Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993
Edited with introduction by Jarrett Earnest. Foreword by Hilton Als.
Art writing, theory, poetry and more from a leading champion of “painting as a poetic act”
This unprecedented collection compiles the writings of artist and poet Jesse Murry (1948–93), an extraordinary thinker who believed in the capacity of painting to hold the complexity of human meaning. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction brings together Murry’s published art criticism with previously unpublished philosophical writing and poetry from 1980 to his tragic death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44. The result is a portrait of an original mind who sought to unite the histories of Romantic landscape painting with the realities of Black experience through “a belief in the restorative and creative powers of the imagination.” No artist before occupied the exact intersections Murry created through his work, which aimed to reclaim “painting as a poetic act” amid the “death of painting” discourse of the 1980s. In addition to Murry’s writings, this volume also includes reproductions of selected paintings; excerpts from a a pair of panel discussions on art criticism and expressionism that took place in 1980; as well as transcriptions of two of the artist's notebooks, in which the spatialization of the words across the page approaches the condition of thought. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction presents Jesse Murry in his own words, offering intimate access to this remarkable figure.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993'.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
BOMB
Sheryl Oppenheim
Reading Painting Is a Supreme Fiction is a profoundly moving experience, as is looking at a Jesse Murry painting—such is the effectiveness of his communication with paint and with words.
New York Review of Books
Jarrett Earnest
Jesse Murry’s abstract seascapes enabled him to explore the inner world of the mind while infusing his art with his life as a gay Black man.
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Tuesday, March 8, from 6:30–7:30 PM, the New York Studio School presents Clear Bright Edges of the Horizon: New Perspectives, a panel discussion introduced by painter Lisa Yuskavage and moderated by critic Jarrett Earnest. Free and open to the public, this live Zoom / YouTube webinar panel will feature painters, poets and art historians including Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Alex Fialho, Camille Okhio and Jason Stopa in conversation with Yuskavage and Earnest on the art and poetry of Jesse Murry. Register here! continue to blog
“Untitled (Rising Abyss Study)” (1992) is reproduced from Painting is a Supreme Fiction, Soberscobe Press’s enlightening 312-page compendium of the underrecognized artist and poet Jesse Murry's art criticism, alongside previously unpublished philosophical writing and poetry from 1980 to his death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44. "As a painter, I mis-read and substitute or make available priorities that address my needs,” Murry asserts in the titular essay, written while he was studying with Harold Bloom at Yale in the 1980s. "For weather, I substitute light, knowing as I do that light is color and color light; light is substance as color is substance or pigment; light as pigment-color is light-imbued substance which in its deployment makes space and in the making of space can assert, deepen, or deny the plane. It can also evoke weather as temperature, climate, light, etc. As an artist, I know these conditions are both part of the factual, visual nature of paint which has the transformative capacity to evoke and possess a metaphoric or poetic power which can be seen as weather. [Wallace] Stevens turns to the idea of weather as a theologian turns to the idea of God. I turn to the idea of God and the knowledge of weather and the experience of light as the materia poetica of painting which transforms painting into a supreme fiction. And I know that the light as weather, as God, takes on a spiritual force and poetic power as the tangible and concrete manifestation of the imagination makes the particulars of my subjectivity or inwardness tenable, actual, real." continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 6.5 x 8 in. / 312 pgs / 15 color / 11 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $32.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $44 GBP £25.50 ISBN: 9781940190303 PUBLISHER: Soberscove Press AVAILABLE: 9/28/2021 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980–1993
Published by Soberscove Press. Edited with introduction by Jarrett Earnest. Foreword by Hilton Als.
Art writing, theory, poetry and more from a leading champion of “painting as a poetic act”
This unprecedented collection compiles the writings of artist and poet Jesse Murry (1948–93), an extraordinary thinker who believed in the capacity of painting to hold the complexity of human meaning. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction brings together Murry’s published art criticism with previously unpublished philosophical writing and poetry from 1980 to his tragic death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44. The result is a portrait of an original mind who sought to unite the histories of Romantic landscape painting with the realities of Black experience through “a belief in the restorative and creative powers of the imagination.” No artist before occupied the exact intersections Murry created through his work, which aimed to reclaim “painting as a poetic act” amid the “death of painting” discourse of the 1980s. In addition to Murry’s writings, this volume also includes reproductions of selected paintings; excerpts from a a pair of panel discussions on art criticism and expressionism that took place in 1980; as well as transcriptions of two of the artist's notebooks, in which the spatialization of the words across the page approaches the condition of thought. Painting Is a Supreme Fiction presents Jesse Murry in his own words, offering intimate access to this remarkable figure.