Two major chicks get out there: Elizabeth Murray and Kate Bush

I like these two women a lot: Elizabeth Murray and Kate Bush. Murray is a highly enjoyable painter, and Bush is a progressive art-rocker of the highest ilk. And their highly original visions are highly female visions, therefore a refreshing break from all the fucking maleness around us. Here are two articles about them:

1. Massive MOMA retrospective from Elizabeth Murray. Disclosure: I've met this woman because I know her remarkable poet entrepreneur husband, Bob Holman, who runs the Bowery Poetry Club, an always open NYC bar/cafe dedicated to poetry events. One reason I really like her is that she was presciently and totally depressed when Bush was first elected in 2000, long before he did anything to be depressed about. If you live in NYC, you should see her show for one reason only: her paintings are great on the eye: they'll keep your visual sense stimulated, enchanted and entranced. I do not mean to demean her work when I call it eye-candy. It's eye-candy of the highest order. If there were a Nobel Prize for Painting, she'd get it. Go see and enjoy.

Stirring Up a Commotion on Canvas -- By Michael Kimmelman

THE philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided writers and thinkers into foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes are interested in many things, hedgehogs in one. Foxes move from one problem to another. Hedgehogs dig deep. Dante and Proust were hedgehogs. Moliere and Pushkin were foxes. Einstein was a hedgehog. Shakespeare was a fox.

Elizabeth Murray is a hedgehog. Her retrospective opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art presents the whole range of shape-shifting, dizzily colored pictures that she has been steadily producing over four decades. Ms. Murray paints cartoonish scenes on canvases that are multilayered or arranged like shards of shattered plates, or sculptured into behemoths, or combined like Tinkertoy parts that nuzzle and jostle.

The colors are noisy, the harmonies pungent; references are to body parts, household furniture, kitchen utensils and comic-book symbols, generally twisted like taffy or otherwise sneakily abstracted.

While art-world fashion has drifted here and there over the years, she has stuck to her craft, with all its difficulties and at the occasional cost of failure and neglect. Organized by Robert Storr, with an ancillary display of Ms. Murray's exquisite prints and a two-volume catalog that includes a clever (not too expensive) pop-up book, bespeaking her playful side, her show is a meaty, openhearted, eye-popping tribute to a beloved painter's painter.

A hedgehog? She has pursued a problem partly inherited from Cubism, and filtered through Surrealism and comics. It is how to get movement (translating her absorption in the sensuous push and pull of pigment) into a static image - how to make a figurative painting, even when its subjects are inert objects like tables and glasses, convey instability, fracture, speed, collapse, explosion, thrust. This isn't a new problem, of course. Among others, Ms. Murray has had her great hero Cezanne to emulate.

Her inclination has been to nudge painting toward relief sculpture: to concoct and combine panels and shaped canvases that teem with goofy incident and stuff. What results can look as rickety as an old jalopy. Paint pools, congeals and drips. Sides and edges of canvases stay unfinished, like the backs of stage props, openly belying their ostensible illusions. You love them or not for their messiness.

Meanwhile, they are ingenious riffs on Cubist perspective. "Don't Be Cruel" is twisted like a crumpled tissue floating on a breeze. Its subject is a table whose legs, by virtue of the twists to the canvas, appear both from the side and below. "Wonderful World," the size of a small church bell in a bell tower, imagines a cup and spoon as if they were made of Silly Putty, the cup squashed and bent to present both its top and bottom at once.

Ms. Murray's first retrospective in New York, a traveling show, arrived at the Whitney in 1988: a big, tendentious survey of only about a decade's work, it skimmed over her earliest pictures. The first two rooms of this exhibition, making up for the previous oversight, should be required viewing for all aspiring artists. They contain mostly small or medium-size pictures, gangly, striving, heartfelt half-successes or half-failures of youth, made when Ms. Murray was a student in Chicago, then in Oakland and Buffalo, where she began to teach; and finally in New York, where she arrived, at 27, in 1967.

