Opinion
Elizabeth Murray’s Rare Moment As an Illustrator
THE DAILY PIC: In Murray's show at Canada gallery, her drawings for a travel magazine are the big surprise.
Blake Gopnik
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THE DAILY PIC (#1714): Even though Elizabeth Murray was an absolutely fine and “high” artist, the fine-ness and high-ness of her art depended on its contact with the everyday—with cartoons and old shoes and messes of every kind. In the current Murray show at Canada gallery in New York, curated by Carroll Dunham and Dan Nadel, the most interesting and surprising work shows her art actually coming into direct contact with mass culture. Today’s Daily Pic is one of several images from 1998 drawn to illustrate a feature on Utah that Murray wrote for Travel and Leisure magazine.
In the first half of last century, it was routine for artists to cross over between “high” and “low.” Ironically, it was Pop art that helped sever the two, since it needed to be very aggressively “high” for its embrace of the “low” to carry meaning as art. Illustration has suffered ever since. (Courtesy Pace Gallery, ©2016 The Murray-Holman Family Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
For a full survey of past Daily Pics visit blakegopnik.com/archive.
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