Equal Parts Intuition & Doubt
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Twenty years ago, Brice Marden’s painting shifted in style so dramatically that the change remains the dominant critical issue in discussions of his work. For the artist, however, it is not that complicated. “It was a survival move,” he said earlier this week. “I had this thing going. I could have kept on doing it, but that isn’t what I became a painter for.You’re always searching for something more.”
Starting in the mid-1960s, Mr. Marden — whose 40-year retrospective comprising 56 paintings and approximately 50 drawings opens October 29 at the Museum of Modern Art — used a mixture of oil, turpentine, and melted wax to create large-scale monochromatic paintings with dense opaque surfaces. His colors were somber and subdued, even melancholy. Dense, textured, and often impossible to name, they tended toward gray.The deep feeling of each canvas, embedded in its layers of paint, evoked a remote, yet insistent, meditative presence, which disclosed itself slowly to receptive viewers.
Over the course of the next 15 years, the work gradually evolved. Single canvases gave way to arrangements of monochrome panels whose tones play off one another; the colors grew brighter; the panels were stacked vertically or horizontally, or arranged as posts and lintels; the paintings changed size. Yet for all this variation, by the early 1980s the artist felt the process had grown repetitive and stagnant.”If you’ve arrived at a certain way of making a painting and just keep repeating it, it’s not terribly adventurous,” he said. “So I just jumped.”
A few years later, he landed. In the early 1980s, Mr. Marden experienced what he freely admits was a mid-life crisis, and he sought a new set of experiences and commitments. He experimented with painting on stone, traveled in Asia, studied the shapes and patterns of seashells, became interested in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, and soon was pursuing a new direction in his art. First in drawings and then in paintings, he created work that, while still completely abstract and based on the rectangular plane of the canvas, focused on the line rather than fields of color.
Calligraphy was the most important of these influences, and it soon became the foundation of a new working method. Mr. Marden invented characters called “glyphs,” arranged them on canvases in couplets meant to recall stanzas of Chinese poetry, and connected their branches into a weave of lines over a generally monochrome ground. The resulting form — a loose tangle of overlapping bands — is the basis of a style that he continues to use, though as with the monochrome works, it developed over the years. If the lines at first were angular and jagged, today they are more like winding paths, thick and sinuous, and no longer based on characters.
The two newest paintings at MoMA, “The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Second Version” and “Third Version” — the latter was finished about a week ago — are perfect examples. Both are 24 feet wide and comprise an arrangement of six verticals panels, their long horizontal reach recalling Chinese scrolls. The paintings are about light, as diffused into the colors of the spectrum. Each panel has a solid ground color (the first is red, the second orange, the third yellow, etc.) that is overlaid with meandering lines in each of the six primary and secondary colors.
Mr. Marden sees his evolution, even the seemingly sudden mid-career change, as very much about continuity. “It was a matter of keeping myself happy,” he said, “of staying creative rather than repetitive.”
As for what unites the two bodies of work, the answer seems to lie in his creative process, a slow, layered approach that is equal parts intuition and doubt. “There’s a lot of hesitancy, a lot of correction, a lot of doubting what’s there,” he said of his method, which involves adding a layer of color, scraping away excess material, evaluating, correcting, and then moving to the next coat. “It’s the way I work. I put something down and then I doubt it.”
For some, doubt translates to anxiety, a paralyzing counterforce. Here it is an essential part of the creative act, the Apollonian check on raw Dionysian urge. None of this is to deny that the work has changed, nor that viewers will not react differently to the monochromes and the calligraphic compositions. But both types of paintings are notable for the way they display the tension of their creation, transmitted through legible brushstrokes and the overall aura of the finished surface.This tension is very much what the artist hopes to convey. You will have seen a work, as opposed to simply looked at it, only “when you’re having an almost physical reaction to it,” he said; when “you’ve scanned the work and somehow you’re letting it affect you psychically. Then something physical happens.”
For 40 years, Mr. Marden has mined the space that some dismissively, others despairingly, refer to as the “death of painting.” Visitors to this exhibition who venture to truly see the work are likely to find something wholly opposite: art that is alive. “My person comes out in the paintings,” he claimed. “It doesn’t come out in a literary way, as a story. It’s more of a feeling.”