Coloring Outside the Lines; So painting is dead? Someone forgot to tell Elizabeth Murray.

Publication: Newsweek

Publication Date: 31-OCT-05

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Byline: Peter Plagens

A quarter century ago, when painting was supposed to be dead again, Elizabeth Murray spotted some small canvases lying around her New York studio. "I just screwed them together in a jumbled way and started painting on them," she says. "Then a studio assistant showed me how to stabilize them with aluminum bars in the back," and a style was born. More accurately, it was a new wrinkle on the cheerfully visceral paintings with kindergarten shapes that have long made Murray a favorite among fellow artists. In the early 1980s, she went baroque, stretching canvas over...

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