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Lot Essay
Acting as an artistic conduit between the gestural nature of second-generation Abstract Expressionism and the intellectual rigor of Minimalism, Brice Marden is one of today’s most pivotal living artists. Beginning his career with carefully considered monochromes that took into account the presence of time and process, the artist was careful to instill his compositions with not only formal precision, but also visual markers that drew from a similar need for temporal evidence as his contemporary, Mark Rothko. Speaking to these overlaps in their working methods, Marden remarked, “In my case, and Rothko’s, with the scratches and scrapes and the colors coming through from below, it might look like a monochromatic surface, but it really never is. There are real evidences of drawing. I remember being very conscious of how you spread the paint on the surface of a canvas, of how it got to the edge and how it went around the corners. How do you draw your way vertically and horizontally around a corner? The issue of how you broach the outer edge of the painting was a big one for Rothko too” (B. Marden, quoted in S. Grant, “Landscapes of the Mind”, Tate Etc., issue 14, Autumn 2008). This infatuation with the act of drawing permeates Marden’s oeuvre, and is nowhere more prevalent than in his later works like Hydra (Summer 1987) that are full of sinuous, meandering lines.
After graduating from Boston University in 1961, Marden pursued a degree in art and architecture from Yale University. Upon completion of these studies in 1964, he traveled to Paris where he started to experiment with charcoal on Arches paper. Marden’s early drawings are a direct result of these inquiries, and can be seen in the way compressed charcoal is used with a furtive intensity in works like Untitled. Expanding outward from these studies, the artist settled upon a meticulous mode of working in which a highly-ordered process of scraping, adding beeswax, adding charcoal, sanding, and reworking resulted in a pointed illustration of materials and media and how these things affected the picture plane. This medium-specific conversation was similar to works by Marden’s contemporaries Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and it is no small coincidence that pieces like Study for a Lot, with its inspired use of beeswax and graphite, were actually owned by Rauschenberg.
This interest in near-Minimalist forms continued into the 1970s, but Marden was careful to point out that he was quite detached from the seeming clinicality of that movement and was more interested in eliciting feelings and experiences with his work. "The paintings are made in a highly subjective state within Spartan limitations," he noted, "Within these strict confines, confines which I have painted myself into and intend to explore with no regrets, I try to give the viewer something to which he will react subjectively. I believe these are highly emotional paintings not to be admired for any technical or intellectual reason but to be felt" (B. Marden, Paintings, Drawings and Prints 1975-1980, London, 1981, p. 51). By playing upon the emotional aspects of his works through attention to time, space, and evidence of the artistic process, Marden married formalist thought with an almost Romantic investigation of self.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Marden turned from his monochromatic investigations and began his so-called ‘stick drawings’. Fastening a brush to the end of a long branch, the artist was able to evoke a literal distance between himself and the painting. Of this momentous pivot, Marden lightly remarked, “I was living on Bond Street in Manhattan. There were a lot of these trees in the backyard and they would just drop branches with all these little leaves that come off. And I always thought they’d make a really great drawing instrument because it’s a very beautiful long stick.” (B. Marden, quoted in J. C. Lee, “Interview with Brice Marden: May 21, 1988, exh. cat., New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Brice Marden Drawings, 1998, p. 17). This reference to his surroundings and their effect on his work comes up often throughout Marden’s esteemed oeuvre.
Marden’s career and its varied paths are intricately related to ideas of place. His early works like Untitled and Study for a Lot reflected the urban landscape and the shifting light of Manhattan, while works like Hydra Rock 3 (Red, Grey, Green) and Hydra (Summer 1987) pay service to the locale of their creation in their titles (Marden’s studio on the Greek isle of Hydra) while also referencing the calligraphic strokes of Chinese and Japanese ideograms. After traveling through both countries and viewing a selection of Japanese masterworks in the 1984-85 exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th-19th Century at New York's Japan House Gallery and Asia Society, Marden became enamored with the lyrical forms of each language and the aesthetics of their depiction. Adamant in his decision never to learn either language for fear that they might lose some visual beauty, Marden nonetheless highly respected the tradition of calligraphy. He, in a similar vein to his West Coast contemporary Mark Tobey, created a conversation between the Eastern art of the brush and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism by fusing fluid, gestural drawing with an emotive quality. "I sort of came back to Pollock. He doesn't apply the image; he lets the image evolve out of the activity. And for me, this is very important, and it's basically what I'm exploring in my own work" (B. Marden, quoted in G. Garrels (ed.), Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 2006, p. 296). By extracting the gestural lyricism of Pollock and other mid-century abstractionists with a new interest in process and emotive qualities, Marden’s work remains an essential part of painting’s evolution into the 21st century.
