Judith Murray's Mediations on Variousness
by Raphael Rubenstein
Working Image of Transformation of the Romantic, 2002, oil on canvas, 96" x 108"
In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Wallace Stevens, a poet Judith Murray passionately admires (many of her titles are taken from his poems, and like him she has been affected by the seductive environment of the Florida Keys), insists on three conditions for the kind of poetry he wants: 1. “It must be abstract.” 2. “It must change.” 3. “It must give pleasure.” It’s hard to think of a better summary of Murray’s paintings, which masterfully build on the various legacies of 20th century abstraction, fearlessly embrace an improvisational process and offer viewers continuous retinal delight.
The opulent beauty of the work Murray has been making during recent decades doesn’t prepare you for the austerity that pervades her early paintings, which typically consist of crisply executed abstract motifs isolated against black backgrounds. I’m thinking of works such as Pearl Street (1975) or the Ballast series from 1976. Contributing to this sense of austerity was the young painter’s decision to henceforth use only four colors in her oil paintings: black, white, red and yellow. Because the motifs, which have often been characterized as “geometric” (a term that doesn’t do justice to their eccentric variety of shapes), feature hard edges and have been painted to look thin and flat, they can seem like painted versions of paper collages, shapes made with scissors or a precision knife rather than with a paintbrush.
If the combination of these floating flattened shapes and their stark palette invites echoes of Russian Constructivist art, especially El Lissitzky’s “Prouns” from the early 1920s, it's no accident: when making these works Murray was looking carefully at El Lissitzky, as well as at Malevich. The impact of Constructivist and Suprematist art is clearly evident in paintings such as Catapult (1981) and Magnet (1981), but her affinity with such pioneers of abstraction went beyond formalist strategies. What attracted her to these artists was, as she recently wrote to me, their “concept of the symbol as not a recognizable form of anything that has been done before but a unique form that grows out of itself.” For Murray, this approach opened the way to a universal rather than a strictly personal vision; she also saw the basic four-color palette as something universal. When, years later, the artist learned that red, yellow, black and white were the colors used in the Lascaux cave paintings, she felt vindicated in her decision.
Judith Murray, Ballast #7, 1976, oil and graphite on canvas, 30.5" × 32.5"
While the stylistic directions Murray pursued in the first phase of her career stood apart from the dominant tendencies among New York painters (in particular, Pattern & Decoration and New Image Painting) there is a more noticeable affinity between her early work and the sculptural works of Ronald Bladen and Robert Grovesner, artists she has long admired. Gradually, however, the ways in which Murray’s work evolved took her further and further away from any connections to minimalist geometry. Surveying Murray’s development, we can trace the gradual dissolution of the geometric elements until by the mid-1990s they had virtually vanished, dissolved into what had been backgrounds but which now became complete atomized visual fields.
There is, however, one element of the early work that Murray has retained, a feature that exerts a powerful and enigmatic influence on how we look at and understand her paintings: the single bands of color that are visible along the right side of every one of Murray’s canvases. Initially monochrome, these vertical bands, inevitably reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s “zips,” eventually became variegated in touch and color, on occasion nearly as painterly as the larger areas to their left. Designating the righthand vertical band is the first action Murray undertakes as she begins a new painting. For her it is, among other things, a means of avoiding the risk of painter’s block when confronted with a blank canvas, not unlike De Kooning’s practice of sketching out a large letter shape to get a painting started. Once she has measured and scored a pencil line from top to bottom (usually around four inches from the right edge) and partly filled in the band with color, she is ready to begin the arduous, joyful process of building up one of her densely sedimented, light-filled paintings.
Judith Murray, A Night in Tunisia, 2014, oil on linen, 72" × 77"
Intentionally, Murray’s supports are always slightly off-square, a bit wider than they are high, but because of the righthand band they look and feel square. An attractive feature of the square support, even when, as with Murray, it isn’t perfectly square, is that it rejects the traditional genre associations of vertical (portrait) and horizontal (landscape) formats, hence its attraction to a long list of radical painters, including Malevich, Mondrian, Albers and Frank Stella. But Murray’s practice of conveying squareness not through simple measurement but by means of the subtle interplay between the physical dimensions of her paintings and the effects of the righthand bands, which seem to nudge the painting closer to squareness, is unique. And that’s not all the bands achieve: reviewing a Murray exhibition in 1999, Barry Schwabsky eloquently described how the bands imply that “a cooler, clearer, quieter force may be mostly hidden but remains in control.” These are gestalt squares, determined by our perception rather than by a measuring tape. As such, they are far more subtle than any literally square painting. Murray further enriches the perceptual subtleties of her work by adding monochrome colors to the right and left edges of her stretched linen support. Viewers who notice these marginal colors may also discover that Murry will often use two different colors for the two edges of the same painting.
Within these constants of format and palette (the artist still relies on her original four colors, though thanks to her prowess at mixing colors a casual viewer would never notice), and a predominantly large scale, Murray has created for herself a dizzying freedom: the variousness of her paintings over the past 25 years is astounding. Each one offers a unique compositional solution, a distinctive combination of colors, a singular mood. The symphonies of marks that she orchestrates onto the paintings with brushes, palette knives, rags or just her fingers can dance like multicolored confetti or flower petals in a breeze (A Night in Tunisia, 2011) or densely accumulate like geological strata (Quarry, 2017-2019) or shimmer like gleams of sunlight on a wind-streaked body of water (Transformation of the Romantic, 2002) or sail like bronzed November leaves (Point of Survey, 2003), wheel around like a murmuration of starlings (Beacon, 2008), rotate like cyclones (Abundance of Matter, 2001), dapple like raindrops on stone (Dark Before Light, 1998) or create fields as dense and delicate as pre-Columbian featherwork (Chance Encounter, 2022); that early austerity is long gone. Underlying these multifarious effects, quite literally, are many layers of work, numerous intermediate states that are invisible in the finished painting but that have been determinative. Paintings such as these can only be created by an artist of grand patience. For all their entrancing richness of color, gesture, and texture, Murray’s paintings are also rich conceptually, with features designed to provoke us into more reflective and less passive ways of looking; they move as we move, in time, in space, in light.
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RAPHAEL RUBENSTEIN is a New York-based art critic and poet, and Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.