BRICE MARDEN: RU WARE, MARBLES, POLKE

BRICE
MARDEN
RU WARE, MARBLES, POLKE

Matthew Marks Gallery

Slow Time D AV ID A NFAM

An artist’s life is an intense search for truth.

brice marden 1

I ask my mind to make one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation.
marcel proust 2

In a sense, the more Brice Marden’s art has changed over the years,
the more it has stayed the same.3 The stasis must not be mistaken
for monotony. On the contrary, Marden’s media and idioms remain
decidedly various. To date, the former have included oil, beeswax, and
terpineol (a type of turpentine) on canvas, linen, and stone; myriad
works on paper in graphite, crayon, charcoal, ink, pastel, and gouache;
collages; lithographs; etchings; and stage sets. The latter encompass
spartan color fields and tangled calligraphies; rigorous geometries and
vigorously gestural marks; huge dimensions and diminutive ones;
and dun monochromatic as well as vividly spectral hues. This much
is well known. Less easy to categorize is the implication of Marden’s
fixed concerns amid these changing means.
Early on, Marden summarized his aims in some much-quoted
words: “An artist’s life is an intense search for truth. […] The rect-
angle, the plane, the picture, the structure, is but a trampoline to

5
bounce on spiritually.”4 In an age of simulation, cyberspace, the decon-
struction of the self, the death of the author, post-Warholian irony,
and other cultural quicksand, “truth” has often become a shopworn or
fleeting entity, tending towards truthiness. Furthermore, the bouncy
trampoline makes an unexpected bedfellow with the spirituality of
the strict rectangle, structure, and plane. Listening to this statement,
it almost sounds as though Mondrian had met Miró or Fellini. Perhaps,
then, Marden’s “truth” resides somewhere between the realms of
abstract spirit and earthy reality, ideal order and hands-on human
feeling? If so, the truth in his paintings may reflect the kind of stabil-
ity that results when opposites face each other. Simply put, from first
to last Marden’s has been an art of romantic classicism, at once cool
and passionate. Consequently, we might think of him as, say, a little like
a latter day Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, albeit rather more hip.
Fittingly, Marden’s recent output has maintained this mix of modes,
bringing his old ideas afresh into the present. The dating of Ru Ware
Project (note how this last word indicates a sustained, even implicitly
ongoing, endeavor), executed between 2007 and 2011, announces his
slow work process, as though the hunt for authenticity were necessarily
protracted and, ipso facto, involved memory. Indeed, the monochrome
of this painting is one of Marden’s most established standbys, stem-
ming from his fledgling practice in the early 1960s. New, however,
is the particular point of reference in the piece’s title and choice of
colors. Both allude to Ru ware (as the ceramics became known to later
connoisseurs), the rarest and most highly prized of ancient Chinese
pottery (only seventy-nine complete objects have survived), produced

6
in Ruzhou during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries for the
Northern Song Dynasty’s imperial court at Huizong [fig. 1].5 Marden fig. 1
Ru ware incense burner
became enamored of Ru ware when he saw an exhibition of it in Taipei and brush washers
Late 11th century to early 12th
in 2007 after his large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in century, Northern Song Dynasty
(ad 960–1127)
New York had opened. Undecorated, the iron-bearing glaze on Ru British Museum, London
(on loan from the Sir Percival
ware is thick and semi-opaque with bubbles. The soft hazy color is David Foundation of Chinese Art)
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
hard to describe, drifting as it does between pale gray and blue. Once University, Oxford (lent by the
Sir Alan Barlow Collection Trust)
typified as “the color of the sky after rain,”6 if Ru ware did not exist,
it would have to be invented as an objective correlative to the famously
in-between tonalities that Marden favors. Like the glazes on the Chinese
ceramics, the surface of Ru Ware Project is the result of intense layering.
(Marden, however, additionally wears down his strata.) Layers involve
a temporal process and may mingle disparate elements in their appar-
ent final unity. They are also constituents of memory.
Layers feature in another of Marden’s recent paintings, Polke Letter
(2010–11). Again, this work mixes the relatively old and the new,
connecting it to Ru Ware Project. This is because the origin of Marden’s
Letter paintings — begun in 2006, there are ten to date7 — lies in the
same visit to Taipei, where he was also struck by the calligraphy of an
eleventh-century Song Dynasty poem displayed at the National Palace
Museum. In turn, these excursions into Chinese culture take their place
in a wider context in Marden’s evolution, which began in 1984 when

