Artist, Elizabeth Murray: This was a real turning point. I knew where to go after I did this painting. I had this idea that you could take conflicting things and make a whole thing out of them. And I thought of it as shattering the canvas, like if you had a canvas that you just threw it down on the floor, and it just split.
Mia Matthias: Painters Progress is made up of 19 fragments. She actually didn't have the image in mind, and one day she was walking her dog on Canal Street, and she saw a neon sign in an art supply store that featured a palette with three brushes. And she felt like it was the most obvious thing in the world when she saw it.
The way that she approached many of her fragmented works is: she sketched the shapes, and then she arranged those shapes on a wall and came to the overall composition of the geometric fragments. And then she arrived at the imagery and the color palette.
Elizabeth Murray: It just, psychically, was so satisfying to have something be shattered, but have an image that pulled it together that made you see it as one thing. And it felt like my mind.
Mia Matthias: Murray expressed that at the time, she herself felt very shattered. And she felt a connection to this process of shattering the canvas and making it whole again, not necessarily the same whole that once existed, but a new whole. It's the work where she was able to solidify this idea that would then permeate through the rest of her career.
Archival audio from: Elizabeth Murray and Dodie Kazanjian. Interview with Elizabeth Murray, 2005 June 7-July 20. Dodie Kazanjian papers, 1949-2025. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.