Brice Marden

Brice Marden has been called Minimalist’s poet. Along with Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman, he insisted that painting still had something to offer within the context of Minimalism, with its focus on art as objects and their relationship to the viewer. In similar fashion, an affinity exists between Marden’s monochromatic paintings of the 1960s and 1970s and the gray monochromatic paintings of 1955 to 1961 by Jasper Johns. Johns also approached a painting as a material object, often inserting smaller panels within a canvas or hinging canvases together. Marden set himself apart however, by acknowledging the mystery and metaphysical associations evoked by his painted panels. ``The rectangle, the plane, the structure, the picture are sounding boards for a spirit.’’ (Brice Marden, ``Statements, Notes & Interviews (1963-1981)’’ in Exh. Cat., London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Brice Marden: Paintings. Drawings and Prints, 1981, p. 54)

Au Centre is emblematic of Marden’s monochromatic canvases of the late1960s in which the artist approached a painting as a field for experimentation within the permutations of planes, rectangles, structure, color and light. The spatial dimensions of a color, combined with the amount of light and reflectivity that plays across his surface, replace the traditional figure/ground relationship which occupied the modern aesthetic discourse of the 1940s and 1950s. Whereas Johns chose gray for its non-representational quality, Marden perceived monochromatic colors as rich in allusions and expressiveness, and in this regard, Marden's work is more in sympathy with Mark Rothko's paintings which sought an impassioned form of Abstract Expressionism. Both artists employed rigorous and reductive approaches to color, shape, balance and composition, and Rothko's paintings in somber tones of the late 1960s were some of his most transcendent canvases, evoking an enigmatic presence and mood for the viewer. In similar fashion, single colors, laid on in lush textures afforded by the waxy medium, provided a starting point for Marden. The colors worked to link the painted object to the viewer, who sees not only with the eyes of objective vision, but with eyes accustomed to seeing poetic allusions and subjective memories. ``I begin work with some vague color idea; a memory of a space, a color presence, a color I think I have seen... A dark black green seen slightly after a foggy dusk.’’ (Brice Marden quoted in Carl Andre, ``New York in New York’’, Arts Magazine, May 1967, p. 50)  In paintings such as Au Centre, it is telling that one cannot factually describe the colors of Marden’s palette. They shift between grays, taupes, greens and blues in his early monochromes, but are not definitively one color over the other and are open to interpretation by the individual.

By 1968, Marden had extended his exploration of color beyond single panel painting in the dimensions of the human form and into the realm of diptychs and triptychs. Made by joining individual monochrome panels, works such as Au Centre offered a way to extend the color and light possibilities without disrupting the unity of a single panel. The mixture of oil and beeswax that gives monochromatic paintings such as Au Centre their creamy, evenly modulated surface and velvety matte finish is the product of carefully scrutinized application. The absence of form or impasto allowed Marden to focus on the intense correlation between the color of each panel and the degree of light that is imbued in each subtle tone, just as Rothko did in his balance of dark and light hues in painting such as Untitled (1969). Marden spoke of a color holding the plane as he painstakingly arrived at the final tonalities in which neither panel dominates the other, ``searching for a color value that pulls the planes together into a plane that has aesthetic meaning. This process is not as simple as explained. There is much repainting of panels which follows no given order. The idea of a painting can change quite fast and drastically or they can evolve very slowly. I want to have a dialogue with the painting: it works on me and I work on it.’’ (Ibid., p. 54)

Au Centre is a lush example of Marden’s unique ability to wed the objective materiality to poetic subjectivity. The surfaces are worked and reworked with consuming attention, augmented by a delicate play of colors. Two tones play with and against each other, registering similarities as they exhibit differences, and achieving an overall harmony of shape, color, aura and tone.