Full Beam, Art Review

Painting isn’t getting any easier for Brice Marden, but he’s working harder than ever, finds Bettina von Hase. Photography by Martin Placek

Brice Marden on stage at the Naples Opera House, with one of his designs for their 2003 production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice

Brice Marden’s studio in Lower Manhattan overlooks the Hudson River, large windows on three sides letting in that particular New York light he identifies with and puts in his paintings. Light is what Marden does, and on sunny, wintry morning I see him standing quite still in the middle of his vast workroom, soaking up the rays. It almost seems a pity to disturb him. "This studio has incredible light, and it has a lot to do with how it comes off the river... There is this vast plain out there, and light hits it and refracts back up," he says. "Light is such an important part; it is very abstracted in painting. Colour becomes the conveyor of light, and how do you use colour...?” I am here to discuss a new project he is working on, two groups of six fixed-panel paintings, one group propped up against the wall, and seven larger works, all with the working title of The Propitious Garden of Plane Image.

“Rules are made to be broken,’ says Marden. ‘I just worry that they don’t get broken enough”

Light. Colour. Plane. Image. Marden’s art turns around these four words, and the somewhat Chinese title reflects all that is most important to him. It was indeed propitious that Marden found Chinese culture in the mid-1980s, a discovery which heralded a dramatic shift in his painting style towards its now-characteristic web-like structures and undulating lines. It gave him a new approach to "bring up the image from the plane". Plane Image is also the name of his company, his 'alter-self', which tries to conquer the confines of the canvas, the delineated space both external and internal he has set himself a lifetime to explore. Marden is one of the great living abstract painters, revered by his peers like no other as the aristocrat of the art world. He emerged in the 1960s as a Minimalist among others such as Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin, but also embraced the emotion of the Abstract Expressionists. A huge admirer of Pollock, he nonetheless denies being his heir, something often mentioned in connection with him.

Indeed, what makes Marden’s work so compelling and individual is its underlying tension between wildness and restraint. "That's the way I am," he says. "If you're trying to express yourself, it comes out."

In conversation, he questions, pauses, thinks, his intellect sometimes hindering the fluency of his remarks, but never the inherent truth within them. "l have this idea about Pollock: he allowed the image to come up from the work. I keep thinking I use that as a working idea, but I don't think I have really allowed the image to come up enough to liberate me. I still think of my painting as very, kind of, constricted."

This seems a harsh assessment, but then Marden is his own sternest critic. Instead, his work suggests liberation within the constraint, something he acknowledges as his grounding theme: "You set up friction; rules are made to be broken — I just worry that they don't get broken enough." He mentions late Titian, late Picasso, and says that at a recent Howard Hodgkin show what he admired was not just the work but also the artist's step "beyond" in mature age.

“Having made generations of my own paintings, talking about this one and that one, you keep on painting, and if you really apply yourself, it gets more complicated. You lose this youthful energy, you're pushing, it's hard. It gets more intelligent. but it doesn't get more lively. I'm looking for this point like Howard where you go beyond it,” Marden says.

There are many who think he already has. "When you look at Brice's paintings, you know they're complete," says Gary Hume. "He can make a painting that has almost no questions left in it — most artists leave questions, but he doesn't." Hume describes Marden's work as "undeniably beautiful and undeniably right. Very few artists attempt it, and he masters it."

At 65, Marden looks like an older and wiser Heathcliff, with a classic bone structure and agile body. He is well known for the physicality of his painting technique; his daughter Mirabelle, 25, owner of a gallery called Rivington Arms on the East Side, says what she most admires about her father's paintings is the way he makes them: "It is like a dance when he's painting, being close to the canvas, then moving away from it."

His body of work spans a 40-year career of remarkably consistent quality. from the early 1960s and 970s monochrome panel paintings made of oil and beeswax to the pale, elegiac late Eighties Cold Mountain series, the title paying homage to the verses of Han Shan, a Chinese hermit poet of the eighth-century T’ang dynasty. Cold Mountain had a triumphal showing at the Dia Center, New York, in 1991 , and was a landmark for the artist — to such an extent that one of the paintings in the series was rumoured to have been sold recently to a collector for more than $10 million. He has done more outlandish projects. For another collector. Marden once designed the exterior of a Lear jet, dubbed Penguin' because it looked like one when it landed. Last year, he made his theatrical debut at the Naples Opera House, where he designed the sets to Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.