7
he visited the exhibition “Masters of Japanese Calligraphy: 8th–19th
Century” at New York’s Asia Society Galleries and Japan House
Gallery. Subsequently, this interest burgeoned into an entire nexus of
paintings, drawings, and prints titled Cold Mountain, after the name (as it
translates into English) of the near-legendary eighth- or ninth-century
(Tang Dynasty) Chinese poet Han Shan. Repeatedly, Marden has
injected the archaic and/or primitive into his modernist aesthetic.
The equally salient issue is that Marden’s lengthy involvement with
such Far Eastern sources runs deeper than any mere chinoiserie or
casual Orientalism, and is closer to the intently engaged emotional
and intellectual perspectives of, for example, Ezra Pound’s Cathay poems
and Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde (The
Song of the Earth), which was also based on the writings of another
Tang Dynasty poet, Li Bai. Like the very subject of Mahler’s compo-
sition, Marden’s outlook has always set great store on nature as a
wellspring. Like Das Lied von der Erde, Marden’s art displays a consum-
mate command of textures and tempi. At times, Mahler reduced his
large orchestra to the sonic thinness of chamber music, just as the
paint of Polke Letter is pared down to the weave of its linen. At other
moments, Mahler’s music is as complexly roiling as Marden’s intricate
handling of line. Both Das Lied von der Erde and Polke Letter are elegies:
the former to life’s inevitable passing, the latter to the recently deceased
German artist Sigmar Polke (another painter obsessed with unusual
hybrid media).
But before the comparison between an early twentieth-century
Viennese composer and an early twenty-first century American abstrac-

8
tionist goes too far, it is necessary to pull back and scan the bigger
picture. To wit, the serenity and stillness of Ru Ware Project and the
energy and emotionalism of Polke Letter are two sides of the same
romantic coin. Put another way, Marden’s credo that “Emotion is the
lasting thing in art”8 goes hand in hand with a severity for which the
dictum of another maestro of painterly grisaille, Georges Braque, offers
the best definition: “I love the rule that corrects emotion.”9 Was
Braque’s quiet yet ardent development of Cubist syntax romantic or
classical in tenor? The answer, of course, is both. (No wonder the
Frenchman frequently depicted such solo instruments as a violin, a
mandolin, and a clarinet, thereby evoking their delicate notes, yet himself
played rousing Beethoven symphonies on the accordion.) Such fused
antitheses return us to Ingres.
In 1952 the art historian Walter Friedlaender definitively clari-
fied any lingering confusion about Ingres’s temperament au fond: “The
archaic, the primitive, the linear-abstract, these are all attributes of a
Romantic tendency. […] Ingres’s classicism was necessarily influenced
in an essential way by the romantic point of view of his time. The result
was a romantic classicism.”10 He could have been discussing Marden
— whose attraction to archaic Chinese objects and scripts has already
been noted; for whom the “linear-abstract” is a fundamental stylistic
tenet; and who remarked that “the evidence of the hand almost gives it
[a drawing] back to a sort of primitivism.”11 What the “medieval” or
“primitive” was to Ingres, the antique has been to Marden. They are
alike artists given to tightly controlled extremes fueled by the past.12
The affinities go further. Consider Marden’s lifelong devotion to

