GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Brice Marden was born in 1938 in Bronxville, New York, and grew up in the nearby town of Briarcliff Manor. Marden attended Florida Southern College, then Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts, where he earned his bachelor of fine arts degree in 1961, and finally Yale University, where he earned a master of fine arts degree in 1963. Marden has continually engaged the tenets and practices of abstraction, first through his series of monochrome panels and drawings from the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, and subsequently through the line-based work he produced since 1985.
Marden's work is represented in most major international museum collections, as well as in important private collections. His work has been the subject of major one-person exhibitions, as well as important international and national exhibitions.
Adapted from
Charles Wylie, Brice Marden: Work of the 1990s: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, in association with Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), 68.
NOTES
- This note was reviewed by the curatorial intern for contemporary art in the fall of 2018, but not reviewed by the curator.
Brice Marden's two paintings demonstrate that abstract art, particularly what has been termed minimalism, need not be coldly clinical nor removed from sensory pleasure. From the beginning of his career in the mid-1960s into the early 1980s, Marden used oil and wax as his painting medium, applying this mixture to simple vertical rectangles of canvas. Upon sustained scrutiny, these paintings resonate with an interior light and call to mind things far outside the realm of purely abstract form. In the four-panel To Corfu, Marden summons colors associated with the land and sea of a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Here tones of blue and green refer to water and sky in a distilled and quiet yet supremely deliberate manner.
As these colors interact, ocean, sky, and field begin to register in the viewer's eye and mind without ever appearing outright. In No Test, Marden creates with a single panel, a field of seductively indeterminate color—it could be tan or brown, but it can never be pinned down. Related to a series of paintings that take their tones for the breathing, warm presence of skin, No Test is further proof that Marden's paintings from the first part of his career, while remaining true to the tenets of abstract art, extend the realm of the abstract into the experience of everyday sensory life.
Charles Wylie, "To Corfu" and "No Test," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Suzanne Kotz (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), 286.
Brice Marden is one of the foremost artists to explore abstraction in contemporary art, creating a body of work that is heir to the post-World War II New York School, which cemented abstract painting at the center of the international avant-garde. To Corfu is a lushly restrained evocation of a sea journey Marden took from the island of Hydra to Corfu. Ocean and sky are evident in that painting's hues of green and blue, which play off one another in four meticulously and laboriously painted wax and oil panels. Feeling at an impasse with monochrome painting, Marden began to explore line after seeing a 1984 exhibition of Japanese calligraphy. Red Rocks (2) (right) is a radiant composition of intertwined red, yellow, blue, and orange lines, all set in a pulsing red-toned field, that reference natural elements and landscape formations.
"To Corfu," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed Bonnie Pitman (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2012), 308.
ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS (list applicable note links)
AUDIO ASSETS
Brice Marden in coversation with Charles Wylie 13312004: UMO
Talk by Charles Wylie on Brice Marden - "Brice Marden and the Field of Painting" - 13313548: UMO
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
- YouTube~Watch a short video by the National Gallery of Art, "Brice Marden in the Studio."
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES (digitized/non-digitized)
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General Description
Brice Marden was born in 1938 in Bronxville, New York, and grew up in the nearby town of Briarcliff Manor. Marden attended Florida Southern College, then Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts, where he earned his bachelor of fine arts degree in 1961, and finally Yale University, where he earned a master of fine arts degree in 1963. Marden has continually engaged the tenets and practices of abstraction, first through his series of monochrome panels and drawings from the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, and subsequently through the line-based work he produced since 1985.
Marden's work is represented in most major international museum collections, as well as in important private collections. His work has been the subject of major one-person exhibitions, as well as important international and national exhibitions.
Adapted from
Charles Wylie, Brice Marden: Work of the 1990s: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, in association with Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), 68.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
(digitized/non-digitized)
Web Resources
Notes
- This note was reviewed by the curatorial intern for contemporary art in the fall of 2018, but not reviewed by the curator.
Brice Marden's two paintings demonstrate that abstract art, particularly what has been termed minimalism, need not be coldly clinical nor removed from sensory pleasure. From the beginning of his career in the mid-1960s into the early 1980s, Marden used oil and wax as his painting medium, applying this mixture to simple vertical rectangles of canvas. Upon sustained scrutiny, these paintings resonate with an interior light and call to mind things far outside the realm of purely abstract form. In the four-panel To Corfu, Marden summons colors associated with the land and sea of a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Here tones of blue and green refer to water and sky in a distilled and quiet yet supremely deliberate manner.
As these colors interact, ocean, sky, and field begin to register in the viewer's eye and mind without ever appearing outright. In No Test, Marden creates with a single panel, a field of seductively indeterminate color—it could be tan or brown, but it can never be pinned down. Related to a series of paintings that take their tones for the breathing, warm presence of skin, No Test is further proof that Marden's paintings from the first part of his career, while remaining true to the tenets of abstract art, extend the realm of the abstract into the experience of everyday sensory life.
Charles Wylie, "To Corfu" and "No Test," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Suzanne Kotz (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1997), 286.
Brice Marden is one of the foremost artists to explore abstraction in contemporary art, creating a body of work that is heir to the post-World War II New York School, which cemented abstract painting at the center of the international avant-garde. To Corfu is a lushly restrained evocation of a sea journey Marden took from the island of Hydra to Corfu. Ocean and sky are evident in that painting's hues of green and blue, which play off one another in four meticulously and laboriously painted wax and oil panels. Feeling at an impasse with monochrome painting, Marden began to explore line after seeing a 1984 exhibition of Japanese calligraphy. Red Rocks (2) (right) is a radiant composition of intertwined red, yellow, blue, and orange lines, all set in a pulsing red-toned field, that reference natural elements and landscape formations.
"To Corfu," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed Bonnie Pitman (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 2012), 308.
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