Brice Marden: A Retrospective
of Paintings & Drawings
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
October 29, 2006-January 15, 2007
Even those who have put off seeing the retrospective of
Brice Marden’s work at MOMA could not have missed
the media blitz surrounding the show. In addition to
a host of sumptuously praising reviews, The New York Times ran a lengthy article
on the show’s
opening day profiling not so much the artist himself as his many
spectacular houses and accompanying studios. “My daughter
joked that the MOMA catalog reads like a real estate
brochure,” Marden told the Times reporter, who was clearly
more interested in the plutography of art-world celebrity
and in mapping the locales of Marden’s estates—most
recently in the Caribbean—than in Marden’s accomplishment
as a painter.
This Better Homes and Gardens school of art writing would not
be worth mentioning if it had not to some degree bled into
the more serious appraisals of Marden’s work. A consensus of
press-release
opinion places Marden as the great abstract
painter of the last forty years, and, because he is a painter at all,
as the cuddly “conservative” on the scene (one that any
broadminded
hostess would be keen to include
at her Hamptons beach party). That applying paint to canvas
and looking to the art of the past constitute for these
critics a “conservative” pursuit is bad enough, but there is
a larger point that is even more troubling. One would hope
that a painter who was purportedly in touch with the tradition of Manet
and Velázquez and Chinese calligraphy and Rothko and de
Kooning and Pollock would have come up with something a bit more
robust than Marden’s fluent, crushingly suave
likability. His elegant paintings are eminently clubbable.
The early monochromes in the show—pleasingly cool and
tranquil—fall somewhere between Abstract Expressionist
spirituality and Minimalist eschewal. Their
beeswax-infused
pigments cover all but an almost imperceptible strip of
blank canvas at the bottom.
Such manmade elements—the
drips that fleck the bottom margin of the canvas and the
hand-smoothed waxy texture of the paint—convey a
serenity that in the end feels as flashy as a party trick
and as tepid as old tea. Nebraska, with its muted
gray-green, would be a subtle and evocative statement, if it
were ultimately worth stating at all. (That a couple of these
paintings—such as The Dylan Painting and Nico—are
named after Warhol factory regulars underscores how badly
they want to be liked.)
The accomplishment of the monochromes, while quiet and limited,
far outstrips that of the more boisterous, brightly hued,
multi-paneled paintings from
the late 1970s and early 1980s. If Marden needed to move
through this decade to arrive at actually
making marks on canvas, then he did not move through it
quickly enough. Where the monochromes came out of Jasper Johns
(without the targets), the post-and-lintel particolored
panels recall Barnett Newman (without the “zips”).
There was a moment, in which Marden first introduced his signature
wiry drawing, when he struck something one might actually
consider a late contribution to New York School painting. Having
said that, it was a fairly brief moment—from about
the Couplet series in 1988–89 to
paintings like The Studio (1991–1993).
There is a vegetable
quality to his intersecting lines, which also suggest the
human form. The Muses and Virgins (both 1991–1993)—large, cool,
lyrical—seem to be the end of something, not the beginning.
(When the spidery organic lines move from muted colors to
bright sunlight in Study for the Muses [Hydra Version],
dated 1991–95/1997, it’s the same move to the Greek islands made by the
color panels of the Seventies.)
The Cold Mountain paintings (1989–1991) at their best—along with the accompanying
drawings from this period—express Marden’s broadest range
of experience and emotion.
(It should be said that a number of the drawings in the show
are particularly strong.
One recent ink on paper, Dragons [2000–
2004], stands out
above the rest, its vibrant reds and yellows swirling in dynamic
harmony over a ghostly field of white punctuated by twiggy
black drawing. If Rothko was the spiritual father of
Marden’s monochromes, in these drawings it’s Pollock but with
an accent of Marden’s own.) Marden’s marks, often made from the end of a stick with
a sweep of the arm, have an expressiveness that derives from
an immediacy of thought, a variety of pressures
on the brush, and an energetic movement to the line. These
are the very qualities—vibrancy, volume, verve—that Marden
paints out of his subsequent work. Angles loosen to ooze, as
the original idea is contemplated almost out of existence,
then offered with buttoned-up reserve.
By the middle 1990s, Marden softens his spindly live-wire
lines into a flowing circuitry that rarely musters the
strength to break beyond the edge of the canvas,
routinely turned back like soft-serve hitting the cone. By
reintroducing bright color in the final, room-length,
six-panel versions of The Propitious Garden of Plane
Image, from 2000 to 2006, Marden repeats the same move that
he made first in the earlier panel paintings and then with
his signature webs. The more he turns up the intensity on
the color, the more the works seem to want to register
a
trademark. This is especially true of the
most recent works,
which juxtapose brightly colored panels and arterial strands, each in its own
fruit-flavor. This sort of showmanship is tiring, like the
all-out barrage of a fireworks finale that tries so hard to
grab your attention then tells you it’s time to go
home.
It is true that one can see Marden’s development in this
retrospective. The limited number of works from any given
period lends the show a spareness that keeps it moving and makes it easy to trace
his search for new strategies, new ground. In the end,
however, the missteps are dispiriting, the show too thin to support
the grand claims made for it. If Brice Marden is the last
modernist, as has been suggested, then, alas, the reports of
the death of modernism have been greatly understated.