With all the recognition being accorded Neo-Expressionism and the revival of figure painting in general these days, the time when abstract painting dominated the art scene is becoming more and more a distant memory. Yet abstract painting persists, of course, and one example of it—Brice Marden’s non-gestural, geometric, reductive abstraction—was recently on view at the Pace Gallery.
Marden emerged in the middle 1960s as part of the Minimalist movement. Minimalism had only just emerged as a movement in opposition to what were then considered to be the excesses of Abstract Expressionism—in particular its seemingly emotionally profligate, gestural application of paint, its deep, almost solipsistic subjectivity, and its insistence, in some cases, on a metaphysical dimension to painting.
Minimalism set out to move away from that. Beginning with Frank Stella’s black and white “pinstripe” paintings, exhibited in 1959 in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Sixteen Americans” show, painting was brought down to the realm of the actual and the specific. Formal clarity, structural rigor, and an emphasis on the impersonal became the order of the day. One other thing was important: the literalness, or “objecthood,” of the work of art, its status as an object in the world as real as a person or a piece of furniture. Here shape came to acquire a new importance. By breaking out of painting’s traditional rectangular format and into specially tailored, eccentric outlines, artists were able to explore more varied formal problems and to assert the painting’s status as something other