9
drawing: “I love how drawing is so close to you. It comes right out of
you. My work tends to evolve from this small, direct thing [drawing]
into something bigger.”13 Ingres would have wholeheartedly agreed
with this position. He is reported to have proclaimed, “Drawing is the
probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours;
drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression,
the inner form, the plane, modeling.”14 There is a foretaste here of
Marden’s fidelity to his “plane image.” Likewise, when Ingres stated,
“If I had to put a sign over my door, I would write ‘School of Drawing’
and I’m certain that I would create painters,” he echoed avant la lettre
Marden’s belief that draftsmanship generates his paintings: “There’s a
certain drawing that’s like the bone structure, and then another draw-
ing lays the skin on, the skin actually being the paint.”15
In terms of their command of color, the two men appear even
closer. While Marden’s admiration for his predecessors and contempo-
raries who had pictorially hymned the praises of gray in its many regis-
ters — among them Zurbarán, Goya, Courbet, Manet, and Giacometti
— is a matter of record,16 it is easy to forget that Ingres set that color
above mere colorfulness: “Better gray than garishness.” His grays are
supremely sensuous. Not for nothing did Friedlaender remark that
“even Ingres’s pure pencil sketches suggest his special feeling for color.
His stroke is never really abstract, but retains a feeling of warmth that
needs only be touched with the suggestion of atmospheric effects of
color and light to come alive.”17 Throughout Marden’s oeuvre a host
of muted shades accord with their counterparts in Ingres. Thus, the
dusky pink in the rightward panel of his D’après la Marquise de la Solana

10
(1969) finds its match in the singular tint of the god’s robe
in Ingres’s Jupiter and Thetis. So does the pale sky blue in at
least four of the nine canvases18 comprising Ru Ware Project
correspond — in pitch and silky opalescence — to the dress
in Ingres’s Louise, Comtesse Othenin d’Haussonville [fig. 2]. Simi-
larly, the shade of Thetis’s drapery is that of the greenish
taupe of Marden’s Nebraska (1966), and the shifty ash-grayed
carnelian-cum-terracotta that dominates Polke Letter hovers
somewhere between the subdued reddish damask wallpaper
background of Ingres’s Jacques Marquet, Baron de Montbreton de Norvins and
the utterly idiosyncratic, suave dulled purple in front of which the lady fig. 2
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
in the Washington version of Madame Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier poses. Louise, Comtesse Othenin
d’Haussonville, 1845
What Marden termed “color losing identities, becoming color”19 Oil on canvas
51 ⅞ x 36 ¼ inches; 132 x 92 cm
translates into Ingres’s capacity to lend his colors a strange, autono- The Frick Collection, New York.
Purchased by The Frick Collection,
mous vibrancy. Whether representational or abstract, historical or 1927

contemporary, an air of refined, lofty aestheticism permeates the two

artists’ temperaments.
A taste for pictorial compression also makes Marden heir to a
romantic classical strategy begun by Jacques-Louis David and contin-
ued by Ingres.20 Again Friedlaender hits the proverbial nail on the
head: “David set his figures in an imaginary, bare, artificially emptied
space. Ingres destroys the space and puts bodies, heads, garments, and
drapery all in one almost uniform plane; in this there is, again, an
approach to an ‘archaic’ style.”21 This is the Ingres whose composi-
tionally compacted Turkish Bath would nurture the more radical steps
in the same direction evident in early Cubism.22 Compression also

11
lurks in Ingres’s hands in a rather different sense that seems hard to
separate from repression. Its symptom is the feeling that his paintings
repeatedly convey of surging color — the radiantly rose pink, ethereal
blue, emerald green, and velvety black clothes of his sitters, the smol-
deringly subdued damask wallpapers, and the pale-gold draped furnish-
ings — being held down by determined, even obsessively disciplined
draftsmanship, itself with the slightest whiff of tamed libidinal urges.23
Such repression anticipates the psychological-formal dynamics at play
in Marden’s stance: “I’m a really repressed guy; that’s what this stuff
is all about.”24 Sanding down his paintings’ “skins,” manipulating
compressed charcoal (“it’s a heavier and greasier charcoal, so you get
a denser black and I could work black over blacks”),25 scraping back
layers with a razor (for works on paper) or a palette knife (for canvases),
and applying a grid are all technical manifestations of this ascetic
instinct. The flip side is Marden’s titles with their sensual tug: Virgins,
Venus, Aphrodite, Torso of the Buddha, Vine, Pumpkin Plumb, Patent Leather
Valentine, and so on. The hedonist confounds the monk. Ingres
contained color with line; Marden holds it in check with the planar
rectangle: “Idea. Trip down from SF in plane. Hills. California hills.
Compress them, flatten them to a flat plane. Painting with this in
mind.”26 In turn, compression connotes solidification and, by implica-
tion, hints at a stilling of something that may once have been more
active, whether in time or space. The nine rectangles of Ru Ware Project
have this paradoxical fixity. Formally, they enact a serene fugue of almost
Bach-like meticulousness around a single color, the mysterious chro-
matic note of the ceramics, shifting in degrees of saturation and

