National Coffee Day: Elizabeth Murray

Cups of coffee appeared frequently in Elizabeth Murray's paintings. 

National Coffee Day was first celebrated in about 2005, but did not take off as a holiday until September 29, 2009. That’s the day that the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans labeled the day as Coffee Day as a kick off to the inaugural New Orleans Coffee Festival. National Coffee Day is a day to celebrate coffee. The U.S. consumes more coffee than any nation.

National Coffee Day, 29 September: art by Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007 US)

Elizabeth Murray, Yikes, 1982, oil on two canvas panels, 291.2 x 288.3 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2025 Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (MOMA-P1522murars)

Between 1979 and 1980, Murray evolved her groundbreaking concept of not only breaking up a composition between several canvases, but breaking up the canvases themselves into a variety of rectilinear and curved shapes. Her shaped canvases began to take on the shape of recognizable objects as well as abstract imagery that made reference to art historical styles. These huge, shaped multi-canvas works ultimately took on three-dimensional qualities, extending from the wall into space, creating sculptural installations.

Yikes – Murray’s ode in color and overlapping shapes to a dropped cup of coffee -- pre-dated her larger multi-canvas works of the early 2000s. In works such as this, where there are references to physical objects, Murray approaches the composition with her stated obsession with unification of the work. Once again, color is a major vehicle of unity. As Murray stated on the PBS program Art21, concerning this piece, "There has to be some kind of unification of shapes and colors and it just may be in a very surprising way."

Background

In the second half of the 1900s in American painting, the prevailing trend of various types of realism was challenged successfully by Abstract Expressionism. After roughly fifteen years of domination, Pop Art and Photorealism arose as successful challengers to the action painting and color field of Abstract Expressionism. Minimalism and Conceptualism challenged the very value of the physical painting, emphasizing the aesthetic idea rather than the resulting object.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Neo-Expressionism and Postmodernism returned to figuration. By the 1980s, many artists committed to abstraction reasserted its relevance not only to painting and the tradition of modernism, but also in its continued ability to articulate the boundaries of the art form and its aesthetic and ideological potential.

Elizabeth Murray, born in Chicago, was raised in Michigan and Illinois. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA 1962) and Mills College in Oakland (MFA 1964) during a time of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism.

After 1967 she moved to New York. At the time, Minimalism was a leading abstract counterpoint to the figuration of Pop Art and Photo Realism. Murray's early work in the 1970s was a reconciliation of Minimalist structures combined with recognizable forms. Lines and curves often pushed at the boundaries of the rectangular canvases.