However much Brice Marden is a child of Minimalism, the true character of his work is something superficially similar to but distinct from reduction: namely, simplicity. Minimal art was about eschewing excrescences, asserting primary, linguistic structures, constantly questioning the definition of art. What comes across in Mr. Marden’s lyrical, sumptuous paintings and works on paper is something quite opposite: an epicurean principle, an art born of rich aesthetic memories, of manifest pleasures in making.

His retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Gary Garrels, launches with stark, sleek monochromatic canvases of the mid-1960s, made in New York after Mr. Marden graduated from Yale and returned from a year in Paris. Several rooms later there is an abrupt shift in style, as wayward linearity takes over from sheer planes as his principle means of expression. But there’s consistency, too, as pared-down means, depersonalized mark-making, and a restricted palette continue to prevail.

In whatever period of his work, or medium, however, what comes across is a honing of sensual forces, not their denial. Mr. Marden is a subtle lyricist, which gives sustained energy to a remarkably satisfying display that progresses through shifts in mood and mode.

His images are handmade and hard won: An early source of inspiration, Cézanne, remains a touchstone. However easy on the eye, his work isn’t shy to let us know that it is the result of intense, accumulated labor.

Take the early monochromes, for instance, initially perplexing in their blandness. But they invite a closer reading, which soon uncovers surfaces that are alive and kicking. It is frequently apparent that the final, defining color — the foggy green of “Nebraska”(1966) or the midnight gray of “The Dylan Painting” (1966/1986) — harbors underlying hues, accomplices in their arrival. These early pictures often have a strip at the base that offer clues of the layers of the flat plane above, almost like bar codes of effort.

And then there is the kind of color Mr. Marden goes for, which is about tone rather than chroma — which means it is the kind of color that is earned rather than elected. His surfaces were worked obsessively, brushstrokes fastidiously erased with a spatula. He mixed molten beeswax into his turpentine to achieve a particularly muted, matte quality. While his color sings, it does so sotto voce.

Mr. Marden’s attitude toward the past singles him out as an artist of accretion rather than elimination. But sometimes his minimal approach leaves ambiguity. The “Homage to Art” series from the early 1970s, for instance, place multiples of postcards (Goya, Fra Angelico) in grids worked up to near blackness in graphite and beeswax, somehow managing simultaneously to threaten and venerate.

Increasingly, however, his art uncovers layers of influence from the past, with Chinese calligraphy and poetry and Greek civilization (he purchased property in Hydra, a Greek island, in 1973) joining Old Master painting as his sources.

The polyptychs of the 1970s became increasingly complex in their arrangements. “Thira” (1979–80), for example, is actually made up of 18 panels, with an almost theatrical sense of dramatic spaces. It is from this place that his art makes its dramatic turn, shedding plane for line.

The way the show is installed, you literally turn a sharp corner into this new direction, slipping into a back gallery for what feels like an illicit indulgence rather than a new chapter. The only transitional work between “Thira” and the gesturally expressive compositions that mark Mr. Marden’s work from the mid-1980s are a few odd paintings on shards of marble.

But if you look at the catalog, which mixes drawings and paintings in strict chronological order, rather than in hanging order, a different narrative emerges. The real transition occurs with drawings that, although still tight with the grid, admit deviation in the form of dripped ink and gouache, as in the “Melia Group” (1980–81), or with a sense of deep space implied by overlapping types of line, as in “4 and 3 Drawing” (1979–81).

These linear Mardens might seem more complex than the planar ones in terms of gesture and expression. But if this work looks more like Jackson Pollock and less like Barnett Newman, there is no sense of Mr. Marden suddenly becoming an action painter. He still found ways to distance overtly personal touch from his work. He attached his brushes to long sticks, for instance, which had twin effects: It made the calligraphy intentionally awkward, thus eschewing his own handwriting, and it established a distance that kept his pictorial surface in focus while he worked. This meant he didn’t separate making from seeing.

Chinese art now became Mr. Marden’s chief source. His “Cold Mountain” series from 1989 to 1991 is undoubtedly a high point in his career, paying homage to the mythic Tang Dynasty poet Han Shan. Nine-foot-by-12-foot canvases present continuous loops of sometimes fluent, sometimes stilted line. Often, as they change direction, they get drippy; other times they seem to run out of juice, just like the brush of a master calligrapher. The grounds are white, or steely gray, and while there might be an underlying web of pale blue, the top layer is black, marking these pictures as chromatically abstemious. Like calligraphy, they are apparently inscribed top to bottom, right to left. Like their oriental source, the artist encourages readings in multiple directions.

If we view his painting career as a totality — in the way Mr. Garrels encourages, with the monochromes of the first 20 years as the thesis, and the calligraphic linear webs as the antithesis — then Mr. Marden’s most recent work is a synthesis of line and plane. As lines thicken and evident pace of application slows up, frenetic spindle gives way to gracious loop.

The last room is a blaze of hot colors and muscular rhythms. The lush turns and sinuous kinks in “6 Red Rock 1″ (2000–2) has an almost Art Nouveau sense of organic deliberateness. In two examples from a series of six-panelled friezes,”The Propitious Garden of Plane Image,” a spectral color sequence of overlapping lines is orchestrated with playful deliberation.

But, as I’ve intimated already, neat sequences and dramatic turns alike are undermined by consideration of Mr. Marden’s drawing, which tells a different tale — parallel rather than contradictory. It seems more about risk, intensity, and experiment than the paintings, which even at their most calligraphic are always characterized by even-tempered finesse. Where his paintings are about distillation, his drawings are about discovery — and at MoMA we are all modernists, hungry for discovery.

Through January 15 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).