After graduating from Boston University in 1961, Marden pursued a degree in art and architecture from Yale University. Upon completion of these studies in 1964, he traveled to Paris where he started to experiment with charcoal on Arches paper. Marden’s early drawings are a direct result of these inquiries, and can be seen in the way compressed charcoal is used with a furtive intensity in works like Untitled. Expanding outward from these studies, the artist settled upon a meticulous mode of working in which a highly-ordered process of scraping, adding beeswax, adding charcoal, sanding, and reworking resulted in a pointed illustration of materials and media and how these things affected the picture plane. This medium-specific conversation was similar to works by Marden’s contemporaries Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and it is no small coincidence that pieces like Study for a Lot, with its inspired use of beeswax and graphite, were actually owned by Rauschenberg.
This interest in near-Minimalist forms continued into the 1970s, but Marden was careful to point out that he was quite detached from the seeming clinicality of that movement and was more interested in eliciting feelings and experiences with his work. "The paintings are made in a highly subjective state within Spartan limitations," he noted, "Within these strict confines, confines which I have painted myself into and intend to explore with no regrets, I try to give the viewer something to which he will react subjectively. I believe these are highly emotional paintings not to be admired for any technical or intellectual reason but to be felt" (B. Marden, Paintings, Drawings and Prints 1975-1980, London, 1981, p. 51). By playing upon the emotional aspects of his works through attention to time, space, and evidence of the artistic process, Marden married formalist thought with an almost Romantic investigation of self.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Marden turned from his monochromatic investigations and began his so-called ‘stick drawings’. Fastening a brush to the end of a long branch, the artist was able to evoke a literal distance between himself and the painting. Of this momentous pivot, Marden lightly remarked, “I was living on Bond Street in Manhattan. There were a lot of these trees in the backyard and they would just drop branches with all these little leaves that come off. And I always thought they’d make a really great drawing instrument because it’s a very beautiful long stick.” (B. Marden, quoted in J. C. Lee, “Interview with Brice Marden: May 21, 1988, exh. cat., New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Brice Marden Drawings, 1998, p. 17). This reference to his surroundings and their effect on his work comes up often throughout Marden’s esteemed oeuvre.
Marden’s career and its varied paths are intricately related to ideas of place. His early works like Untitled and Study for a Lot reflected the urban landscape and the shifting light of Manhattan, while works like Hydra Rock 3 (Red, Grey, Green) and Hydra (Summer 1987) pay service to the locale of their creation in their titles (Marden’s studio on the Greek isle of Hydra) while also referencing the calligraphic strokes of Chinese and Japanese ideograms. After traveling through both countries and viewing a selection of Japanese masterworks in the 1984-85 exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th-19th Century at New York's Japan House Gallery and Asia Society, Marden became enamored with the lyrical forms of each language and the aesthetics of their depiction. Adamant in his decision never to learn either language for fear that they might lose some visual beauty, Marden nonetheless highly respected the tradition of calligraphy. He, in a similar vein to his West Coast contemporary Mark Tobey, created a conversation between the Eastern art of the brush and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism by fusing fluid, gestural drawing with an emotive quality. "I sort of came back to Pollock. He doesn't apply the image; he lets the image evolve out of the activity. And for me, this is very important, and it's basically what I'm exploring in my own work" (B. Marden, quoted in G. Garrels (ed.), Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 2006, p. 296). By extracting the gestural lyricism of Pollock and other mid-century abstractionists with a new interest in process and emotive qualities, Marden’s work remains an essential part of painting’s evolution into the 21st century.