NEW YORK City - Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings is an unprecedented gathering of the artist’s work and the first overview of the entirety of his career, which spans more than 40 years.  With 56 paintings and more than 50 drawings, the exhibition is organized chronologically, beginning with works from the 1960s and ending with two new monumental paintings exhibited for the first time at MoMA.  The gradual, deliberate evolution of the artist’s work becomes evident throughout the exhibition, as does his constant exploration of light, color, and surface.  The work of the first 20 years of his career, characterized by luminous monochrome panels that first won the artist acclaim, will now be seen in balance with the work of the last 20 years, including the Cold Mountain group, which solidified Marden’s reputation as one of the most important abstract artists of his generation.

Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings, on view at MoMA from October 29, 2006, to January 15, 2007, is organized by Gary Garrels, Senior Curator, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.  The exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (February 17 to May 13, 2007), and with paintings only to the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany (June 12 to October 7, 2007).

“Marden’s work is deeply influenced by the places he has lived and worked, the people in his life, the cultures in which he has immersed himself, not the least of them the art of the past, both ancient and recent,” says Mr. Garrels.  “From his sharp syntheses and distillations of his experiences, an art is made that in turn gives viewers an incisive means to reflect more deeply on their own perceptions, knowledge, and experience.”

For the MoMA presentation, all 56 paintings, including three oil-on-marble works, will be on view in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery on the sixth floor, along with 8 drawings interspersed in key galleries.  Drawing has often been Marden’s method of working through problems before attempting a painting dealing with the same issues.  The rest of the drawings in the exhibition will be on view in The Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries on the third floor.  These drawings will be arranged into three groupings: the grid, the plane, and the gesture.

Brice Marden was born in 1938 in Bronxville, New York.  Early in his childhood, Marden’s best friend’s father, a painter, encouraged Marden in his art studies, and in his early teens, Marden visited museums in New York City.  As an undergraduate at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Art (1958 to 1961), Marden had thorough and traditional training, including classes in drawing, printmaking, design, lettering, and the study of anatomy and perspective.  While in school, Marden painted portraits and still lifes that reveal the influence of work by Paul Cézanne and the early work Henri Matisse.  On his own, he visited galleries and museums in Boston and New York.  At Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Edouard Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867), which, coincidentally, can be seen on the third floor of MoMA beginning November 5 in the exhibition Manet and the Execution of Maximilian, was a particular favorite of Marden’s because of Manet’s use of color.

After graduating from Boston University, he attended the Yale University School of Architecture and Design.  At Yale, Marden stopped making figurative paintings and began to paint abstractions only, inspired by Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.  By the end of his first year at Yale, Marden began to organize paintings and drawings around a four-part grid, and the exhibition begins with examples of these works.  By 1963, these grids had evolved into two flanking planes of gray.

In the fall of 1963, Marden moved to New York City. He found a job as a part-time guard at The Jewish Museum, where in the winter of 1964, the first retrospective of the work of Jasper Johns was presented.  This exhibition provided an important stimulus for Marden.  Marden traveled to Paris for the spring and summer of 1964.  He would make charcoal-and-graphite drawings in which the work’s surface divides into an overall grid.  He was exposed to the work of painter Jean Fautrier, and he became interested in the paintings of Alberto Giacometti for their space, gray palette, and linear strokes.

In 1966, Marden completed Wax I, his first painting made with a blend of oil paint, turpentine, and beeswax.  This mixture reduces the oil’s shine and increases the tactility of the surface.  Marden kept the mixture on a hot plate, mixing it constantly and initially using a refrigerator door as a palette.  Brushing on the hot mixture, he smoothed it with a spatula and a knife, building layers of the medium to create a dense surface that both absorbs and reflects light.  Some of his one-panel monochromes, such as Nebraska (1966), incorporate an inch-wide strip at the bottom of the canvas below which he did not paint; instead he allowed drips from the surface above to accumulate there, pointing out the process used to make the painting and reminding viewers of the nature of the canvas as a physical object.

