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).[10] The retrospective was widely praised, with The New York Times noting that by the end of the exhibition, "You're left with the sense of an artist in the flush of her authority and still digging deep."[6] As of 2008, Murray was only one of five female artists to have had a retrospective at the MoMA—the other four are Louise Bourgeois (in 1982), Lee Krasner (in 1984), Helen Frankenthaler (in 1989), and Lee Bontecou (in 2004).[11]
In 2007, Murray died of lung cancer. In her obituary, The New York Times wrote that Murray "reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself..."[1] The Bowery Poetry Club held a Praise Day in her honor on August 30, 2007, with artists Brice Marden and Joel Shapiro, writers Jessica Hagedorn and Patricia Spears Jones, and choreographers Elizabeth Streb and Yoshiko Chuma among the attendees; Artforum described the event as "a blend of the poignant and the comic that threatened to bring it closer to a Saturday Night Live skit shredding avant-garde performance practice than an actual art-world remembrance." [12] A second private memorial was held at the Museum of Modern Art later that fall. Murray was survived by her husband, Bob Holman, and three children: daughters Sophia Murray Holman and Daisy Murray Holman, and son Dakota Sunseri.[1

Art and Feminism[edit]

"Murray’s curatorial gesture would seem to have constituted a partial change of heart from her . . . previously self-contained feminism. It is important, though that her strategy for convincing was exhibiting––bringing images out of the shadows . . . As with the Abstract Expressionist record, so with MoMA, where far more works by women sit in storage than are on display." - [13]
The Murray-Holman Family Trust is represented by the Pace Gallery in New York.
After Murray's death, the A G Foundation, Columbia University, and the Archives of American Art established the “Elizabeth Murray Oral History of Women in the Visual Arts Project,” to honor her memory. "It seems so right to honor Elizabeth Murray by archiving the lives, the thoughts, the dreams and goals of other women who—like herself—persisted in the visual arts, extending and enriching the world through their work," said the A G Foundation'sAgnes Gund.[14]

Commenti

Posta un commento

Post popolari in questo blog

Anselm Kiefer

Immagine
Dice Kiefer: “ C’è una tale proliferazione di cose, musica, messaggi, che non esistono più confini da infrangere. Non voglio dire che Duchamp abbia fatto male a esporre il suo orinatoio, la prima volta è stato straordinario, ma la seconda non lo era già più, la terza volta non era altro hee un orinatoio. L’arte e la vita sono due cose molto diverse. ” È davvero la fine di un’era. Dopo il liceo si iscrive a Legge, ma nel  1966  lascia il corso per iscriversi a Pittura. Vive a  Friburgo  e frequenta lo studio di Peter Dreher poi si trasferisce a  Karlsruhe  dove avvicina il pittore Horst Antes, che considererà il suo primo e vero maestro. Nel  1972  incontra  Joseph Beuys . Sono gli anni in cui Kiefer inizia una serie di azioni artistiche che definirà "Besetzungen" (Occupazioni). Egli, provocatoriamente, si fa fotografare col braccio teso nel saluto hitleriano davanti a una serie di luoghi della...
Continua a leggere

Diego Rivera

Immagine
Man at the Crossroads 1886 Diego Rivera nasce l'8 dicembre a Guanajuato, città a nord del Messico. E' un gemello, ma suo fratello Carlos muore ad un anno e mezzo. Nel 1988 nasce la sorella Maria de Pilar. 1892 Con la famiglia, si trasferisce a Città del Messico. 1896 Comincia a seguire dei corsi serali all'Accademia San Carlos. 1898 Si iscrive in modo ufficiale all'Accademia San Carlos, dove apprende gli stili artistici europei e diventa allievo di José Maria Velasco, paesaggista della fine del XIX secolo.  1906 Partecipa con ventisei opere all'esposizione annuale degli studenti dell'Accademia, combinando il percorso classico con l'influenza dell'artista folk messicano Jose Guadalupe Posada. Emergerà con uno stile specificamente messicano già all'età di 16 anni. 1907 - 1908 Una borsa di studio del governo messicano rende possibile la partenza per l'Europa. Il primo stato europeo visitato è la Spagna, dove studia le ope...
Continua a leggere

Cy Twombly

Immagine
Cy Twombly Ritual 1949 Min-oe 1951 MIN-OE 1951. / BITUMEN, OIL BASED HOUSE PAINT ON CANVAS, 85 X 100 CM. ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION. Untitled 1951 Landscape 1951 ZYIG, 1951. / LEXINGTON VIRGINIA. 41 X 51.5 CM. UNTITLED 1952. / OIL ON CANVAS, 73.5 X 91.5 CM. SOLON I 1952. / LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA. HOUSE PAINT AND EARTH ON CANVAS, 102 X 133 CM. UNTITLED 1953. / OIL BASED HOUSE PAINT, WAX CRAYON AND PENCIL ON CANVAS, 52 1/8 X 52 1/8 INCHES. ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION UNTITLED 1953. / MONOTYPE IN PAINT, 48 X 64 CM. UNTITLED 1953. / MONOTYPE IN PAINT, 48 X 64 CM. TIZNIT 1953. / WHITE LEAD, HOUSE PAINT, CRAYON, AND PENCIL ON CANVAS, 53, 1/2 X 6 2 1/2 INCHES (135.9 X 189.2 CM). Dal  1947  al  1949  studia al School of the Museum of Fine Arts di  Boston , alla Washington and Lee University e al Art Students League di  New York  dal  1950  al  1951 . Lì conosce  Rober...
Continua a leggere