BRICE MARDEN | Basel Drawings (Window Studies No. 1, 2, 4, 5)

Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London
Jason McCoy Gallery, New York
Daryl Y Harnisch, New York
Private Collection, New York
Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998

New York, Mary Boone Gallery, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Brice Marden, October 1985 London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Brice Marden: Recent Paintings and Drawings, April - May 1988, n.p., no. 26-29, illustrated

Lausanne, FAE, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Sélection: Oeuvres de la collection, June - October 1991, p. 99, illustrated in colour

Pilar Viladas, 'Posh Spice', The New York Times, 29 October 2000, p. 77, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the paper tone is lighter in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Brice Marden’s Basel Drawings (Window Studies No. 1, 2, 4, 5) present a hushed, numinous rumination on the relations between space, gesture, structure and light. Quadripartite, the work comprises four rectangular sheets arranged like a window: the upper two panels are quadrisected by inky lines of red and green, while the lower pair is divided into nine equally-sized parts. Commissioned by the Basel Cathedral Stained Glass Trust at the end of 1977, Marden created these studies as proposals for the windows of Basel Cathedral. Occupying the majority of his time from 1978 to 1985, the commission acted as an artistic turning-point for Marden, who used the project as a vehicle by which to explore his interests in alchemy, the self, and the universe’s primordial foundations. Just as in works like For Hera (1977), Annunciation (1977-8) and Thira (1980), Marden mapped the intersections of the earthly and the spiritual. Representing, by turns, the alchemical bases of earth, air, fire and water, these coloured lines configure Marden’s take on humanity’s origin. Marden’s style resides in the uncanny interstice between the mechanical and the expressive; each facet serving as a perfect foil for the other. An apparently depersonalised formalism is rendered via ink blots, irregularities and haptic traces. If Donald Judd made a point of rejecting Minimalism’s claim to spirituality, Marden identified a poignancy precisely in the failure of minimal art to remain devoid of it: “the rectangle, the plane, the structure, the picture”, he explains, “are but sounding boards for a spirit” (Brice Marden cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Anthony d’Offay Gallery, Brice Marden: Recent Paintings & Drawings, 1988, np). Enacting neither the reproduction of visual reality, nor the expression of emotion, nor the delivery of pure abstraction, Marden’s work effectively achieves all three of these functions. Indeed, in certain of his monochromes such as The Dylan Painting (1966), Marden deliberately leaves a small strip of the work unpainted. Drips of the paint from the surface above accumulate in this space, left bare to remind the viewer of abstraction’s bodily, human origin.

The present work was immediately followed by a series of Window Paintings, which also formed part of the Basel Cathedral commission. Part of the power of these works, as well as of Basel Drawings (Window Studies: #1, 2, 4, 5), derives from their realising the intellectual human urge – never quite understood, never quite satiated – to represent the transcendent. As John Yau expresses, the works “suggest a movement from the earthly to the spiritual, without arriving at an image of immateriality… From the outset of his career, Marden accepted the inevitability of being continuously thwarted, of never being able to arrive at a purely spiritual realisation. His response was to make fully considered proposals, which remain open and incomplete. It is this incompleteness, the ache of it, that haunts the paintings, the artist, and the viewer” (John Yau cited in: Ibid., n.p.).