- 139
Brice Marden
Description
- Brice Marden
- Untitled
- signed and dated 70
- graphite, cray-pas and wax on paper
- 21 7/8 by 30 in. 55.6 by 76.2 cm.
Provenance
The Pace Gallery, New York (acquired from the above in April 1978)
Collection of Leonard Lauder, New York (acquired from the above in October 1979)
Acquired by the present owner circa 1985
Condition
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.
Catalogue Note
BRICE MARDEN: A drawing is the most direct reminder of where you are, in terms of what you’re doing. Painting is a complex, highly evolved form, and the great thing about painting is that it has all these elements that are refinable. And so when you make a statement in painting, when you have a finished painting, it is the product of refinement. You can put something down, you can take it and change it, and do this, that, and the other, and still have it — you have color, you have paint, you have all these things that you can use to make your statement. Drawing is much more limited and it’s much more direct, so you can see things in drawing that you can’t see in your painting, yet you can make anything as complicated in your drawing as you can in your painting. There are times in drawing when I’m not there and I’m drawing, which is what you hope for in painting, and I think at certain points I have had that in painting, but I don’t have right now. I look at some of the Cold Mountain paintings and I see one or two of them in which I think that happened — I ended up with something I could never have anticipated.
Brice Marden and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, Inside the Art World: Conversations with Barbaralee Diamonstein, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York, 1994, p. 171
In his early drawings such as the present work, Untitled (1970), Brice Marden presented a distinctly tactile corpus of works on paper which serve as meditative explorations into nuanced color, complex surface texture and subtle manipulations of light. While adhering to strict, self-imposed, compositional confines, the artist succeeds nonetheless in producing richly expressive work through a palpable application of his chosen media: graphite, craypas and wax on paper. Marden explores his materials so fully that the drawing, while intimate in scale, exudes a substantive presence which extends beyond the modest sheet on which the artist has laid his marks.
With Untitled (1970), Marden expertly overrides common expectations that his role as artist should require a direct presentation of overtly intellectual assertions or obvious technical achievements. Instead, he introduces a more quietly sophisticated composition that commands a sheer emotional response. Marden’s work confronts a tension between the formal realities of his materials and compositional structure and the artist’s own spiritual contemplations and unrefined thoughts. As viewers we can admire the bold, direct nature of drawings like the present work, and observe, at a close distance, the tension between the artist’s hand and mind.