Brice Marden, an abstract painter whose work found a new direction at a time when painting was regarded by some to have run its course, has died. He was 84.
His death was announced by his daughter Mirabelle Marden, who posted on Instagram that he had died on Wednesday in his home in Tivoli, New York.
“He was lucky to live a long life doing what he loved,” she wrote. She said that her father had continued painting until Saturday.
Marden’s explorations into abstraction were committed. Once asked if he had ever wanted to paint figuratively, he responded simply: “No.” Yet the artists he loved often came from figuration.
As painters were attempting to break free of the frame, and in some cases the canvas itself, Marden applied himself to the medium’s reinvention. “People were saying ‘painting is dead’”, he once explained. “It was my way of saying what can be done.” He called rectangles “a great human invention.”
At his first solo show, in 1966 at New York’s Bykert Gallery, he deployed flat monochromes in muted colours – “an indeterminate colour characteristic”, noted the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and “drips and slim, tapered brushstrokes reach into this channel, serving as evidence of both gravity and the artist’s labour.”
At the time, Marden lived a bohemian existence, often hanging out with the troubadours and poets of Greenwich Village. At that Bykert show, he paid tribute to Bob Dylan with a bruised purple monochrome, and to Nico with a tawny blond canvas.
As Marden’s painting advanced, he deployed different minimalistic modes until, in 1984, he broke with monochromes to venture into deceptively simple but highly reworked swirls of paint often inspired by eastern calligraphy.
His Cold Mountain paintings series from 1989 to 1991, referred to Tang dynasty poet Hanshan. Each began with landscape that was then refined down to an abstracted impression.
Marden, the critic Roberta Smith once noted, achieved “a kind of flame-keeper status – something like the Giorgio Morandi of radical abstraction, a maker of inordinately beautiful, exquisitely made (and expensive) artworks.”
Taking up the challenge of abstraction presented by older artists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Marden paid tribute to his elders in the field: Johns, he said, “added another dimension to what is reality in painting. Is a flag real?”
In 2017, Marden exhibited in London at the Gagosian Gallery and returned to monochromes. “I kept putting the same colour on – the same colour, the same colour – but every time I put it on it was different,” he explained.
“Each time it was this whole new light/colour experience. It was not a revelation, but a whole wonderful new experience… To me, it involves harnessing some of the powers of the earth. Harnessing and communicating.”
Marden was born on 15 October, 1938, in Bronxville, New York, and studied at the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts. As a graduate student, he attended Yale School of Art alongside Chuck Close, Robert Mangold and Richard Serra.
At his retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2006, he described when he knew that a painting was finished. “When I have put all I can into it and it really breathes, I stop. There are times when a work has pulled ahead of me and goes on to become something new to me, something that I have never seen before; that is finishing in an exhilarating way.”