12
tonality — now greenish, now bluer, now nearer to beige. Expressively,
they have the hushed stillness-in-movement quality that T. S. Eliot
discerned, serendipitously enough, in the same class of object:

Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.27

With their typically deep (2½ inch) stretchers, around the vertical
sides of which the paint conspicuously extends approximately halfway
in rough strokes, the Ru Ware Project’s panels seem suspended between
geometric objecthood and a color that is greater than the sum of the
individual canvases — and which, for that selfsame reason, is elusive,
evoked rather than stated. There is the air of an absent, unmoved mover
to the procession that these panels perform. Resolutely material, the
eye nonetheless can no more pin down the chroma that Ru Ware Project
appears to be perpetually “becoming” (to paraphrase Marden) than
it can plumb the depth of the sky or the ocean. How apt that the
seventeen-foot windows facing west and north in Marden’s studio at
Tivoli should allow him to survey a panorama of the Hudson River
and the firmament above it.28
Where have we encountered this odd fusion of the ideal and
the empirical before? For one thing, in nineteenth-century American
Luminism. Commentators on the Luminist painters have remarked
that their effects seem to stop time so that the moment is locked in

13
 place — “locked even more by a strong horizontal organization, by
fig. 3 an almost mathematical ordering of planes in space parallel to the
John Frederick Kensett
Passing off of the Storm, 1872 picture surface, and by deliberately aligned vertical and occasional
Oil on canvas
11 ⅜ x 24 ½ inches; 29 x 62 cm diagonal accents.”29 Luminism, that is to say, worshipped prolepti-
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York.
Gift of Thomas Kensett, 1874
cally at the altar of “plane image.” This explains why there should be
a striking yet coincidental concinnity between a Luminist vista such as
John Frederick Kensett’s Passing Off of the Storm [fig. 3], Ru Ware Project,
and various other paintings by Marden. It is the very palpability of
light in the Kensett, allied to the fastidiously delicate surface render-
ing, that makes it a merger of the real and the cerebral. In short, the
Luminists anticipated Marden’s synthesis of intense observational
strategies (the scenery of western Nebraska, the light and landscape of
Hydra, Patti Smith’s blue-black hair, the length of an ailanthus twig)
with idealizing abstraction (the structure, the field, the rectangle, the
plane).30 Luminism imposed — as Marden seeks to do — measure and
planarity upon light and spirit. Here memory re-enters the equation.
Luminism’s icons tend to have the flavor of extreme precision
associated with things that are beheld through the mind’s eye (after

14
all, the mind organizes and abstracts what the eye perceives). The
exactitude that pervades Marden’s methods — the calibrated dimen-
sions and depths of his canvases, the color of silk he might seize upon
in a Zurbarán, the obsessive configuration and placement of lines
— belongs to the same hierarchy. While Marden makes countless
drawings en plein air and in front of the motif, there are just as many
works, especially among the paintings — The Seasons: Spring-Summer-
Autumn-Winter (1975) is a prime instance — that must perforce rely
upon his recall of a place, a person, a thing, or a certain time. Indeed,
Marden has said as much, commenting on Summer Table (1972–73)
that “the painting started with colors that approached those colors [of
two glasses of lemonade and Coca-Cola] from memory.”31 Memory
and time are intertwined. In this respect, a nod towards an otherwise
altogether remote predecessor may prove instructive. I am thinking of
the Victorian William Dyce’s Pegwell Bay, Kent — A Recollection of October
5th 1858 [fig. 4].
At face value what links Dyce to Marden? One could cite their
common concern with minute pictorial exactitude, a restrained glow
or lambent atmosphere that seems to suffuse everything (Dyce’s palette
is, like many of Marden’s works, basically an inflected grisaille) and
which is mutable as it shifts towards yellow, violet, green, and brown
without ever allowing those hues enough area and saturation to wax
full-blooded. More profoundly, Dyce’s scene captures, as its title indi-
cates, a memory, and it does so with an eidetic degree of definition and
concomitant attention to lineation and surface. Hence a cynic might
dub the Dyce as a retrograde Marden returned, via a century and more