Early on she started wrestling with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and with collage and relief in works like "A Mirror," from 1963-64, which breaks out of the strict rectangle of its frame. Its pasty, pea-soup pigment belies the future extravagance of thick paint, her later gift, toward which it nevertheless clearly strains.

A few years later comes "Night Empire," painted on printed fabric, like a Sigmar Polke before nearly anybody in America had ever heard of Sigmar Polke, stretched on what looks like a card table with rounded corners. (Tables would become a regular motif in due time.) It looks toward the shaped canvases and the sheer chutzpah of Ms. Murray's maturity.

She has described wanting so much to belong to the New York art world when she came to the city that for a while she struggled to reconcile herself to Minimalism and abstraction. "But the effect," she has said, "was to disguise my interest in subject matter." An untitled picture from 1970, a clotted, Minimalist-inflected exercise, injects cartoonish shapes to adapt a figure from Cezanne's "Card Players" so that it echoes the printed pattern of the earlier "Night Empire." A kinship with the Chicago eccentric Jim Nutt, perhaps coincidental, is hard to miss. Painted arrows drive home the impulse toward movement, the antithesis of Minimalist stasis.

"Madame Cezanne in Rocking Chair," from 1972, a schematic cartoon in grid format, shows the French painter's stern, long-suffering wife transported through a window on a beam of light. More strictly Minimal pictures follow, arrangements of squares, blocks and lines. Having already noticed the tactile eloquence of Mr. Johns's encaustic surfaces, Ms. Murray now takes some cues from Agnes Martin and Brice Marden. Quavering, handcrafted patterns drawn into viscous textures, like incised wet plaster, organize colors that aspire to Mr. Marden's buttery yellows and jade.

The lines mutate into wobbly curves and asymmetric Moebius bands implying not just movement but movement into depth. Ms. Murray next enlarges the scale with "Pink Spiral Leap" (1975) and "Beginner" (1976). These arrive in the show as logical consequences of a long gestation. But they still look shockingly big and bold.

"Beginner" entails a pink shoelace squiggle laid on top of a huge kidney-bean glyph, a "Tweety Bird shape," as Ms. Murray calls it, which locks into a thick, stony gray field. The gray is like slate. Tweety Bird is a shimmery dark blue, like a peacock's feather or glazed ceramic. The lines are sharp, the surface rich.

This leads to more and more complex fields of blobs and zigzags that hark back to Stuart Davis at the same time that they ally Ms. Murray with friends and colleagues like Robert Moskowitz, Jennifer Bartlett and Susan Rothenberg, who defined so-called New Image painting, which was soon absorbed within the catchall of Neo-Expressionism. The art world was starting on its decade-long bender. For a while, Ms. Murray held her own in a marketplace besotted with testosterone and chest-thumping egos.

In terms of subject matter, she stuck to her territory, "despite the obvious risks that attached to her doing so because she was a woman," as Mr. Storr puts it in the show's catalog; she painted "interiors and still lifes, turning them inside out and transforming them into her own inimitably comic, calamity-prone theater of household upheaval."

It was a magpie style that frankly rejected high modernism's dictates about purity of form - an art of this plus that plus the other thing, occasionally bringing to mind Claes Oldenburg or Frank Stella or Philip Guston or graffiti art. Ms. Murray was, in other words, neither divorced from the mainstream nor fully accounted for by it.

Which has remained her fate: an outsider-insider. As a critic once put it, there are some people who want to like her work more than they do. Meanwhile, she just does what she does. That the Modern is now devoting its first show by a living painter in its redesigned museum to Ms. Murray is, among other things, proof of how modernism is renewed every once in a while by strong-willed, adulterating figures like her.

There have been periods, during the late 80's, for example, when her work became baroque and overwrought; it tried too hard to be big and bad; then briefly during the 90's, it got tight and slick, as if Ms. Murray were trying to prove to herself and perhaps to others her ability to paint smoothly.

