Life Lines
The Major Brice Marden Show at Hamburger
Bahnhof<br>
He is friends with
Bob Dylan and Patti Smith; he’s considered to be one of the most important
abstract painters of his generation. Now, Hamburger Bahnhof is celebrating
Brice Marden with a major retrospective sponsored by Deutsche Bank.
Following the MoMA in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
the Berlin institution is the final station of this comprehensive
exhibition. Achim Drucks on the creative revolutions in Marden’s
work.
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Brice Marden at the Hamburger Bahnhof
Photo:
Achim Drucks
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At some point in the late ’70s, the artist grew tired of
producing typical Brice
Marden paintings. He didn’t want, as he confided in an interview, to
suffer a "silent creative death" and no longer intended to limit himself
to monochrome canvases. His encounter with Far Eastern art helped him out
of his artistic crisis. A journey of several months through Thailand and
Sri Lanka and a visit to an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy in New York
provided Brice Marden with the initial catalyst to radically change the
style of his paintings. In the chronologically hung presentation in
Berlin, it almost seems as though one were looking at the work of a
different painter. It resembles an act of liberation from the artist’s
self-imposed "Spartan limitations" when expressive webs of line suddenly
replace the impenetrable color fields of the ’60s and ’70s – the very
paintings that made him one of the most prominent proponents of
abstraction.
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Brice Marden: Couplet IV, 1988-89 The
Museum of Modern Art, Fractional and promised gift of Kathy and
Richard S. Fuld, Jr.
©
2006 Brice Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Back home in America, the 1938-born artist has long been
regarded a classic. He’s far less known here, but that might soon change.
For the first time in Europe, the retrospective, supported by Deutsche
Bank, offers an opportunity to experience Brice Marden’s work in its
full scope. The first two stations of the show at the MoMA
in New York and in San Francisco met
with praise among critics and public alike. Now, 43 primarily large-scale
paintings and 11 drawings offer visitors to Hamburger
Bahnhof a chance to experience Marden’s investigation into the
interrelationships between light, color, and painted surface.
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Exhibition View
Photo:
Achim Drucks
The monochrome paintings
exude a meditative quietude. The subdued grey in Return 1 (1964-65)
is typical for the color scheme of Marden’s early works. Initially, he
limited himself to black, grey, and matte hues of green. He eliminated the
visible brush stroke, smoothing the surfaces of his canvases with knives
and spatulas and leaving scratches, cracks, and spots where the ground
layer peeks through. A thin strip of blank canvas often remains along the
bottom edge of the paintings, while traces of dripped paint refer to the
painting process. In the beginning, the artist still used conventional oil
paints, whose gloss he quickly began to alter. Since 1966, he’s mixed
turpentine and hot bee’s wax into the paint, making the paint matter and
less transparent and lending the works a very particular presence. Marden
also began combining several identically sized canvases, such as in Point
(1969), a subtle composition of three green-grey fields whose hues vary in
nuances. The triptych quotes the altar form; instead of depicting a saint,
however, it is dedicated to the variations of a single color.
Brice
Marden: Return I 1964-1965
The
Museum of Modern Art, Fractional and promised gift of Kathy and Richard S.
Fuld, Jr.
© 2006 Brice
Marden/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Despite
all their formal reduction, Marden’s works are situated at a clear
distance from the contemporaneous tendencies of Minimal Art. He countered
the cool objectivity of the new avant-garde with his own subjectivity and
spoke of "highly emotional paintings not to be admired for any technical
or intellectual reason, but to be felt." Marden’s monochrome surfaces seem
like the distilled results of his experiences and passions. Nebraska (1966)
reflects his love for the "exquisite green" of the landscape there. The
"blondness and light tan pantsuits" of the cool Velvet
Underground singer inspired him to paint the varying beige tones of Nico
(1966). The music scene of the ’60s played an important role for the New
Yorker. Through his first wife Pauline,
Joan Baez’ sister, he got to
know Bob Dylan, who also
inspired him to make a painting. Later, he counted among the regulars of
the legendary bar Max’s Kansas
City, where musicians and artists mixed with stars from Hollywood
and the New York underground. Patti
Smith was also one of the regulars there. Marden dedicated the
painting Star (for Patti Smith), completed in 1974, to his friend.
The coloration of the vertical format – two black panels flank a lighter
middle part – seem to play on the singer’s pale complexion and jet-black
hair.
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