Painting Is a Supreme Fiction: Writings by Jesse Murry, 1980-1993

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 Painting Is a Supreme Fiction brings together Murry’s published art criticism with previously unpublished philosophical writing and poetry from 1980 to his tragic death from AIDS-related illness at the age of 44.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.