2023-08-13 18:37:12
The painter Brice Marden in front of his painting “The Propitious Garden of Plane Image”, at the Gegenwart museum, in Berlin, on June 10, 2007. NIGEL TREBLIN / DDP IMAGES VIA AFP
The painter Brice Marden, a great figure of abstraction, died in New York on August 9, defeated by the cancer against which he had been fighting since 2017. He was 84 years old. He was born on October 15, 1938 in Bronxville, New York to a father employed in an insurance company and a housewife mother. In 1961, he obtained a Bachelor in Fine Arts at Boston University. A summer workshop at Yale University, where he had fellow students with the painter Richard Mangold and the sculptor Richard Serra, completed his initiation into current painting. Appear the first canvases of rectangular format with muted tones.
To paint in this way is to break away from abstract expressionism, which had hitherto been dominant, as his contemporaries Frank Stella (born in 1936), Robert Mangold (born in 1937) or his elder Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) did at the same time. ). They restrict their language to geometric shapes and uniform colors posed with perfect regularity. This reaction began a decade earlier in the workshops of Robert Rauschenberg, who experimented with monochromy in black and white from 1951, and of Jasper Johns who, from 1954, painted targets and alternating bands with wax. of the United States flag. Or Marden, who moved to New York in 1963, was Rauschenberg’s assistant in 1966 and borrowed from Johns, whose exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1964 had a profound effect on him, his wax technique and his dullness.
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These characteristics are found in the abstract compositions he executed at the time and which he exhibited in 1964 at Swarthmore College, then at the Bykert Gallery in 1966. By applying color with small spatulas, he obtained flat surfaces, but where some touch irregularities. The sensations aroused are visual, but also tactile due to the almost silky smoothness of the surfaces. The work can thus be felt by everyone in an individual way. ” In my opinion, he said in 2006, abstraction is the real way of the 20th century because you don’t direct the viewer too much. »
profound change
That he understands painting as a sensitive experience and not as the execution of a method is seen more and more afterwards. Refusing minimalism and conceptualism, which he considers impersonal, and preferring to refer to Zurbaran or Cézanne, he thinks of the canvases as harmonies born of living sensations. So it is with series Hydra (1972), Grove Group (1973-1976) et Water it (1979-1980). These compositions of large monochromes of muted green, red or blue, come from his stays in the Greek island of Hydra and the observation of olive trees, the sea, the sky and the temples.
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