Abstraction And Popeye's Biceps

By ROBERT HUGHES

Most fans of Elizabeth Murray's work will remember a time, only ten or twelve years ago, when the American art world decided that Painting Was Dead. Henceforth the future would belong to videotapes, "propositions," "events" and bits of string on the gallery floor. The exequies over the body were as solemn as they were premature; dust devils of argument spun through art magazines, scattering the ashes. Though no prophecy could have proved less correct -- painting has filled the horizon of American art in the '80s, almost to the point of monopoly -- a young artist needed cussedness and conviction to reject the tribal wisdom of the end of the '70s.

Luckily, Murray had both, and the sight of a dogged, idiosyncratic mind firmly engaged with its own experiences is what her traveling retrospective show -- which will open July 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, having closed late last month after a seven-week run in Boston -- has to offer. At 46, Murray has developed without shortcuts into a wonderfully articulate painter, one of the best of a generation that includes Susan Rothenberg, Neil Jenney and Brice Marden. Her show of some 45 works, a midcareer report organized by the Dallas Museum of Art with an excellent catalog essay by Art Critic Roberta Smith, will continue after Los Angeles to Des Moines and Minneapolis before finishing at the Whitney Museum in New York City next spring. It should not be missed.

At a time when so much art is ironic, distanced and parasitically given to quoting the Big Media, Murray's work goes against the grain. It presents a standoff between fracture and extreme sensuousness. It is nominally abstract, a bit hard to read at first -- until you are used to the shaping and layering of canvas planes in the paintings and of separate sheets of paper in the drawings -- but almost profligate in its flat-out appeal to the eye. The chrome yellows and leaf greens, cobalts, pinks, purples and deep, reverberant blacks that proliferate in her work are the signs of a master colorist without inhibitions. Her drawing may be ponderous and whippy by turns, but never irresolute.

The subtle friction of the yellow fingers and pink biomorphic shapes around the central void of Keyhole, 1982, has something of the quality of '40s de Kooning, sexy and calligraphic at the same time: it evokes the felt presence of the body as an obsessive subject, but obliquely. And there is a curious tension between the enormous size of Murray's canvases and the often domestic and maternal emblems that become their subject matter -- tables and chairs, cups and spoons, an arm, a breast. Murray is not a feminist artist in any ideological sense, but her work, like Louise Bourgeois's or Lee Krasner's, gives a powerful sense of womanly experience. Forms enfold one another, signaling an ambient sense of protection and sexual comfort -- an imagery of nurture, plainly felt and directly expressed, whose totem is the Kleinian breast rather than the Freudian phallus.

But this longed-for integration is always jolted by the fracture and splitting of the paintings, their discontinuous surfaces, their eccentric formats. There are times when Murray's shaping of the canvas gets too sculptural and becomes an awkward hybrid. The space her color evokes so well can be overstrained by so much twisting and jutting, though that never happens in the drawings. But the sense of controlled disorder does not matter: "I want the panels to look as if they had been thrown against the wall and that's how they stuck together," she says. This sense of improvisation lets Murray make "abstract" art that includes experience of the body and is filled with tender awkwardness, but in a colloquial way.

False rhetoric is not one of her problems. She goes in for titles like Yikes and Can You Hear Me?, and the shapes in her paintings have a cartoony flavor; there are speed lines and zap-zigzags from the comics in several of them, and speech balloons too. One of her favorite forms, a swelling lobe pinched at the ends, looks like Popeye's biceps ready to take on the world after the transforming gulp of spinach. This fondness for the demotic shape has been with Murray since her childhood in Bloomington, Ill., when she used to draw her own comic books and pass them around among her friends. But today the effect in no way resembles that of pop quotation. Murray transforms these signs rather as Miro did those of Catalan folk culture. Indeed, one of the presiding influences on her work clearly is Miro's, for her art is about dreaming and free association, the goofy insecurity of objects that slide through the looking glass of her tactile sensibility and peek out, transformed, on the other side.

The other artist one thinks of in connection with Murray is Juan Gris, the quiet master of analytical cubism, with his smooth Ingresque planes and profiles of a teacup, gueridon and spoon, their lights and darks fitting together like notches of a key in the wards of a lock. But Murray's work is less composed. Its messages include the direct psychological narrative, the contact with anxiety (including the anxieties of stylistic irresolution that must be faced with every new picture) that Gris' still lifes were designed to bury. You sense, when you look at it, that a whole temperament is strenuously engaged in conveying what it is like to be in the world. The effort goes beyond style, beyond pat categories of abstract and figurative; and it gives her work its sweet, rambunctious and very American life.