But she always manages to find herself, because in the end she is true to her heart. "Join" (1980) exploits the design of a diptych, with the space between the panels, to picture a broken heart. "Can You Hear Me?" (1984) turns Munch's famous scream - a cry of the heart - into the cartoon set piece of a whirling scythe, acidly colored.

By "Tangled" (1989-90), her funky Rube Goldberg contraptions have morphed into Martian topographies, or some weird enlargements of human innards with blood and pus. "Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure," Willem de Kooning once said. "I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity." Going a bit further than Ms. Murray's pictures do, the remark still speaks to her indecorous and restless penchant for clattery shapes and colors that gladly flirt with the melodrama of vulgarity.

The last room of the show includes recent paintings like "Do the Dance," along with studies that document their evolution. They're airy, dreamlike constructions of multiple parts: Ms. Murray's Rococo spell, after her baroque years. The emphasis is again on paint over construction. An ongoing bout with cancer is gently alluded to in a cartoonish figure with a stitched chest. But the mood is bright, breezy and full of life. It's childlike.

Only a true veteran painter could pull that off. You're left with the sense of an artist in the flush of her authority and still digging deep.


2. Kate Bush: Doesn't Tour, Hates Attention, Likes Home -- by Will Hermes

Pop music has seen a lot of 80's musicians angling for a second act lately - the Pixies, Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, among others. Partly this represents a natural cycle: artists rise, peak, burn out, fade away, until the need returns for money and/or limelight, when back they strut. But the phenomenon has been fueled lately by a revival of 80's styles. With so many new bands sounding like Gang of Four or Talking Heads, for example, it's understandable that the originals would regroup to claim what's theirs (as the former did), or at least release a fancy box set (as the latter did).

The adventurous singer-songwriter Kate Bush is another 80's comeback. Her new double CD, "Aerial," will be released on Nov. 8. But she doesn't quite fit the paradigm, since she never quite fit the era. She wasn't "new wave" or "postpunk," and the movement she might logically be identified with, British progressive rock - a near-exclusively male bastion even by rock standards - was well on the wane by the time of her 1978 debut.

While her idiosyncratic music never spawned a cottage industry of clones, it has influenced a remarkably diverse group of musicians. Antwan (Big Boi) Patton of the polyglot hip-hop group Outkast cites the singer as a huge inspiration ("She's my No. 1 musical influence next to Bob Marley," he said); so has the ethereal piano balladeer Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons. The innovative rhythm-and-blues singer Maxwell had a surprising 2001 hit covering "This Woman's Work," Ms. Bush's cryptic paean to childbirth. She has also been covered by male-fronted British rock acts like Placebo and the Futureheads, who had a hit last year in Britain with their new-wave version of her "Hounds of Love." And she has been reflected to varying degrees by female artists like Bjork, Sarah McLachlan, Dido, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos interested in exotic vocalizing, intimate piano songs, sexually frank lyrics, electronic composition, world music or studio experimentation.

If not a recluse, as she is often described, then certainly a homebody, Ms. Bush, 47, has been below the radar for more than a dozen years. During a rare recent telephone interview from her home near Reading, England, her son Bertie, 6, could occasionally be heard howling in the background. The singer was upbeat and gracious, despite a late night finishing final production work on the video for her new album's first single, the floaty, reggae-tinged "King of the Mountain" (viewable at katebush.com). She spoke on topics ranging from how Agatha Christie might have fared in the Internet era ("everyone would know who'd done it before they even started the book"), to her love for Elton John's "Madman Across the Water" album, to what she has been up to since releasing "The Red Shoes" in 1993.

"Trying to do stuff other than putting records out all the time," she said of the last topic. "After 'The Red Shoes' I was exhausted, so I figured I'd take a year out, which turned into two. And here we are."

The "stuff" included spending time with friends, seeing movies and raising her son. "It's been important to spend time with him. And I'm pretty slow making records anyway," she said, laughing, adding that she worked on "Aerial" "for the past five or six years."

