Brice Marden’s throwback splendor

Contributed by David Carrier / Brice Marden, who died in 2023, has always had an astonishing mystique. Two generations ago, when painting was often pronounced dead, he identified as a rare heroic survivor and continued to make abstractions. It was possible then to see him as the true successor to Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns – the one artist who kept the New York School alive. But now, in a very different environment, his work has to be understood differently. Gagosian’s museum-scale retrospective “I Am Plane Image,” an exemplary exercise in curatorship, lets us appreciate at once his range and his discipline, both remarkable.

The show includes some classic near-monochromes, such as Nebraska, from early in his career, as well as multi-panel monochromes like Summer Table, proof that no one can compose three simple rectangles more effectively. A number of pictures – Cold Mountain 1 (Path) is an exceptional one – reflect gestures that set curving lines on a background field. Some recent works like Rivers use gestural devices that are harder to classify. No one else can run a line across a picture as gracefully as Marden does in The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version. Great works like these seem to encapsulate the whole tradition of New York painting.

Marden was always an aesthetic painter whose colors and lines were decorative in the best sense. You could hang any one of these pictures alongside works by Manet or even Matisse and enjoy the visual correspondences. But, with the ideals of harmony and visual delectation presently beleaguered – just look across the work in the recent Whitney Biennale or the Carnegie International – Marden has posthumously become the odd man out in contemporary political art. By the same token, the transformed cultural and visual environment makes the relative narrowness of his aesthetic more conspicuous, vivid, and admirable. I am old enough to marvel at how novel his art now looks.

Is there something essentially escapist in Marden’s determined search for visual pleasure, which is now closely associated with luxury and commodification? I am not sure, at least not yet. The question of whether Marden was a great artist will take some time to consider. The splendid work in this show feels like a monument of sorts to a world that has disappeared. That makes me sad and a little nostalgic, which hints at the answer.

“Brice Marden: I Am Plane Image,” Gagosian, 522 West 26th Street, New York, NY. Through December 12, 2026.

About the author: David Carrier is a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Getty Scholar; and Clark Fellow. He has lectured in China, Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand, and North America. He has published catalogue essays for many museums and art criticism for Apollo, artcritical, Artforum, Artus, and Burlington Magazine. He has also been a guest editor for The Brooklyn Rail and is a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.