BRICE MARDEN (1938-2023)

Described by Peter Shjeldahl as “the most profound abstract painter of the last four decades”, Brice Marden is among the most celebrated artists of the 20th/21st century. His monumental masterpiece Event (2004-2007) will aptly lead the 21st Century Evening Sale this May in New York. Estimated at $30–50 million, Event has been in a prestigious private collection since it left the studio. It has never before been seen in public and is poised to establish a new record for the artist as the finest example of his work to appear at auction. Event is the sister painting to the current artist’s record, Complements (2004-2007), sold by Christie’s in 2020.

Dynamic and expressive, Event forms part of Marden’s ‘summation’ paintings - paintings that represent a culmination of the ideas and processes he developed and honed over the span of his career. It is one of the works that make up his most ambitious series: The Propitious Garden of Plane Image. The group comprises of one smaller and two mural sized, six-panel paintings, one of which is in the collection of MoMA, and only three diptychs: Extremes, which is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Complements which made the world auction record for the artist and, Event, the current work.
Marden called the series ‘Plane Image’—a phrase that summed up his lifelong resolution to synthesise the plane and the image. It was also the title he chose to give to the catalogue of his landmark retrospective exhibition at MoMA.
Brice Marden passed away in August of 2023. Born in Bronxville, New York in 1938, extensive travel had taken him to places and cultures that became essential to his work - from the landscapes of Greece to the scholars’ rocks and calligraphy of ancient China. According to Roberta Smith of The New York Times, he reconnected Minimalism with Abstract Expressionism. He was described by The New York Times as “one of the most admired and influential artists of his generation”.
For a full and detailed analysis of the work and its place in Marden’s oeuvre please see John Yau's video and Eileen Costello's essay below.
Brice Marden:
The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Extremes, Complements and Event
by Eileen Costello

In 2004, Brice Marden was at work on a pair of mural-size multipanel paintings that he had begun four years earlier, both titled The Propitious Garden of Plane Image. Each six-panel painting measured six feet tall and twenty-four feet wide, making them the largest canvases he had ever embarked on. Color has always been at the heart of Marden’s artistic practice, and with these monumental paintings, the pigments he used, and the order in which he layered them on the canvas, were based on the prismatic spectrum. In stark contrast to the muted hues of the calligraphic and China-themed works of the previous decade, these two frieze-like paintings were infused with bold and vibrant color. Marden was pressed to complete the two The Propitious Garden murals in time for his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, opening in the fall of 2006, but as the two versions were evolving, they sparked a second set of prismatic paintings—a trio of diptychs—and he commenced work on them immediately. These newer works would become Extremes, 2004–05, Complements, 2004–07, and Event, 2004–07.

There are, in fact, three versions of the Propitious Garden paintings, all of which Marden initiated in the fall of 2000. At approximately half the size of the second and third versions, The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, First Version, 2000–05 is almost a prototype for the two larger paintings, which the artist completed in time for the retrospective and where all three served as a sort of “grand finale.” (Gary Garrels in conversation with Brice Marden, Museum of Modern Art, New York).

Indeed, Marden regards the Propitious Garden canvases as “summation paintings,” in that they represent a culmination of his ideas and processes developed and honed over the span of his career, beginning with the monochromatic oil and beeswax paintings of the 1960s and 70s, which climaxed with the eighteen-part Thira, 1979–80; the introduction of brighter colors, line, and transparency in the 1980s as manifested in Five Part Window Study (Second Window Painting), 1983; the profound shift in his work instigated by Asian art and culture, in particular calligraphy, that culminated with the landmark Cold Mountain series of the early 1990s [Cold Mountain 2, 1989-91]; his exploration of the figurative, as seen in the magisterial trio of paintings titled The Muses [The Muses, 1991-5⁄1997, Study for the Muses (Eaglesmere Version), 1991–94⁄1997–99, and Study for the Muses (Hydra Version), 1991–97]; and the ever-present inspiration drawn from abstract expressionist painting—all of these elements and achievements cohere within these two large paintings, which simultaneously served to renew the possibilities for, and prepared a pathway to, the next phase of his work (Brice Marden in interview with Mirabelle Marden. Interview Magazine, January 4, 2015.)

