The celebrated artist Elizabeth Murray once said, “Art is no more of a distortion of ‘reality’ than is our all too human remembered fantasy.” This insight lies at the heart of her innovative approach to the feline form, where she deconstructs the familiar cat shape and imbues it with new layers of abstraction and emotional resonance. In our 15 years installing…
Now, this might seem counterintuitive…
Murray’s iconic “Madame Cézanne (in the armchair turning on the light)” series from the early 1970s exemplifies her radical reimagining of the cat as a symbolic, psychologically-charged presence. By reinterpreting Cézanne’s portraits of his wife through the lens of her own experiences as a woman and mother, Murray collapses the boundaries between representation and abstraction. The cat figure becomes a conduit for her subjective expression, “as much about me as it is about Cézanne.”
This blurring of the line between the representational and the abstract is a hallmark of Murray’s artistic practice. As she explained, “I think that’s what I was thinking, that I was her and I was falling forward in the rocking chair, or making that gesture.” The cat shape, once a recognizable motif, becomes a vessel for the artist’s own psychological projection and a means of deconstructing traditional portraiture.
Murray’s evolution from the “Madame Cézanne” works to the boldly abstract “Cat” paintings of the late 1970s and 1980s demonstrates her increasing commitment to pushing the boundaries of representation. In these later works, the cat form is fragmented, multiplied, and abstracted to the point of almost complete dissolution. Vibrant, irregularly-shaped canvases are populated by disjointed feline forms that seem to float, collide, and dissolve into sweeping brushstrokes and pockets of pure color.
The proliferation of these feline shapes, often depicted in an unnatural palette of greens, purples, and blues, creates a sense of dynamic tension and visual ambiguity. As the art critic Roberta Smith observed, Murray’s paintings from this period are “alternately ingratiating and antagonistic, sophisticated and dopey.” The cat, once a familiar domestic subject, becomes an agent of visual disruption and emotional complexity.
This deconstructive approach to the cat form is intimately tied to Murray’s broader exploration of the painted surface and its ability to convey subjective experiences. As she explained, “The physicality of the making is very intense for me.” Her canvases become arenas for a kind of physical, embodied expression, where the act of painting itself is as important as the representational imagery.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Murray’s groundbreaking “Beginner” (1976), a sprawling, shaped canvas that features a monumental, abstracted feline form. The work’s sheer scale and dynamic, sculptural presence evoke a sense of the cat as a primal, almost mythic presence, unbound by the constraints of traditional representation. The cat shape is both recognizable and utterly transformed, a testament to Murray’s virtuosic command of the painted medium.
In a similar vein, the “Children Meeting” (1978) painting incorporates feline elements that seem to burst forth from the canvas, their swirling, fragmented forms imbued with a raw, expressive energy. Here, the cat is not just a subject to be depicted, but a creative force that shapes the very structure of the work itself.
Murray’s radical approach to the cat form was not developed in isolation, but rather emerged from her engagement with a wider artistic discourse. The fragmented, abstracted aesthetic of her cat paintings can be seen as a response to the innovations of Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism – movements that sought to challenge the conventions of representation and push the boundaries of visual expression.
In particular, Murray’s work shares a kinship with the deconstructive strategies of Picasso, whose groundbreaking “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) shattered the picture plane and reimagined the human figure through a prism of fractured perspectives. Like Picasso, Murray embraces the disruptive potential of abstraction, using the cat form as a springboard for exploring the expressive capabilities of paint and the painted surface.
Murray’s cat paintings also resonate with the Surrealist fascination with the subconscious and the realm of dreams. The distorted, morphing feline shapes in works like “Searchin'” (1976) and “Desire” (1976) evoke the unsettling logic of the dream world, where the familiar is transmuted into the strange and uncanny. This sense of visual ambiguity and psychological intensity aligns Murray’s practice with the Surrealist project of revealing the hidden depths of the human psyche.
Yet, as with her Cubist and Surrealist predecessors, Murray’s engagement with abstraction is always tempered by a deep commitment to the medium of painting itself. Her canvases, with their thick, tactile brushstrokes and irregular, shaped supports, bear the mark of the artist’s hand in a way that distinguishes her work from the more conceptual approaches of some of her contemporaries.
This fusion of abstraction and materiality is perhaps most evident in the artist’s “Painter’s Progress” (1981), where the cat form is reduced to a series of overlapping, interlocking shapes that seem to pulse and vibrate with pure chromatic energy. Here, the cat is not a discrete, representational entity, but rather a jumping-off point for an exploration of the expressive potential of paint as a physical, tactile medium.
As the art critic Deborah Solomon observed, Murray’s cat paintings “show her a side of herself — a violence and physicality that scares her.” This notion of the cat as a vessel for the artist’s own psychological and emotional complexity is a central thread running through her oeuvre, from the “Madame Cézanne” series to the boldly abstracted works of her later career.
By deconstructing the familiar feline form, Murray challenges viewers to engage with painting as a mode of subjective, embodied expression. Her cat paintings become sites of creative tension, where representation and abstraction, the familiar and the uncanny, coexist in a state of dynamic equilibrium. In doing so, she expands the expressive possibilities of the painted image and invites us to rethink our very understanding of the cat as a subject for artistic exploration.
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