Lot Essay
Brice Marden is celebrated both for exquisitely colored minimal panel works and for more expressive recent canvases. The earlier works were often painted in a single color whose emotional implications affect the viewer almost subconsciously. Marden used the same technique to produce magical monochrome drawings; the present piece is a classic example of a small group of drawings that Marden made in the 1960s.
Marden made the following statement about his approach to art:
The paintings are made in a highly subjective state within Spartan limitations. Within these strict confines, confines which I have painted myself into and intend to explore with no regrets, I try to give the viewer something to which he will react subjectively. I believe these are highly emotional paintings not to be admired for any technical or intellectual reasons but to be felt. (B. Marden, Master of Fine Arts Thesis, Yale University, 1963)
The simple rectangular format was one limit, the reduction of color to a near monochrome was another. A third was Marden's use of layers of individual strokes whose overlapping produces a neutral effect. Dissatisified with reflective sheen, Marden developed by 1966 a method of adding wax and turpentine to oil pigments to create a resistant but matte surface. Painting with a spatula and a small palette knife, he obsessively worked and reworked the surfaces of his pictures.
He began to apply the same method to his drawings, where the wax "solidifies drawn space and shape and renders more visible the surface of the drawn shape and that of its support" (K. Kertess, op. cit., p. 36). Marden worked the surface and applied over it the objectifying grid that categorized the work as modernist. Sometimes the grid was minimally inscribed, sometimes it was scored through several layers of pigment and wax. Its definition of the image on the sheet creates the tension which allows us to respond to the emotional qualities of the work. As Klaus Kertess explains, "The identity of the marks and the identity of the plane become an organic unity. As gesture becomes rectangular plane, so does rectangular plane become gesture. Marden freed the hand by subordinating it to the plane and vice versa" (ibid., p. 36). In some of these drawings Marden creates a rectangle within the sheet, but in the present piece the plane of the drawing presses to the edges of the page (except for the characteristic unworked edge at the bottom, where the results of the process are partly visible).
Kertess posits a lineage for Marden's drawings through Seurat, de Kooning and Johns. Kertess wrote:
Marden...sought to retain de Kooning's emotionality but to moderate it with and contain it within the geometric dictates of the plane. The ghostlike residues of the marks in Marden's drawings (and paintings) are freer and more subjectively charged than Johns's marks, but less volatile and more measured than de Kooning's. The lessons of Johns and de Kooning are integrated with the lessons of Czanne and Mondrian. (Ibid., p. 37)
Marden made the following statement about his approach to art:
The paintings are made in a highly subjective state within Spartan limitations. Within these strict confines, confines which I have painted myself into and intend to explore with no regrets, I try to give the viewer something to which he will react subjectively. I believe these are highly emotional paintings not to be admired for any technical or intellectual reasons but to be felt. (B. Marden, Master of Fine Arts Thesis, Yale University, 1963)
The simple rectangular format was one limit, the reduction of color to a near monochrome was another. A third was Marden's use of layers of individual strokes whose overlapping produces a neutral effect. Dissatisified with reflective sheen, Marden developed by 1966 a method of adding wax and turpentine to oil pigments to create a resistant but matte surface. Painting with a spatula and a small palette knife, he obsessively worked and reworked the surfaces of his pictures.
He began to apply the same method to his drawings, where the wax "solidifies drawn space and shape and renders more visible the surface of the drawn shape and that of its support" (K. Kertess, op. cit., p. 36). Marden worked the surface and applied over it the objectifying grid that categorized the work as modernist. Sometimes the grid was minimally inscribed, sometimes it was scored through several layers of pigment and wax. Its definition of the image on the sheet creates the tension which allows us to respond to the emotional qualities of the work. As Klaus Kertess explains, "The identity of the marks and the identity of the plane become an organic unity. As gesture becomes rectangular plane, so does rectangular plane become gesture. Marden freed the hand by subordinating it to the plane and vice versa" (ibid., p. 36). In some of these drawings Marden creates a rectangle within the sheet, but in the present piece the plane of the drawing presses to the edges of the page (except for the characteristic unworked edge at the bottom, where the results of the process are partly visible).
Kertess posits a lineage for Marden's drawings through Seurat, de Kooning and Johns. Kertess wrote:
Marden...sought to retain de Kooning's emotionality but to moderate it with and contain it within the geometric dictates of the plane. The ghostlike residues of the marks in Marden's drawings (and paintings) are freer and more subjectively charged than Johns's marks, but less volatile and more measured than de Kooning's. The lessons of Johns and de Kooning are integrated with the lessons of Czanne and Mondrian. (Ibid., p. 37)