15
 fig. 4
William Dyce
Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858,
ca. 1859–60
Oil on canvas
25 x 35 inches; 64 x 89 cm
Tate Gallery, London. Purchased, 1894

of representationalism, to nature. A keener eye would add that Dyce

dealt with the verities that have preoccupied Marden — water, sky,
and stone — even down to the seashells (a motif that first fascinated
the latter when he visited Thailand in 1984–85) constituting the base
substance of Pegwell Bay’s chalk escarpment. A meditation on duration
and matter,32 Dyce’s view scrutinizes, as Marden has done over and
again, the stratifications of time — at once heavenly (the horizontal
clouds and comet), human (the various ages of the figures),33 and
geological (the layered cliffs). This conjunction between color, light,
time, and memory inevitably broaches another thing: namely, Marden’s
especially high regard for Mark Rothko’s imageless icons.
Crudely encapsulated, the essence of Rothko’s classic canvases from
1950 onwards is their imposition of an abstract idea — the rectangle
— upon manifold colors that delve the entire scale of human experi-
ence. On this score, Rothko left no stone unturned, exploring with
numberless surprises brilliant radiance and somber darkness, opacity
and translucency, flatness and depth, svelte uniformity and gritty

16
textural incident, saturation and lightness.34 The Rothko Chapel in
Houston holds a special place in Marden’s pantheon. This prompts
a personal digression and full disclosure.
As consulting curator of the large loan exhibition at the Menil
Collection in 1996 that celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
Rothko Chapel, one of the great privileges I enjoyed was having the
opportunity to view these late penumbral canvases at all hours of the
day in Renzo Piano’s painstakingly lit galleries. As the filtered Texas
sunlight passed from morning to sunset, so the same painting appeared
to assume completely different aspects. This experience recapitulated
Rothko’s own predilection in later life for meditating on the pictures
in his studio as the light faded towards the end of the day. Marden’s
comments on the 1996 exhibition are pertinent; they not only speak
to his admiration for Rothko’s achievement but also enlarge our under-
standing of his ongoing handling of luminosity and shade. “It was
kind of ‘Now you see it, now you don’t,’” said Marden. “Things that he
[Rothko] would have going on in those dark areas disappear, though
they’re there and are having an effect. You can’t perceive the color at
first, then when you do, it’s incredibly beautiful. Also, the surfaces
become very hard and reflective.”35 Mutatis mutandis, the facture of Ru
Ware Project has a certain shell-like resilience and reflectance, whereas that
of Polke Letter is matte, porous, abraded, and almost friable. As such,
it adverts to another type of Rothko canvas, epitomized by a 1953
exemplar [fig. 5].36
Rothko’s moody composition is a shadowlands, dense with obscu-
rity while nevertheless very thinly rendered. There are even extensive

