GRAND FUNK.(Elizabeth Murray; PaceWildenstein, New York, NY)

Elizabeth Murray's enchanting, tough show of recent paintings and drawings at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea is her best in many years. This makes it an important event in the New York art world. Murray has been eminent and beloved hereabouts for a quarter-century, but she has also been regarded with ambivalence. There are people who don't always like her stuff as much as they wish they did. (I'm one of them.) But the most successful of her paintings assuage all doubts. They are congeries of daffy cartoonish shapes in stretched canvas or jigsawed wood, thickly painted in rich, loud, chafing colors and arrayed on the wall in roughly rectangular layouts. They teem with figurative references to vestigial body parts (fingers, hands, eyes, noses, lips, sex organs); flora (leaves, cacti); fauna (birds, snakes); domestic objects (windows, doors, pieces of furniture, kitchen utensils, handkerchiefs); symbols (arrows, speech balloons, hearts). But the works' chief impact is augustly formal. The various shapes, interacting with literally negative spaces, cohere in the eye and in the mind as balanced, flat pictures. This dynamic is both impressive and very satisfying.

Murray was born in Chicago in 1940, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. After sojourns in northern California and elsewhere, she arrived in New York in 1967, and within a few years became celebrated for cheeky abstract paintings that played with generic, modern-arty polygons, zigzags, and blobs. Her style was, and remains, indebted to Chicago "imagism,"a funky Surrealist movement of the nineteen-sixties. She was also inspired by the example of Philip Guston, who, late in his career, jettisoned the most sensitive of Abstract Expressionist styles in favor of raucous, psychologically raw cartoon imagery. Other formative influences included Claes Oldenburg and Jasper Johns. Murray brought an anarchic expressiveness to the rescue of New York abstraction, which had become cowed and constipated during the reign of minimalism. (By contrast, the monochromes of Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, for all their excellence, could seem like pupils furtively whispering in the back of a classroom ruled by a fearsome teacher.) With an evolving strategy of decisive, juicy painting on jazzily shaped and layered canvases, she stared down Frank Stella's coldly impersonal painted reliefs of the seventies. To diehard painting fans, her audacity was exhilarating.

Murray is one of a handful of artists, Chuck Close and Terry Winters among them, who carry the sputtering torch of classical New York painting; their work is big in size and in feeling, formally scrupulous, aesthetically adventurous, and nakedly sincere. This tradition has long been in trouble. Around 1980, it was eclipsed by European painters, notably Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer, who had assimilated American precedents and leaped beyond them by using formats derived from Abstract Expressionism as scaffolds for dazzling conceptual manipulations. A Kiefer could deliver a sublime punch while stirring reflections on sinister modern history. On a more general level, skeptical irony undercut art that smacked of earnestness. Murray suddenly appeared provincial and corny. Her manifest desire to please--her labor-intensive, exhausting sprightliness--began to feel as discomfiting as an overattentive party host. What might be called a lingering Chicagoism, tinged with feminist sentiments in manic evocations of coffee-spilling domestic discord, further limited her appeal.

In the eighties, the New York art world demanded theatrical self-consciousness in painting, and it arrived in the grandiose posturing of Julian Schnabel and the vertiginous sarcasm of David Salle. Such wised-up, European-influenced painting appeared heroic because it was pitted against fashions in conceptual art and critical theory that were striving to expunge painting altogether from respectable contemporary art. Murray's refusal to surrender her conviction of unbroken continuity with the New York School's principles could seem heroic, too, in a mulish sort of ...