"Modernist painting has been about how the color comes up closer to the surface and how that affects the viewer. The whole evolution of modernism is about getting up, up, up to the surface, tightening the surface to the plane." Brice Marden in interview with John Yau, ‘An Interview with Brice Marden’, Brice Marden Paintings and Drawings 1964 -2002, Scalo, 2003, p. 51

In size, shape, color, and construction The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version, 2000–06 and The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version, 2000–06, mirror one another save for the layering and movement of the bands or linear elements, as Marden prefers to call them. In fact, Marden regards them as pendant paintings that, ideally, would remain together as a pair and be displayed opposite one another, as they were exhibited at the MoMA retrospective, so as to highlight the parallels and differences between the two. Both are composed of six joined panels, each measuring six feet high by four feet wide.

Each individual panel features a monochrome ground that reads from left to right in spectral sequence, beginning with red on the left and concluding with violet on the sixth and final panel. On these colored grounds, the artist laid down a network of layered lines, also in a prismatic color progression. Their color sequence is repeated throughout the individual panels, but with a slight change in their order from panel to panel. In the Propitious Garden, Second Version, Marden first laid down an orange band on the red ground, then yellow, green, blue, and purple. The second panel has an orange ground upon which he laid down a yellow, green, blue, purple, then red band. The progression continues throughout the remaining panels. Marden reversed the progression of the colored bands in the Third Version. Although the first panel also begins with a solid red ground, here he first laid down a purple band, then blue, then green, yellow, and concluded with orange moving through and altering the order from panel to panel.

"...The structure gave the work a kind of stasis. It’s almost like a hum. But, at the same time, there are these things going on within the structure. The form itself is static, but there’s a dynamic going within it.: Brice Marden in an interview with John Yau, ‘An Interview with Brice Marden’, Brice Marden Paintings and Drawings 1964 -2002, Scalo, 2003, p. 48

Marden based the format, as well as the color scheme of the Propitious Garden paintings, on the number six. He has used specific color progressions in the past as with his Elements series of paintings (1979–84) [Elements III, 1983-84] where he based his color choices on a formula derived from medieval alchemy and used the colors of the four elements symbolically, but here the logic to the making of the Propitious Garden paintings stems from a more personal association.

Marden had been told that in numerological terms, six was “his number,” hence, each painting’s formal elements are based on a numeric code: It begins with his birth date —the fifteenth—which, when totaled, equals six. There are six panels within both of the paintings whose overall measurements—six by four feet—when multiplied, equal twenty-four, or two and four, which is six. The same formula can be applied to the paintings’ overall length: twenty-four feet. Although their color progression is based on the sequence of hues seen in the visible spectrum, Marden merged the indigo with blue to result in six colors. Marden often establishes rules for himself in his approach to his drawings, paintings, and prints, but his self-imposed limitations are only general parameters. At a certain point, intuition and spontaneity take over, disrupting what is, in fact, an unsystematic system. This is the moment, he says, “when I feel painting begins.” (Marden, in “Conversa.on, Brice Marden with Jeffrey Weiss,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 2006, 14.)

The curvilinear bands of gestural tracery in the Propitious Garden paintings reference the elegant Chinese garden rocks that Marden first encountered in the mid-1990s during a visit to Suzhou, as well as ornamental scholars’ rocks, their smaller relatives. Admired for their sheer abstract beauty, the peculiar formations of scholars’ rocks are believed to represent microcosms of nature and, as such, are thought to possess qi, the vital energy of all living things. But Marden is not depicting the rocks per se. Instead, he aims to capture a sensorial equivalent of their energy: “I take from nature only its energy; I don’t want to try to reproduce it.” (Marden, in interview with Anouchka Roggeman, “Des tremplins pour l’esprit,” L’oeil no. 577, February 2006, 55).

The ideas that generated the Propitious Garden paintings are equally prevalent in the three diptychs. Their panels, at six by four feet, are the same size as those in the larger paintings. They even employ the same compositional structure and six-color progression. However, the hue of each diptych’s palette is vastly different, attesting to the fact that Marden can deploy any number of variations on a predetermined theme without the work appearing programmatic or devolving into repetitious cliché. And despite having fewer panels, all three diptychs are as dynamic and assertive as their precursors.

