Floor 4: Elizabeth Murray & Joan Mitchell: Southeast entrance from Guston

Wall Text

1989
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2008

In Bracket, as in many of her later paintings, Mitchell joined multiple canvases to create a panoramic, immersive composition, producing something of the experience of being in an actual landscape. Bold strokes of cobalt blue, emerald, and sienna are set in different arrangements on each panel, suggesting perhaps the passage of time. Mitchell painted this just three years before her death. Despite declining health, she infused it with all the energy of her earlier paintings of the 1950s. She explained: “I just got up on that f—ing ladder and told myself, ‘This stroke has to work.’”

Wall Text

1987
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989

Wall Text

1956
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1982

In the upper portion of this composition, arcing green lines interwoven with passages of white suggest the spreading canopy of a tree, while a concentration of thicker marks below hint at a trunk. The dense network of brushstrokes might also be read as the overlapping leaves of an artichoke (normally spelled artichaut in French). Here, as she often did, Mitchell sought to capture her personal response to the landscape, as filtered through her memory. “I could certainly never mirror nature,” she said. “I would like more to paint what it leaves with me.”

Wall Text

1987
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1994

It takes time to recognize that this warped canvas represents a table with legs in the form of four small elements that project from the canvas. On its surface Murray painted the dark-blue outline of another splayed table, along with an elongated spoon and a cup filled with an orange-red liquid that splatters outward. She drew upon imagery from her immediate surroundings—everyday objects in her studio and home. The forms unmistakably reference the body, with suggestions of orifices and fluids. At the same time, the pool of orange and the giant drops refer to the medium of paint itself.

Wall Text

1988
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1988

As in My Manhattan, January, on view nearby, this work features a central circular opening from which cartoonish drops flow. Here, however, the surface is a complex, multipart form that bulges out and loops back on itself. To prepare the canvases for works like Things to Come, Murray first sketched her ideas, then modeled them in clay, then translated them into full-scale drawings from which assistants built the shaped wooden supports. Such works blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. The artist noted: “They’re really paintings, but I think that they do transgress—they’re transgressors into space.”