Marden had his first solo exhibition at the Bykert Gallery in New York in November of 1966.  The works included in the Bykert exhibition fully encapsulate the lessons and experience of the prior eight years.  Some of those works can be seen in MoMA’s retrospective, including Nebraska, The Dylan Painting (1966), and Nico (1966).  “These paintings have a maturity and confidence as well as a sense of grandeur and ambition, without any hint of hesitancy or tentativeness,” says Mr. Garrels.  “These prodigious works stand as fundamental touchstones for the time.  Marden was now fully launched as a painter to be reckoned with.”  Shortly after the Bykert Gallery exhibition, Marden created the two-panel painting For Helen (1967), which is dedicated to Helen Harrington, whom Marden married in 1968.

In 1971, Marden and Helen visited Hydra, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea.  The qualities of a place and its light strongly figure into Marden’s work, and allusions to the Mediterranean landscape can be seen in Marden’s work through the early 1980s—his colors became brighter, surfaces became lusher, and canvases bigger and bolder.  Both the myths of the Greek gods and of early Christianity made appearances in his works, as seen in Grove Addenda III (1973–74).  Nature, the seasons, and sunlight all influenced such works as the painting The Seasons (1974-75) and the drawing Inside Outside (1977).

Throughout this period, Marden reconsidered the development of abstract painting in New York.  Marden saw the 1971 Barnett Newman retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art and was inspired by Newman’s series of four large works titled Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue (1966–70).  Three years later, Marden would begin his own series of works dealing with red, yellow, and blue, including the paintings Fourth Figure (Red Yellow Blue) (1973–74) and Red Yellow Blue II (1974).

The late 1970s through the mid-1980s was a period of transition for Marden.  Among the important developments was Marden’s abandonment of the use of wax in 1981 because of the fragility of the surfaces of his paintings.  He developed a new technique using terpineol, a further distillation of turpentine, to produce a pigment that dries to a flat surface.  Marden also began to question his own work’s potential for development.  He said that he “could go on making ‘Brice Marden paintings’ and suffer that silent creative death. . . .  You get to this point where you just have to make a decision to change things.”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Marden melded his Greek and Asian influences with New York School abstract painting in a seamless synthesis to create a series of works entitled  The Muses. In one of the works, The Muses (1991–93), he not only incorporated Greek and Asian motifs but also drew on memories of his father and inspiration from his daughters to create one of his most monumental and important works.  In it he conjoins past and present, and culture and family, in a unity of aspects of his life and work across decades.

In 2000 in the Tivoli studio, Marden embarked on two of the most ambitious paintings of his career.  On view for the first time in this retrospective, The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version and The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version are both 24 feet long, and they both comprise six panels that explore the spectrum of six colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.  The works allude to Marden’s interest in Greek compositions as well as Chinese hand scrolls.  The works’ titles are rich with meaning: the word “propitious” can be defined as “favorable,” and the garden is an ancient motif for constant change, growth, and renewal.  Marden has used the phrase “plane image” for decades, often saying that his work is a synthesis of the plane and the image.

PUBLICATION:
The accompanying publication, Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective, features an introduction by Mr. Garrels on the issues, development, and historical place of Marden’s work, as well as scholarly essays by Richard Shiff, Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, The University of Texas at Austin; Brenda Richardson, independent scholar and former Deputy Director and Curator at The Baltimore Museum of Art; and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Associate Director of Conservation and Research at The Whitney Museum of American Art and Founding Director of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard University Art Museums.  The book is published by The Museum of Modern Art and is sold in the MoMA Stores.  It is available to the trade through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.) in the United States and Canada and through Thames & Hudson outside the United States and Canada.

TRAVEL:
The exhibition will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (February 17 to May 13, 2007), and with paintings only to the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany (June 12 to October 7, 2007).

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