The Man Who Persevered When Painting

Was Stalled
By ROBERTA SMITHOCT. 27, 2006

A detail from "The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version," 2000-2006. Credit Private
Collection/Artists Right Society, New York

Brice Marden, whose 40-year-career is the subject of a quietly magnificent retrospective at the
Museum of Modern Art, is unusual among major American postwar painters. He did not make
his name by stopping painting in its tracks and setting it off in a radically new direction. There is
no emblematic Marden invention, like a Johns flag or Stella stripes or a Warhol silk-screen Elvis,
where you can say, There! That changed painting.

Mr. Marden may have been able to evade Modernisms breakthrough requirement because he
made his entrance at a time when painting as a whole had supposedly ground to a halt. This was
the late 1960s, when painting was being forced through the eye of the Minimal-Conceptual
needle and proving a trifle bulky and balky. It was having a near-death experience.

Mr. Marden, who was born in Bronxville, N.Y., in 1938, began his career making subdued
monochrome paintings hardly a novel idea in 1966, when he made his New York debut at the
fledgling, soon-to-be-hot Bykert Gallery on East 81st Street. His more recent paintings, which
first had infrastructures of angular lines that resembled briary fences and then more relaxed,
elegant tangles of thick, ropelike loops that uncoiled across radiant, still monochrome fields,
dont occupy a class of their own. They are sometimes compared unfavorably with the work of
Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn or Bradley Walker Tomlin. Such comparisons have earned
Mr. Marden a kind of flame-keeper status something like the Giorgio Morandi of radical
abstraction, a maker of inordinately beautiful, exquisitely made (and expensive) artworks.

The Modern show defies that status. Organized by Gary Garrels, a former curator at MoMA and
now senior curator at the U.C.L.A. Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, it fills 10 large galleries on
the museums sixth floor mostly with paintings, and several more on the third floor with
drawings a medium integral to Mr. Mardens development.

The exhibition shows him as an artist who has spent his career assiduously converting the rule-
ridden zone of Minimalist abstraction into a capacious yet disciplined place, pushing it toward
landscape and the figure while reconnecting it to its roots in Abstract Expressionism and beyond,
in non-Western art. It makes perfect sense that one of the greatest influences on Mr. Mardens
recent work has been Chinese art, where originality is a much fuzzier, more nuanced concept.
His inspirations include calligraphy, landscape painting, scholars rocks and ceramics.

Untitled # 3, by Brice Marden, at the Museum of Modern Art. Credit Private Collection/Artists
Right Society, New York

Watching someone start out at a time when painting had grown narrow and confining and make
the medium big again is exciting.

As Mr. Mardens abstractions progress from one idea of structure, proportion, color, light and
surface to another, his trajectory encompasses a tremendous range of physical and emotional
energy and gives the lie to the idea that any art can be purely formal or completely abstract.
He was, of course, not alone in his expansion project. Around the same time, Philip Guston,
Robert Ryman, Elizabeth Murray and Frank Stella and eventually, more idiosyncratically, the
erstwhile Conceptualist Mel Bochner started making painting seem full of possibility, in all kinds
of different ways. But Mr. Marden stuck closest to tradition, both physically and emotionally. For
one thing, he has never wavered from paintings most traditional format: oil on canvas fitted to
rectangular stretchers designed to hang on walls.

In 1964, when the nightmares of young New York painters were haunted by Mr. Stellas
Minimalist dictum what you see is what you see and visions of shaped paintings danced
in their heads, Mr. Marden was happily in Paris. He visited the Louvre regularly, continuing a
habit of studying old paintings he began as an art student in Boston. And he became mesmerized
by the rhythmic motions of French workmen layering plaster or stucco on walls. The basic
principles of his work took root: draw from the past, but use a strictly maintained physical
process, express an un-Minimalist, even romantic inner life through Minimalist means.

The show starts with the svelte, luminous monochromes that Mr. Marden made back in New
York, for his first show. Each is gray, but each is different, variously tinged with tones of silver,
green, yellow and plum. Their closed surfaces are seductively smooth and strangely matte,
because Mr. Marden was adding beeswax to his oil paint and applying it to his canvas, like the
workmen, with a palette knife.

