In its grand scale, chromatic intensity, and profound rearticulation of the picture plane, Elements IV from 1983-84 exemplifies Brice Marden’s unwavering commitment to and rigorous examination of the most fundamental elements of painting: color, shape and form. Elements IV belongs to a limited and important body of “post-and-lintel construction” paintings—so called because the arrangement of their composite panels echoes that of a post-and-lintel system of architecture, first devised by the ancient Greeks. Originally conceived in the early 1980s, this body of work is deeply informed by Marden’s interest in world religion and spirituality, as well as his travels, specifically to Hydra, Greece and South Asia. Elements IV belongs to a smaller group of Elements paintings which Marden began in 1981 and which were constructed of three vertical rectangular panels joined to a capping horizontal in a post-and-lintel configuration. Elements IV is further exalted as being part of a suite of large scale post-and-lintel construction paintings executed between 1983 and 1984 which were first exhibited together in a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Pace Gallery in 1984. Others of this group belong to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Glenstone Museum in Maryland, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Defined by a compositional complexity and ambition of scale unprecedented in Marden’s output up to that date, these paintings remain amongst the most visually compelling and conceptually ambitious of Marden’s entire oeuvre.
Evincing Marden’s singular capacity to endow a single hue with inimitable complexity and depth, each monochrome panel of Elements IV is in fact built up of innumerable layers of paint which Marden would repeatedly brush on then scrape smooth with a palette knife, the culmination of which coalesces into washes of deep hues whose subtle imperfections and gestural irregularities endow the panels of color with a sculptural dimensionality that marvelously defies the flatness of the paint itself. Unlike his contemporary Ellsworth Kelly, who privileged a purity of color, Marden perceived monochromatic colors as rich in allusions and expressiveness, foregoing the preciousness championed by the Minimalists, and instead embracing the gestural, physical capacity of color. The intense physicality with which he approaches his paint aligns Marden with a gestural tradition and impassioned approach to color akin to that of Rothko and his brand of Abstract Expressionism.
Post-and-Lintel Construction Paintings in Museum Collections
The sculptural presence of Elements IV is further intensified by the conjoined construction of the eight architectonic panels; mounted upon the wall, Elements IV becomes itself a sculptural relief, vibrating with the physical energy, purity and formal elegance of a monumental Richard Serra sculpture. In his New York Times review of Marden’s critically acclaimed exhibition at Pace Gallery, art critic John Russel writes that with these paintings: “Marden's ambition finds overtly spectacular expression. What makes us look and look at these paintings to see how they can possibly have been made is partly the fact that none of the colors are quite what they seem. These reds, blues, yellows and greens are compounds of color, mixed and re-mixed, layered and re-layered, until they have subsumed 'all of everything.' After that has been done, they still have to work together. There have to be color chords the like of which we have not experienced before. And those chords have to establish connections for us that we could not have established by ourselves. They will vary from person to person, but they have to do with the interaction between difference and propinquity.” (John Russel, "Art: Brice Marden’s Building Blocks of Color," The New York Times, October 12, 1984) While remaining committed to pure abstraction, Marden subverts the cool detachment of Minimalism for the ethereal effect of painterly expression, imbuing the seemingly formalist concerns of color, shape, and form with a deeply personal and poetic resonance. Indeed, despite the refined subtractions and stringent compositional syntax of Marden’s painterly technique, Marden nonetheless retains in paintings like Elements IV the capacity to elicit emotional response.
In the early 1970s, Marden traveled with his wife Helen to Greece where he visited Hydra, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Taken by the turquoise hues of the Aegean, the grand architectural remains of ancient Greek civilization, and the striking Mediterranean landscape, Marden decided to buy a small property there for a house and studio, and subsequently would return to the island almost every summer. The influence of Hydra on Marden’s work was immediately palpable as Marden’s compositions became grander in scale and more ambitious in construction than ever before. As one of Marden’s post-and-lintel paintings, Elements IV demonstrates the influence of ancient Greek monuments and temples on Hydra, in which post-and-lintel construction predominates.
Further to the architectural implications, Elements IV also elucidates Marden’s fascination with the elements of alchemy. Rendered in rich hues of red, yellow, blue and green—the colors that in medieval alchemy represent the four states of fire, air, water, and earth—the present Elements IV reveals Marden’s deep interest in the spiritual treatment of materials, which was sparked by his research for a stained-glass window commission for the Basel Cathedral in 1978. Although the project never materialized, it led to his study of alchemical recipes. "You put silver into the glass to get yellow. You did all these things which alchemists worked on." (The artist cited in E. Heller, "'I Think Of Myself As A Romantic Artist,'" Brice Marden, Zurich, p. 21) Elements IV illuminates the deep knowledge of ancient history, classical architecture, spirituality, and world religion which greatly informs Marden’s artistic practice.
“Marden's ambition finds overtly spectacular expression. What makes us look and look at these paintings to see how they can possibly have been made is partly the fact that none of the colors are quite what they seem. These reds, blues, yellows and greens are compounds of color, mixed and re-mixed, layered and re-layered, until they have subsumed 'all of everything.' After that has been done, they still have to work together. There have to be color chords the like of which we have not experienced before. And those chords have to establish connections for us that we could not have established by ourselves. They will vary from person to person, but they have to do with the interaction between difference and propinquity.”
Composed of multiple assembled panels and rendered in disparate hues, Elements IV furthers Marden’s investigation of the spectral progression of color—the separation of light, and therefore color, into its constituent parts. Within each segment, panels of complementary colors—red and green, purple and yellow, blue and orange—are arranged in a T-shaped structure. In working with panels of pure color which are then arranged into a composite unit, Marden allows himself to explore and experiment with color relationships without compromising the purity of the color itself, and without the hindrance of imposing any sort of figure-ground tension on the composition, as each canvas remains a single hue. In 1981, Marden dispensed with the wax-based painting technique that had preoccupied him since the 1970s; instead, he sought a medium that would most directly convey color without interference from reflective shine produced by varnish and oil paint. To this end, Marden developed a new technique of mixing terpineol with oil to produce a pigment that dries as flat to the surface as possible, which allowed the viewer to perceive pure color with a physicality previously unseen in his paintings. By utilizing a sophisticated economy of means, Marden addresses the nature of the painted canvas as a structured object, not a field of painterly gesture, with isolated impactful colors entirely shifting our perceptions of space. canvas as a structured object, not a field of painterly gesture, with isolated impactful colors entirely shifting our perceptions of space.