The hiatus was overdue for a piano prodigy who entered the pop business at 16. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd - a friend of a friend - hired a 30-piece orchestra to help her produce demos for her debut album, "The Kick Inside," a head-rush of precocious artistry and sexuality that, with songs conjuring masturbation, incest-triggered suicide and Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," still sounds fresh and strange 25-some years later. The record never quite registered in the United States but was a hit in England, prompting a promotional whirlwind that included a rushed second album ("Lionheart") and Ms. Bush's only tour, a 29-date theatrical spectacle in 1979, with choreography by Antony Van Last of the London Contemporary Dance Company.

Exhausted, Ms. Bush slowed her pace during the 1980's, abandoned touring - in part due to a fear of flying - built her own studio and released a series of increasingly ambitious and sporadic records. She also kept to herself, acquiring a reputation as a something of a hermitic oddball; the English music magazine Mojo, for example, ran a cover story without her participation in 2003 - "Kate Bush: The Mysterious Life of a Reclusive Superstar" - as part of a package titled "English Eccentric Weirdfest!"

So might one read her cryptic first single in over a decade, "King of the Mountain," with its references to Elvis Presley and "Rosebud" (the symbolic sleigh from "Citizen Kane") as a wry comment on her own retreat to Xanadu? One might, but Ms. Bush doesn't recommend it. "It's fascinating that people have this fascination with what I do," she said. "The way I see it, you go away, create something, talk about it a bit so people know it's there, and get on with things. I don't live my life in the public eye. Maybe because people are all over television happily promoting themselves all the time, I'm seen as weird."

Ms. Bush, who has no plans to tour, likes the idea of making records as puzzles that listeners complete by interpretation. "So much is so accessible, so disposable, so many experiences are so shallow. I think what's so exciting about life are the great mysteries and questions," she said, stopping to laugh at herself. "And without wanting to sound horribly pretentious, that's something I like to play with."

Like 1985's "Hounds of Love," perhaps her best record, her latest is split between a group of individual songs (the first CD, subtitled "A Sea of Honey") and a suite (the 42-minute "A Sky of Honey"). But where "Hounds" is dense and agitated, busy with sounds created on the Fairlight synthesizer - an early sampling keyboard that Ms. Bush was among the first to master - "Aerial" is expansive and relatively relaxed. Recorded with longtime associates, including Del Palmer on bass, many of the album's songs are arranged simply for voice and piano, like the exquisite "A Coral Room," composed, she said, "the way I used to do, just sitting at the piano writing."

Sometimes "Aerial" is so relaxed, it drifts into smooth jazz territory. But Ms. Bush's voluptuous, slightly alien voice usually corrects by contrast: purring, trilling, cackling, jumping octaves and echoing itself, witchlike, in multitracked choruses. "Aerial" also shows a more overtly classical English influence than her recent records. "Bertie," a love song for her son, features Renaissance period instruments, while "Sky of Honey" invokes Vaughn Williams's "Lark Ascending." "The record has a lot to do with England," said Ms. Bush, who has given Bulgarian choirs and Australian didgeridoos prominent roles in earlier songs. "I wanted to do something more colloquial."

That fits the record's spirit of finding infinite possibility in your own creative backyard - a spirit, it's worth noting, that's surfaced in a new generation of parlor-room musical eccentrics like Joanna Newsom, Antony and Ariel Pink (who has a recent tribute song called "For Kate I Wait"). On "Pi," a song literally about infinity, Ms. Bush tries "to sing numerals with as much emotion as possible," and in the process gives new meaning to that cliche about singing the phone book. "Mrs. Bartolozzi" is a rhapsody to a washing machine that turns cosmic. Also arranged for voice and piano, it's the record's oddest song, but in its wistful, muted eroticism and quiet wonder, maybe the most emblematic.

"I suppose there's an element of me in it," Ms. Bush said. "I spend quite a lot of time doing housework, and it's very important to me - I don't want to be a person unconnected to the basic things of life. And I like the idea of taking something that's very small and quiet and allowing it to just connect, you know?"