Roberta Smith Reexamines "Singular" Elizabeth Murray

Born and bred in Chicago, the late Elizabeth Murray (BFA 1962) fell in love with Cézanne and de Koonig while roaming the Art Institute. A survey of her drawings at gallery Canada invited Roberta Smith to reflect on the artist’s attachment to Chicago in a recent New York Times review, noting that Murray “was steeped in the attitudes—namely an equal interest in high and low—of the artists who would soon to be known as the Chicago Imagists.”

“Murray was a hybrid artist,” Smith mourned, “which makes her work seem very pertinent in a moment when younger painters have little interest in purity and a lot in the formal or abstract possibilities of representation.”