Of the three, Extremes was completed first. The title refers to the ground colors of its two panels, red and violet, which are located at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Yet rather than the effulgent hues one might expect from prismatic colors, the palette is restrained, particularly its earthy reddish brown and inky-violet panels, which bespeak the environment in which the painting was made rather than the spectrum on which it is based. Marden maintains studios in several far-flung locations, and each one has a profound effect on the luminescence in his paintings. Pigments are themselves mixtures of compounds and what we see is the light reflected from them. More than most artists, Marden understands the indivisibility of light and color. He has often talked about “getting the color up to the light” and, as he readily acknowledges, “You’re really influenced by where you’re painting. One of the biggest things is the light.” (Marden, in Ted Loos. “A Subtle Sense of Place.” New York Times, October 29, 2006, sec. 2, p. 1). He painted Extremes in rural Pennsylvania, where he works in a converted barn shaded by a dense canopy of hemlocks. Not much light penetrates the studio windows, and Extremes has the feel of a damp and shadowy forest. In contrast, he produced Complements and Event, the two most radiant of the three diptychs, at his New York studio, a concrete and steel duplex on the west side of Manhattan. Located on the building’s top floor, the studio’s twenty-foot-tall windows admit the abundant light that glints off the Hudson River. Marden describes the illumination there as silvery, cold, and clear, likening it to the daylight that floods into his Tivoli workspace, a former carriage house, also on the east bank of the Hudson but one hundred miles north, where he made the two large-scale Propitious Garden paintings. Complements has a chromatic intensity that suggests the painting has, in fact, absorbed the full brilliance of the river light. In this diptych, Marden paired a saturated red-orange panel with another in deep blue to investigate the potent effect of contrasting complementary colors, hence its title.

The third diptych, Event, is a synthesis of brightness and shadow, clarity and opacity, high and low saturation, warmth and coolness, quietude and movement, soft lines and hard edges. Marden began with its two ground colors, a slightly warm cadmium yellow for the left panel and a terre verte with cool undertones on the right. Yellow and green are not unfamiliar in Marden’s oeuvre, appearing together, albeit in more subdued hues, in some of his most important paintings, such as The Seasons, 1974–75 and his mammoth Moss Sutra with Seasons, 2010–15.

He first started using terre verte pigment (also known as “green earth”) in the 1970s, with his well-known Grove Group paintings, but fully explored its possibilities only recently, in 2016–17, with a set of ten large monochromatic canvases devoted to ten different hues of the pigment and each work titled after the brand of paint that he used. Some brands are more intense in value than others, and Marden’s mastery of coloristic nuance is unmistakable with this group of paintings.
For Marden, color is never just color, and green, which is located at the midpoint of the spectrum, has always held special relevance for him as evidenced by its regular appearance in his work, and notably in a number of his “summation” paintings. A light celadon green serves as background to his celebrated canvas, The Muses (1991–93), a tribute to the goddesses of arts and science and a source of all creative inspiration. A gray-green hue found in some of the Letter paintings, such as Second Letter (Zen Spring), 2006–2009 is reminiscent of The Muses, but the color comes more from Marden’s visit in 1995 to the Saiho-ji Zen Garden in Kyoto, popularly known as the Moss Temple. In Event the hue is almost an emerald green, the color taking on a gem-like quality because of its many translucent layers.

"It’s like you are bound and then unbound, and you go back and forth. You push the picture, the picture pushes you. Back and forth." Brice Marden in an interview with John Yau, ‘An Interview with Brice Marden’, Brice Marden Paintings and Drawings 1964 -2002, Scalo, 2003, p. 53

With Event, Marden maintained the same six-color progression of linear elements he used in the Propitious Garden paintings. (This sequence of line colors first appeared in his Red Rock series from the early 2000s [6 Red Rock, 2000-02], a set of seven large-scale paintings that are generally duskier in hue, particularly their toned-down bands of color.)

Event’s yellow panel follows the same sequence in accord with the yellow panel in Propitious Garden, Second Version with the orange band laid down first, then red, violet, blue, and finally green, which is visually closest to the viewer. In the green panel, the order of colors is identical to that of the Propitious Garden, First Version’s green panel: blue, violet, red, orange, then yellow on top. The bands, which are less than two inches wide, flicker between opacity and translucence as they loop and weave across the canvas, animating the surface. Despite the fact that each network of layered lines is self-contained within its respective panel, intermittently tracing the four edges of its canvas, there is a sense of unity, cohesion, and contemplativeness to the overall composition. The painted border, which first appears in works such as Study for the Muses (Eaglesmere Version), 1991–94⁄1997–99, and Study for the Muses (Hydra Version), 1991–97, and which Marden has now largely eliminated from his more recent work, lends the painting a greater sense of balance and structure.