Cold Mountain was followed by more recent, dramatically darker work. especially the Red Rock paintings, exhibited in his last show, "Attendants, Bears, and Rocks' at Matthew Marks in 2002. Marden — a collector of scholars' stones, the preserve of Chinese literati and artists since the T’ang dynasty — wanted to capture the "idea of rocks, this energy running through the landscape"

The shift in colour, much remarked upon at the time, was coupled with another change: abandoning the corrections or erasures so familiar in his work. The Red Rock paintings look purposeful and sensual rather than gestural and spiritual. The process of making them is complex; the ground colour is applied, bands painted over, one over another, and then the whole picture is overpainted with the ground colour again, with the bands repainted on top of that. "It had a lot to do with adjustments," he says, while running his hand over one of two enormous canvases in the studio, inviting me to do the same, the smoothest surface I've ever touched. "l used to leave the corrections, they would become like a counter-image. I didn't want that in these paintings. there was already too much going on, I didn't want chaos, so I would repaint the ground colour, repaint it again. They kept getting darker and darker; there was nothing I could do."

The group of six works in the studio were canvases in progress, each painted with colours following the red to violet colour spectrum — except he leaves out indigo, which he says he "doesn't understand". Marden works on paintings for years, putting them down, sometimes for more than a year, only to return to them with fresh eyes. In the mid-1980s, his eyes weren't so fresh: "The painting had come to a point where it wasn't going where I wanted it to," His visit to a show of Japanese calligraphy at the Asia Society and Japan House turned him on to calligraphy and a return to drawing, which prepared the way for the Cold Mountain show. But before that, a mid-life crisis made him take a year off, to travel in Thailand, Sri Lanka and India with his family.

Born in Briar Cliff Manor, in Westchester, York, he was the middle child of three. The Mardens were the only Democrats in a Republican town; one of their friends, Fred Sergenian, a former art director for Young and Rubicam, became an artist when he retired, which made a huge impression on the young Brice. He went to Boston for his HA, and to Yale for his Master's degree.

Orange Rocks, Red Ground (3), 2000-02, oil on linen, 190x272cm

“Brice’s paintings are complete,’ says Gary Hume. ‘Most artists leave questions, but he doesn’t”

Yale's art school was, he says, brilliant ("They just left you to do what you wanted to do"), his fellow students including the likes of Richard Serra and Robert Mangold. "My becoming an artist was a lifestyle choice," Marden Says now. "I watched these bohemian hippies, and thought I'd like to live like that. It was the general atmosphere Juliette Greco."

He met his artist wife Helen — who has her studio above his in New York — at Max's Kansas City on 16th Street, a big hang-out for artists. In the early 1960s, they went to Paris. "Now, my kids [Mirabelle and her sister, Melia, 23] just have no concept of what it was like to be us, our generation going to Paris. It was really grand, connecting into some sort of tradition that still existed."

At Yale, Marden had a teacher, Esteban Vicente, who was Spanish, and opened his eyes to Spanish painting: had been interested in Klein, Manet, drawing, colour, which led to the Spaniards: Velazquez, Goya, Zurbaran. Zurbaran is so realist, so intensely observed, you think he is at a point beyond. He makes silk look like steel, but it also looks like silk, it has a strange metaphysical body to it... I went from that to [Jasper] Johns."

Johns was a huge influence. "He was working with another intensely realist image, which is not pictorial, that reveals certain things about the plane." Marden nearly worked for Johns, but instead opted to be Rauschenberg's assistant for four years, which he says was a better choice: was kept freer." He has also attained the freedom that comes with success, keeping four studios.

Outside New York, there's a family home and studio by the river in Rhinebeck, Duchess County, which he calls his "mini-Marfa"; he also has Eagles Mere, a studio in the woods in north-central Pennsylvania, and a studio in Hydra, Greece, where the family go each summer. "The paintings coming out of these studios really reflect the places," he says. "It's not as if you are some sort of conceptualist, going around applying some idea. Your idea is coming from how you exist within where you are. That is in the painting, it's part of the whole expression."

Marden mentions a favourite quote of his, by Maynard Solomon talking about Beethoven: “He says that the one thing about a work of art is that it's a constantly renewable source of energy.”

Quite apart from his paintings, Marden's energy is also visible in his generosity towards other artists, showing them his work or helping with a hang — for example, during Gary Hume's show at Matthew Marks in the mid-1990s.

"He dropped by the gallery after I told him the night before I had trouble with the hang," Hume recalls. "He stood in the middle of the room and stared, slowly revolved on his own axis, looking at the walls. Then he said, ‘This one should be an inch lower, that one should go over there...' He made minor tweaks, but he turned it on, like flicking a light- switch."