Brice Marden, Painter Who Redefined Abstraction, Dies at 84 – ARTnews.com

Brice Marden, an acclaimed painter whose abstractions quietly pushed the fashion in new instructions, repeatedly injecting it with new life throughout an period when portray was presumed to have hit a wall, has died at 84.

His daughter, Mirabelle Marden, wrote on Instagram that Marden had died on Wednesday in his house in Tivoli, New York. “He was fortunate to stay a protracted life doing what he liked,” she wrote, noting that he had continued portray up till Saturday.

From the Nineteen Sixties onward, Marden painted in many various modes, usually taking the oil-on-canvas strategy at a time when different painters had been untethering the medium from conventional methods of working. Marden’s fashion could have made him completely different from a lot of his colleagues with extra explicitly conceptual ambitions, however he continued to seek out admirers due to it.

The critic Roberta Smith, writing on the event of a Museum of Trendy Artwork retrospective in 2006, as soon as mentioned that Marden had obtained “a form of flame-keeper standing—one thing just like the Giorgio Morandi of radical abstraction, a maker of inordinately lovely, exquisitely made (and costly) artworks.”

Peter Schejldahl, writing on that very same exhibition, put it equally: “Marden could usefully be thought of a late-entry Summary Expressionist: a conservative unique, the final valedictorian of the New York College.”

Marden’s first solo present, in 1966 at New York’s Bykert Gallery, featured a grouping of monochromes in muted colours, every with surfaces that had been rendered matte by way of using beeswax. Critics didn’t reply nicely to them on the time, discovering them to be knockoffs of works by different, extra well-known artists, together with Jasper Johns, whose 1964 Jewish Museum present was manned by guards corresponding to Marden himself.

However by the tip of his profession, Marden’s artwork had considerably diverged from that components. He painted abstractions that includes spaghetti-like traces arrayed throughout vibrantly coloured planes and drew minimalist drawings that took their inspiration from Chinese language portray. He proved himself a tireless innovator repeatedly.

All through all his completely different our bodies of labor, Marden remained dedicated to working in abstraction, a mode that was thought, by the Nineteen Sixties, to have reached its logical endpoint with Summary Expressionism greater than a decade earlier. “For me, abstraction is the actual means of the 20th century since you’re not main the viewer an excessive amount of,” he as soon as informed the painter Chris Ofili in a dialog for Artforum.

By the point of Marden’s first Bykert present, artists like Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had laid down the gauntlet, incorporating on a regular basis objects into their work and depriving their artwork of any notion of inventive genius that accompanied Summary Expressionism. Marden, somewhat than shying away from that medium, took up these artists’ problem. Talking of Johns and his famed work of the American flag, Marden as soon as informed the New York Instances, “He added one other dimension to what’s actuality in portray. Is a flag actual?”

Notably, Marden borrowed from Johns using encaustic, a medium that entails the utilization of wax to make the paint extra bodily. Marden’s early work additionally owed quite a bit to Rauschenberg, for whom Marden would function an assistant throughout the mid-’60s. A few of Marden’s monochromes from that interval take the type of multi-panel preparations, a mode of presentation that owes one thing to Rauschenberg’s landmark White Portray from 1951.

These early works concerned a course of that was extra uncommon than it first appeared. To acquire his easy surfaces, Marden would apply paint with slightly cooking spatula. Though his surfaces would turn into flat, with few strokes delineated, small scratches could be made, too, permitting extra outlined pops of colour to poke by means of. “It’s a really hand-made floor,” Marden mentioned in an interview with MoMA. “After which I’d make some choices about which technique to take the colour, after which, at one other level, redo the entire train.”

The emphasis on doing, redoing, and revisiting would pervade Marden’s oeuvre for the remainder of his profession.

Brice Marden was born on October 15, 1938, in Bronxville, New York, not removed from Manhattan. His father labored as a mortgage servicer. Marden got here to artwork by means of his neighbor, a painter, and he would go on to check on the Boston College of Positive and Utilized Arts and later, as a graduate pupil, at Yale College, the place his cohort included Chuck Shut, Robert Mangold, and Richard Serra.

Informally, Marden made himself a pupil of artwork historical past as nicely by visiting museums. In Boston, he was compelled towards the work of Édouard Manet and Francisco de Zurbarán. When he went to Paris throughout the mid-’60s for a interval, he visited the Louvre usually.

The artists of the previous whom Marden got here to like all labored in a figurative mode, although Marden explicitly didn’t. But a few of his work consult with individuals. One purplish monochrome is titled after Bob Dylan; one other from the period bears Nico’s identify. What relationship these work truly bear to those singers, each of whom Marden knew personally, stays unstable.

He continued to make use of titles allusively throughout the ’70s, when he started making a grouping of works impressed by a visit to the Greek isle of Hydra. The “Grove Group” work particularly took their inspiration from olive bushes noticed there. They’re work that includes giant planes of olive and blue. Critic Robert Pincus-Witten, viewing them as being associated to Greek mythology, as soon as wrote that the work had been akin to “muses gathered anew at a mouseion.”

Through the ’80s, Marden launched into a grouping of artworks that took their inspiration from Chinese language calligraphy, with tangles of traces that cross and re-cross.

The beloved “Chilly Mountain Work” sequence, produced between 1989 and 1991, took its title from Tang Dynasty poet Han Shan, whose identify could be translated to Chilly Mountain. Marden started the work by drawing from a panorama, then taking his sketches into his studio, the place he would translate what he noticed to a canvas. Talking to the painter Pat Steir, Marden mentioned he was particularly desirous about calligraphy’s visible rules as he had carried out so.

This was a notable departure from the monochromes, and Steir questioned Marden about whether or not he thought of magnificence to be an vital part of those works. Sure and no, he informed her, explaining, “One of many causes I needed to do that work was that through the use of the monochromatic palette prior to now principally all I may get had been chords. I needed to have the ability to make one thing extra like fugues, extra sophisticated, back-and-forth renderings of emotions.”

By no means one to go for a simple means out, Marden continued to problem himself nicely into the later phases of his profession. In 2019, he informed the New York Instances that had began to color with white. “White to me has all the time been a corrective colour. You paint issues out with white,” he mentioned. “I’m making an attempt to interrupt my very own guidelines.”

Lately, Marden has ascended to the standing of an artwork star. Having appeared in three editions of Documenta, 5 Whitney Biennials, and one Venice Biennale between the Nineteen Seventies and ’90s, Marden’s fame was well-cemented by the point his artwork began promoting for thousands and thousands of {dollars} at public sale in 2000s. Nonetheless, some thought of it a shock when, in 2017, he departed his longtime seller Matthew Marks for the mega-gallery Gagosian, a call Marden mentioned was prompted by a necessity for change throughout the later phases of his profession.

Marden had been battling most cancers for the previous few years. Whereas Marden had not usually mentioned his illness in interviews, his spouse, the artist Helen Marden, publicly documented his remedies, in an try, she mentioned, to encourage others to really feel extra accustomed to the ailment.

At the same time as he confronted his most cancers analysis, Marden didn’t cease portray. He has had quite a few solo exhibits prior to now half-decade, a lot of them that includes new works. That methodology of working solely made sense for an artist who had toiled restlessly for his total profession.

“I’ve proven a portray two instances earlier than I assumed it was completed,” he mentioned in his 2006 dialog with Ofili. “I’d take it again, rework it, put it out once more, then take it again and rework it once more.”