The art critic who dismissed these paintings as Jasper Johns backgrounds was right to some
extent, although these backgrounds came as much from Goya, Manet and Velazquez as from
Johns. Mr. Mardens dense planes of color simply emphasized to the exclusion of all else the
most obtrusive fact of most paintings shape and background color. He brought them forward
and made them unavoidable, not unlike Donald Judds Minimalist boxes.
"Post Calligraphic Drawing," 1998. Credit Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York

From single-panel paintings, Mr. Marden moved to two and three panels, keeping theme vertical.
One of these is the imposing yet delicate Daprs la Marquise de la Solana, inspired by Goyas
portrait of the pert, lavishly gowned aristocrat standing on and in front of an ambiguous plane of
shadowy gray. Mr. Marden distilled the basic elements of the image into slablike planes of gray-
green (background), gray-gray (garments) and grayed pink (flesh). A collage spells it out,
juxtaposing three postcards of the Goya with three rectangles of graphite built into hard, shiny
planes.

In the blue-green Group Grove series, a painting made of two panels appears, suggesting a
severely reduced seascape. Next, colors brighten, first blues, then greens, then yellows, oranges
and reds. Soon paintings are combining both horizontal and vertical panels, narrow ones, in
configurations partly inspired by Greek temples. The most striking here is the enormous Thira,
where three sets of post-and-lintel arrangements in rich Renaissance reds, blues and greens, and a
single brown, suddenly suggest the hill of Golgotha and its three crosses.

Mr. Marden did eventually graduate from having the narrow gaps between his panels function as
drawn lines and actually began to make marks on canvas. The middle section of the show is
devoted to this transition. It happened first in his drawings, which often used a grid, then on little
flat scraps of marble one has a perforated edge that evokes a spiral notebook. By the mid
1980s, skewed, off-kilter linear networks were angling their way across canvas. Mr. Marden had
eliminated beeswax, thinned his paint and at first tied his brush to a long stick, which seemed to
destabilize his natural facility, and then moved on to using long-handled brushes. In addition, he
made overt revisions, scraping, rubbing out until the paintings filled with ghostly vibrating after-
images that formed organic, crazy-quilt grids. Under the weight of so much change, and inspired
by Chinese ink painting, his palette shrank back, toward gray.

Basically Mr. Marden was making visible, through line, the gestures by which he had previously
layered his paint onto his monochrome surfaces. Tacking back and forth, he accounted for the
entire surface, touching it here and then there, as if building scaffolding with long, awkward
stitches. The worn jade green surface of Untitled 3, from 1986-7, is lashed down, you could
say, by lines of blue, red and gray, with some interstices faintly masked by white. The
comparison to Pollock is valid but not invalidating: Mr. Mardens all-over is deliberate, open and
tensile, at once deliberate and full of mistakes and revisions. It is not a dance, but an extended
contemplation that allows us one, too.

As the show progresses, the terse networks unbend, gain in scale and relax into fewer, thicker
curving lines that have the weight of wet clay. The colors blossom again. In 6 Red Rock 1 of
2000-2, a burnt-orange ground is complexly lassoed by lines of red, yellow, blue and green. In
some of these final paintings, the lines start to suggest figures, specifically the dipping bows and
cascading robes of Tang ceramic sculptures of court ladies.

The show ends on a glorious note: two long six-panel versions of a work titled The Propitious
Garden of Plane Image, in which Mr. Mardens subtly shadowy versions of the color spectrum
rotate between foreground and background. The lines surge and reverse, tumble and straighten
out, evoking road maps, silhouettes of hurtling figures and fluid geometries that sometimes
threaten to burst the boundaries of the surface. But these works seem positively stately compared
with the frenzy of Dragon, a large drawing in colored inks near the door. In it the Marden
scaffolding whirls and twists like a dervish splattering paint. Pollock be damned, it seems to say,
as Mr. Marden takes abstract painting somewhere we think we have seen before, but havent.

Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings opens Sunday and continues
through Jan. 15 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street; (212) 708-9400.