Brice Marden

BRICE MARDEN

The American artist Brice Marden (b. 1938) is one of the great contemporary painters.

Brice Marden's first works were the Minimalist monochrome panels of the 1960s, large, austere, 'implacable' oil and wax paintings characterized by a precise coolness. In 1975 Marden had a one-man show at the Guggenheim Museum.

Laura Garrard looks at Marden's artistic career, from the early works, the multi-panel works of the 1970s, the Sea Paintings, Grove Group, Greek and landscape works, and the 'Annunciation Series' and Thira.

In the 1980s, Brice Marden developed a 'calligraphic' or 'Oriental' art, which appeared in many prints as well as large canvases.

Brice Marden studied at Florida Southern College, Lakeland, and Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1961. That year, he worked at Yale Norfolk Summer School in Connecticut. In 1963 he was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Yale University at New Haven. He moved to New York City, and worked as a guard in the Jewish Museum. At this time he was married to Pauline Baez, the sister of Joan Baez, the singer, and had a son, Nicholas.

In the mid-1960s, Marden began to have one-man exhibitions (typically at Bykert Gallery, where he had many shows). In 1966 he became an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. In the late 1960s, Marden began making multi-panel paintings. He worked as a painting instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1969-74. He had solo shows and group shows in Europe (Milan, Turin, Paris, Dusseldorf). In 1975 there was the ten-year retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, unusual for so young an artist. From 1973, Marden visited Greece every year.

Other major shows included a one-man exhibition of drawings (1964-74) at Contemporary Arts Museum, a drawing retrospective at Kunstraum Munich, and the Whitechapel and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam one-man shows of 1981. An exhibition of prints 1961-91 travelled to the Tate Gallery, London, Baltimore Museum of Art and the Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris.

This is the only full-length appraisal available. Fully illustrated, with new illustrations.