Brice Marden

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brice Marden (born October 15, 1938), is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Marden was born in Bronxville, New York and grew up in nearby Briarcliff Manor. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland (1957 to 1958), receiving his BFA from the Boston University, School of Fine and Applied Arts in [[1961. Marden earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture (1963), where he studied with Esteban Vicente, Alex Katz, Jon Schueler, Jack Tworkov, Reginald Pollack, Philip Pearlstein, and Gabor Peterdi. Among his fellow students were the future artists Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Robert Mangold.

It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that would characterize his drawings and paintings in the proceeding decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats, and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. In his early work of the 1960s and 1970s, he used simplified means, typically monochrome canvases either alone or in series of panels, diptychs or triptychs. He thereby achieved what he considered highly emotional and subjective representations. These include the noted works The Dylan Painting, 1966; "1986" (now in the collection of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); 1969's Fave (the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin); and Lethykos (for Tonto), 1976 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York).

[edit] Career

[edit] Early years

Marden relocated to New York in 1963, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth while employed as a guard at the Jewish Museum, New York during the museum's Johns's 1964 retrospective. The following summer Marden traveled to Paris where he began to make compressed charcoal and graphite grid-patterned drawings. Marden's graphic works have always constituted an important corollary to his paintings, and he would transfer ideas ignited by these early works into even his most recent paintings and drawings. 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 Edouard Manet have 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.

[edit] Mature work

Marden's paintings are often borne from a particular experience, or in reaction to having spent time in a specific place. In 1971, he and his wife, Helen Harrington, visited the Greek island of Hydra, to which they have returned every year since, and the light and landscape have greatly influenced his work (see, for instance, the five Grove Group paintings, 1972-1980; Souvenir de Grèce works on paper, 1974-1996).

In 1983, Marden and family traveled to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India; the artist became fascinated by the art, landscape, and culture of Asia. Marden has subsequently incorporated numerous elements of these 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 master the 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.

In 2000, Marden embarked on the most ambitious paintings of his career: The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, the longest two of which measure 24 feet. Marden is considered to rank among the most important American painters of [[Contemporary art|contemporary period]. Writing in The New Yorker in 2006, the critic Peter Schjeldahl described him as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades."[1].

[edit] Collections, retrospectives, honors

Marden has participated in hundreds of group exhibitions, and has also been the subject of numerous one-person shows and retrospectives. His first museum show was the 1975 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York. In the fall of 2006, New York's Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented "Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings". The MoMA called the exhibition "an unprecedented gathering of [Marden's] work, with more than fifty paintings and an equal number of drawings, organized chronologically, drawn from all phases of the artist's career."[2] The show traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in early 2007, and finally to Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart in the summer of that year. Originally, Marden was not enthusiastic about the idea. The works were divided into two periods: from the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties and then the mid-eighties up to the present. It allowed the artist to reasses his previous works and focus on future works. [3]


In 1988, Marden became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2000, Brown University awarded the artist an honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts.

[edit] Personal

His daughter, Mirabelle Marden, is a proprietor of Rivington Arms, an art gallery in New York. She is also an accomplished photographer.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Schjeldahl, Peter. The New Yorker. "True Colors." 6, November, 2006.
  2. ^ Brice Marden: A Retrospective
  3. ^ Robert Ayers (October 31, 2006), A Resistant Brice Marden Agrees to Major Retrospective, ARTINFO, <http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/22718/a-resistant-brice-marden-agrees-to-major-retrospective/>. Retrieved on 16 April 2008 

[edit] External links

Languages