As with the Propitious Garden paintings, the linear elements in Event descend from the unusual forms of Chinese scholars’ rocks, but the graceful, elegant lines also recall the dynamic forms in The Attendants (1996–99) [Attendant 2, 1996-9]. That group of paintings and drawings was based on Chinese tomb figures, their linear elements evoking the sway and swirl of long-sleeved dancers moving to and fro. The fact that Event is, at six feet tall, roughly human in scale may encourage this reading. But even without the figural connotations, the bands convey movement, and if you stare at the painting long enough, the colors begin to dance.

Marden paints with a brush attached to a long stick, up to six feet in length. This distance allows him to see what emerges on the canvas as he works, but it also encourages a more physical engagement with the painting. As if choreographed, he advances forward to examine the painting’s surface and assess his mark-making, then back again to study the work-in-progress from afar. The extended brush also forces him to work with his arm, shoulder, and entire body rather than just his hand and wrist, resulting in rounder, more relaxed lines with a greater sense of fluidity. The physical energy he exerts when painting endows the canvas with a feeling of rhythm and buoyancy, calling to mind a statement Jackson Pollock made about his own work: “Organic intensity—energy and motion made visible.” (Jackson Pollock, in, Francis V. O’Connor, ed., Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of PainFngs, Drawings, and Other Works, Vol. 4, New York: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., 1978, p. 253).

"I take from nature only its energy. I don’t want to try to reproduce it." Brice Marden in an interview with Anouchka Roggeman, ‘Interview with Brice Marden’, L’Oeil, Feb 2006

Event is intensely worked. It begins with the ground colors and involves a repeated process of brushing thinned-out pigment onto the canvas, scraping it off with a palette knife, then applying another layer that is yet again scraped or rubbed off. Instead of building the paint up, Marden tries to keep it close to the surface. This method of working is in direct contrast to the monochromatic paintings he produced throughout the 1960s and 70s, wherein he applied dense, nearly opaque layers of oil paint and beeswax onto the canvas until he arrived at what he describes as “the right color for a shape.” (Marden, in interview with Lucile Encrevé in Brice Marden / Gustave Courbe, Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2006, p. 30.) In the early 1980s, he relinquished beeswax and began to dilute his oil paint with terpineol, which allowed him to apply thin layers of color, resulting in a greater chromatic vibrancy that is more inclined towards transparency. With terpineol, the paint dries matte, but as more layers of paint are applied it gets shinier, imparting those areas with a shimmering effect. Marden has manipulated the surface of Event for optimum visual effect. Rubbings, scrapings, and sgraffito are deliberately left visible, as are spatters, drips, and traces of pentimenti in the underlayers, all of which lend the painting a lively surface texture. Marden has repeatedly drawn and redrawn the curvilinear bands, further refining their course and color. These brush-drawn lines extend from his interest in Chinese calligraphy, which became a predominant influence as far back as 1986, with the important Etchings to Rexroth prints.

Marden then developed his own evolving vocabulary of triangular shapes, or glyphs, predicated on Chinese ideograms. Those spiky forms, which he began to link together in vertical columns to fill the pictorial field, gradually morphed into softer curving and gliding forms, first in The Sisters,1991–93 and reaching their apogee with the Propitious Garden paintings and diptychs.

In December 1952, Harold Rosenberg published a divisive yet groundbreaking polemical essay, “The American Action Painters,” in which he underscored the importance of self-expression in the very act of painting. “At a certain moment,” he wrote, “the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act … What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” (Harold Rosenberg, “The American Ac.on Painters,” Art News 51, no. 8 December 1952). No artists were named, but it was widely understood that Rosenberg had in mind the leading Abstract Expressionists Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, each of whom has been an underlying inspiration to Marden in one way or another. Process has been the bedrock of his artistic practice since its inception, and Event is that which we see upon its canvas—all of the intellectual complexity, emotional intensity, and dynamism instantiated at its charged moment of creation.