Brice Marden’s valedictory courage

Contributed by David Rhodes / Brice Marden died at the age of 84 in August 2023. His first exhibition was in 1966 at the Bykert Gallery, located on East 81st Street, only a few blocks northeast of his current exhibition at Gagosian. A long life, years in the studio, immeasurable time spent with other artists’ work, travel, and an abundance of courage led to the paintings he made at the end of his life. 

Through most of Marden’s life, his own body, height, weight, and reach were determining factors in his paintings, as he himself noted. In these final paintings, Marden used the depletion of his physical power to artistic advantage. On thinned ground color he added linear drawing in stages, subject to time and gravity between each application. In their unfussy opacity, accumulated paint streaks and drips reflect the limitations on his physical reach and bodily strength occasioned by age and illness. But these constraints in no way inhibited Marden’s expressiveness. As Matisse utilized papier-collé towards the end of his life, Marden found a way not just to continue painting but also to expand on his earlier work. Anthony Caro once told me that genius was the ability to find the optimal outlet for one’s particular talent, situation, and means. Marden always succeeded in doing just that. 

There are six paintings in the upper gallery, all 72 x 96 inches, and all oil on linen. They comprise six different orientations of characters by the same technical approach. Intuition and keen intelligence are in evidence in these works, their color and tactility suggesting an automatism of a material kind as opposed to the surrealist conceit of pure psychic impulse. Blue Painting has a web of meandering and searching line in tension with the framing edge, holding tight to it in several places and fluxing through the painting’s space, in and out of the plane, like slowly fashioned ironwork or plant root networks. This is craft and nature synthesized. The limit of an arm’s movement from the elbow leaves a restrained corporeal curve, with detours and deviations occurring from movements of the wrist. The blue ground gets darker, with patches of light or shadow in irregular stained areas, like bruising. Lines of red and yellow earth color are in perpetual motion, rhythmic and animated. Courbet’s painting of a storm at sea, Cézanne’s partially described objects, and the twists and turns of a scholar’s rock all come to mind.

Lingerie registers transience by way of fleeting visual associations with water, smoke, or fog. Silver or grey-white lines – notionally anemones, flesh, breath, or condensation – cross the expanse of pink, the linen surface tactile and present. The rose color is like a mist, dissolving, fading, reappearing. The artist’s hand, as in the other paintings, is everywhere, measured but not neatening. Additions come in small steps, and traces of what is erased are left. The surface of the work seems to breathe. Like a Paleolithic wall painting, it marks a very particular surface, claiming its place.

Ridge features a grey ground of short, wide strokes of thin paint that have flowed down briefly and dried, against which a darker grey forms a silhouette. As with Blue Painting, the lines hold fast to the painting’s edge at several points, acknowledging the objective limits of the painting itself, while continuations of the same lines cut by the same edge imply the extension of fictive pictorial space. This painting recalls Marden canvases from the mid-1980s, such as Green Painting (1986)and Red Horizontal (1987). Though angular and strident, these older works too are built with repeated strokes of thinned paint, more or less transparent depending on the pigment, on a single ground color, and their lines likewise acknowledge the physical finiteness of the painting as an object in the world (think of Jasper Johns). This concept evolved in Marden’s drawings as a response to Jackson Pollock’s ability, as Klaus Kertess puts it, “to make line both referential and abstract and to destabilize the plane with more spatial vacillations.”

Verve, Marrow, and The Dance are distinct from one another and from the three paintings just described. The Dance contains several rows of glyph-like drawings in charcoal that were prevalent in the earlier exhibition “These paintings are of themselves” in 2021, now partially erased with terpinol and rag. Marden thus records the decision to discard motifs by leaving them visible and not simply obliterating them.

The exhibition continues on a lower floor with 16 works of ink, or ink and graphite, on paper, and one painting. They range from irregular gestural patterns to repeated rows of abstract characters to asymmetrical configurations of repeated line. In one untitled ink drawing, vertical repetitions of curving line are smudged in places to disturb the continuous trajectory and complicate visual impact. I connect this drawing and two similar ones, in their fragile precision and movement, to Marden’s Mirabelle Drawings (1978–79), shown in a Whitechapel Gallery exhibition in 1980. 

The untitled 2023 painting, his last, is decisively horizonal in three adjacent parts, measuring 24 x 126 inches in total. It pulls one’s vision along its extended axis, insisting on the peripheral ocular inclusion of the outer panels as part of its visual consumption. The physical division between two panels on the right side, each a different color, is pronounced, while identically-sized rectangles proceed across one long panel, the external edge brought inside compositionally. In its seamless co-location of formalism and emotion, this resonant farewell piece recapitulates the many panel paintings Marden made over decades, still asking questions and making discoveries.

“Brice Marden: Let the painting make you,” Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. Through December 22, 2023.

About the author: David Rhodes has exhibited internationally, including one-person exhibitions at Anthony Wilkinson Gallery (London), Centrum (Berlin), Palacete Viscondes de Balsemao (Porto), Galerie Katharina Krohn (Basel), Hionas Gallery (New York), and most recently, Tat Art (Barcelona) in 2017. He has a solo scheduled in NYC at High Noon Gallery in early 2024.