Early work

Brice Marden, Gulf (from the New York 10/69 portfolio), 1969, Lithograph, 20 × 25½ in

Marden relocated to New York City in 1963, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns while employed as a guard at the Jewish Museum during the museum's 1964 retrospective of Johns' oeuvre. The following summer, Marden traveled to Paris, where he began to make compressed charcoal and graphite grid-patterned drawings. Marden's graphic works are a corollary to his paintings, and he would transfer ideas into even his most recent paintings and drawings. Marden made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in the winter of 1964.^[6] It was also in Paris that he admired the work of Alberto Giacometti and Jean Fautrier, although masters such as Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, and Édouard Manet also informed Marden's artistic practice.

In 1966, at Dorothea Rockburne's suggestion, Marden was hired by Robert Rauschenberg to work as his assistant. That same year, he had his first solo show in New York at the Bykert Gallery, which exhibited the first of his classic oil-and-beeswax paintings. Prior to that he had worked at Chiron Press as an assistant to Steve Poleskie. Marden created the lithograph Gulf (from the New York 10-69 portfolio) in 1969 while at Chiron Press.^[7]

In the late 1960s and early '70s, a moment when painting was widely considered moribund, Marden gained international fame as the master of the monochrome panel.^[8] In 1971, Brice and his wife, Helen Harrington, visited the Greek island of Hydra, to which they returned every year thereafter. The couple bought their first home there in 1973.^[9] The light and landscape greatly influenced Marden's work (see, for instance, the five Grove Group paintings, 1972–1980; Souvenir de Grèce works on paper, 1974–1996). Executed in oil on marble fragments, he made a total of 31 paintings on marble on Hydra.^[10]

Marden’s early monochromatic paintings exist as single panels, diptychs, and triptychs. In each of the four Red Yellow Blue paintings (1974), the artist painted slabs of dense yet nuanced color on three adjoined canvas panels, using oil paint mixed on the spot with melted beeswax and turpentine and applied with a knife and spatula.^[11] He gradually increased the number of panels, arranging them into post-and-lintel configurations.^[8]

Brice Marden, For Pearl, 1970, 96 1/2 x 98 3/4 x 2 1/8 in, Glenstone

In 1977 Brice Marden was commissioned (after an invited art competition with artists Samuel Buri, Joseph Beuys, Alfred Jensen, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Penck, Robert Ryman, Antoni Tàpies, and Jim Turrell) to design the windows lining the apse of the Basel Cathedral, a project that he labored on continuously from 1978 to 1985.^[12] Influenced in part by the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, which the artist visited in 1972, Marden painted with the aim of fostering a heightened spiritual environment through abstraction.

Occupying the space above the altar, these windows would be central to the ritual activity of the space, and the artist spent the next seven years honing his concept to address the spiritual weight of the installation context, culminating in a limited group of Window Study paintings. After preparing designs for stained-glass windows for Basel Cathedral, he became interested in expressing in his paintings the conditions of colour and light in architecture. The Basel commission saw the artist move away from the understated encaustic monochromes that dominated his output during the 1960s and 1970s to embrace a new, vibrant palette and set of linear compositional devices. In part influenced by his growing interest in alchemy, he decided to work with combinations of colors limited to three (the Trinity) for the linear components and four (the elements - earth, air, fire, water) for the monochrome panels.^[13] While the windows were never physically fabricated, Marden’s paintings for the Basel Cathedral endure as masterworks of his oeuvre because of their conceptual aims.^[14]

In 1977, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, where he strengthened his interest in Roman and Greek art and architecture, which would influence his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s.^[6] Between 1981 and 1987, Marden made a total of 31 paintings on marble, all of them produced in Hydra.^[15]

Later work

In 1983, Marden and family traveled to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India; the artist became fascinated by the art, landscape, and culture of parts of Asia. Marden subsequently incorporated numerous elements of certain Asian traditions into his work, making them one key to his process (the Shell Drawings, 1985–87). A visit in 1984 to the exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th-19th Century, encouraged Marden to use form, a predominant influence in his recent work—which can be seen in his acclaimed Cold Mountain series, both paintings and works on paper, 1989-1991. Combining airy calligraphic scaffoldings of line with whitish or palely tinted backgrounds, these 9-by-12-foot paintings were the biggest Marden had created up to that point.^[8] An infatuation with Chinese calligraphy and poetry helped spark the change in his art toward line and gesture, works inspired by the free-spirited eighth-century Chinese hermit and poet of that name (en: Cold Mountain - Han Shan, in Chinese). At first, lines in Marden's paintings and drawings were arranged in neat rows, like Chinese writing. But the lines have got looser, and hence more evocative of landscapes and figures. As a Minimalist, Marden was concerned with grids and patterns. Looking to add freedom to his work without abandoning order, he found Chinese calligraphy inspiring, with its system of drawing characters in rows.^[16]

In 2000, Marden embarked on The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, the longest two of which measure 24 feet.^[17] Writing in The New Yorker in 2006, the critic Peter Schjeldahl described Marden as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades".^[18]

Death

Brice Marden died at his home in Tivoli, New York, on August 9, 2023, at the age of 84.^[29]