17
 passages where Rothko rubbed down his tinted
washes with a cloth or similar device, leaving ghostly
pentimenti, in a process that prefigures Marden’s
analogous methods.37 Above all, the chromatic
gamut is singular — effectively a fugal inflection
of the basic gray ground towards (reading the rect-
angles respectively from the top) bluish purple,
ivory white, dusky maroon. Polke Letter’s wafer-thin
makeup, obscurities, and inimitable rusty plum-
tinted field are at some deep level heir to Rothko’s idiosyncratic color-
fig. 5 ism. The joint testimonies of each artist corroborate this accord.
Mark Rothko
Untitled (Purple, White and Red), 1953 Rothko wrote, “I use colors that have already been experienced thru
Oil on canvas
77 ¾ x 81 ¾ inches; 198 x 208 cm the light of day and thr[u] the states of mind of the total man. In other
The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift
of Sigmund E. Edelstone, 1983.509 words my colors are not colors that are laboratory tools which is [sic]
isolated from all accidental impurities so that they have a specified
identity or purity.”38 Chiming with Rothko, as it were, we will recall
that Marden spoke of “color losing identities, becoming color.” Just as
it is impossible to pinpoint the exact hues in Rothko’s Untitled, which
resemble those seen when we close our eyelids,39 so Marden expresses
his interest in “the strangest gray I have ever made” and in “putting
on a gray […] that under certain conditions shows up green, so you
aren’t sure about the color at all.”40 For both painters, color shifts
subliminally between the noumenal and the phenomenal, presence
and erasure.
Lastly, the rectangles that Rothko imposed on his vaporous tonali-
ties to contain them within an ironclad frontal plane, which he likened

18
to “facades” (constructs that commonly tend to possess some sort of
rectilinear design or coordinates), have an inverted correspondence
with the structuring that underlies Marden’s Letters. At their outset, the
Letters evince a network of glyphs and lines similar to what remains visi-
ble in his calligraphic drawings [fig. 6]. Subsequently this grid of signs
is scraped away and overpainted with a “first” (actually consequent
upon the true first markings) ground layer, then additional campaigns
move towards the eventual palimpsest that results in the appearance
of the finished Letters.41 So whereas Rothko trapped his chromatic
expanses within a final orthogonal scheme, Marden emancipates the
gridded arrangements with which the Letters begin into
an ensuing freewheeling, sinuous labyrinth. Insofar as
this curvaceous linear tracery prompts manifest asso-
ciations with bodies and motion (the dancers, sway-
ing attendants, bulky bears, and so on that populate
Marden’s titles and imaginative models)42 and springs
from calligraphic improvisation, it has an antecedent
in the work of another Abstract Expressionist whom
Marden reveres: Jackson Pollock.
Although it would be foolish to make an overt linkage between
Polke Letter and any single painting by Pollock, his Stenographic Figure fig. 6
Brice Marden
[fig. 7] is the locus classicus for the superimposition of calligraphy upon Forgery, 2007–08
Kremer ink on Lanaquarelle paper
the outspread human body figured as a pattern of flowing energy. 22 ½ x 30 inches; 57 x 76 cm
Private collection, Dallas
Characteristically, Pollock’s runes lie mostly on top of the schematic
female anatomy, while Marden’s equivalent traces linger materially
below. Nor need we search further afield than Abstract Expressionism

19
 to witness a precedent for Marden’s fictive/illegible scripts. In Adolph
fig. 7 Gottlieb’s Pictographs and such sculptures by David Smith as The Letter
Jackson Pollock
Stenographic Figure, 1942 [fig. 8], indecipherable alphabets and hieroglyphics summon the look
Oil on linen
40 x 56 inches; 102 x 142 cm of writing, as Marden often manages to do so graphically yet without
The Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Mr. and Mrs.
Walter Bareiss Fund
conveying any readable message.43 That Smith should have aligned his
glyphs according to a grid plan conforms to an immemorial human
tendency to position writing, partly because it is inherently system-
atic, according to linear principles. (For instance, even the earliest of
all Sumerian clay tablets dating from circa 3,300 already aligns its
marks in regular columns.)44 Writing is a means to record experience
and thought. Consequently it is the handmaiden of memory and
charged with temporality.45 Because there is an age-old propensity,
stretching back at least to ancient Greece and Aristotle, to figure the
mind as flat or planar, the art of memory has long been likened to an
inner writing.46 Pollock’s famous phrase that his technique entailed
“memories arrested in space”47 can be understood as his attempt to
render inner sentience, ergo time, in the atemporal medium of paint

