Beginner,

1976

Elizabeth Murray arrived in New York in 1967, following a period of study at the Art Institute of Chicago and Mills College in Oakland, California. Working at an oblique angle to Minimalism, the dominant trend at the time, and inspired by the examples of both Cubism and Surrealism, Murray emphasized facture over impersonality and eccentricity over symmetry. As its title implies, Beginner represents an ending as well as a beginning; specifically, it symbolizes the start of a new phase of the artist’s career, one inaugurated by this very painting. An important transitional work, Beginner ushered in a series of monumental canvases characterized by elasticity, warp, and torque, along with emphatic materiality and biomorphic shapes. Murray once compared the dark, bulbous form that jostles the upper right portion of the painting to "Tweety Bird," a reference to her long-standing fascination with cartoons and Walt Disney. Painted in 1976, one year before Murray was appointed lecturer at Princeton University, Beginner was included in the artist’s first solo ­exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery that same year.