20
on canvas. Triangulating time, the grid, and glyphs leads to the third
and final grouping in Marden’s recent activity: the paintings on marble.
The marble paintings have a clear provenance. During the summer
of 1981 Marden’s wife Helen hired some local workmen to build a
marble bench for the garden of their residence in Hydra. Noticing the
leftover fragments strewn about the place, the artist decided to paint
on them. He continued this process for the next six years, then broke
off. In a typical cyclical move, he resumed the undertaking in 2011. It
is customary to observe that the stones’ irregular shapes
loosened the orthogonal ordonnance that controlled
Marden’s canvases.48 This is true: the latest group of
marbles develop the diagonals present in the first batch
with increasing freedom. In Joined (all marble works
mentioned here are from 2011) two graphite vectors run
at a tangent to each other; in Years the upper broken edge
of the stone is itself a splintered diagonal; and in #10 the
exceptionally trued rectangular format contains on its left
side the suggestion of a truncated trapezoid. However,
the germ from which these diagonals sprang occurs even
further back in Marden’s career — the diagonals that arose
from joining the corners of the grid network in Untitled
#1 (1973) [fig. 9]. The shading within this ink drawing reprises how fig. 8
David Smith
early Cubism and particularly Mondrian in his serial compositions The Letter, 1950
Welded steel
of circa 1912–15 imposed a (conceptual) grid upon the (natural) 37 ½ x 25 x 12 inches;
95 x 63.5 x 30.5 cm
world of trees, buildings, and the sea. The recent “stones” (so to speak) Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts
Institute, Museum of Art, Utica,
mirror this imposition, placing straight lines and chromatic planes in NY. Museum purchase, 51.37

21
 primary colors (plus black, white, and green) upon the irregularly
shaped supports with their veining and blotches. (Most of the stone
is a black and white marble from Naxos.) Sometimes they suggest
Mondrian’s signature manner re-projected onto unruly nature. In other
instances, for example the two Chinese Landscapes, the
affinity is more with the geological phenomenon
whereby representational likenesses seem to gel in the
accidental patterning and veins found in stone, such
as the so-called “ruin marble” found on the banks of
the river Arno (pietra albarese), Chinese dreamstones,
and the same country’s fantastically shaped lingbi and
gongshi rocks that Marden prizes.49 Greece meets the
Far East. Certainly, opera di mano — to invoke an appo-
site distinction deriving from Renaissance architec-
tural theory — here impresses itself on opera di natura.50
What Marden’s hand limns with relative brevity — in
effect, fleeting though measured painterly interven-
tions upon objets trouvés or natural readymades (remember that he was
fig. 9 once Robert Rauschenberg’s assistant) — laminates a substance laden
Brice Marden
Untitled #1, 1973 with temporality. In a nutshell, stone concretizes terrestrial time,
Ink on paper
14 ½ x 12; 37 x 30 cm
Collection of the artist
registering in its variegations and amassed strata well-nigh unfathom-
able spans of slow geological change.51 It is lithic memory.
The other intriguing feature of the painted marbles is their rela-
tion to architecture. Firstly, during the period of the initial “stones,”
Marden was also engaged in the early 1980s on a project to create
stained glass windows for Basel Cathedral. The paintings and studies

22
stemming from that commission exploited the diagonal’s possibili-
ties to the full: “When I was doing the windows, in order to have
meetings between the threes and fours, I started using diagonals. […]
Suddenly there’s perspective, a completely different kind of space.”52
In light of this notion, a case exists for arguing that the “stones” of
2011 encompass thoughts hatched over two decades before. More-
over, the space in them is redivivus. Pigment extends around some of
the sides, emphasizing a tinted sedimentary depth. View is just what
its title says: an abstracted Mediterranean vista in which blue, yellow,
and red stand proxy for serried mountains plunging down to a silver
sea beneath a wine-dark sky.53 Pietra dura transfigured. The attenu-
ated vertical Chinese Landscapes suggest their subject glimpsed perhaps
through the aperture of a narrow window. (It would be a nice conceit
to make the empty space surrounding the slab stand for the positive
periphery of an embrasure.) Alternatively, in Swirl, #3, and other slabs
the chance black intrusions within the otherwise pristine marble inter-
act with Marden’s pigment washes to precipitate a play of light and
shade, stability and flux — abrupt swirling or gently drifting ciphers
that bring to mind lines by W. B. Yeats:

Another emblem there! That stormy white

But seems a concentration of the sky;
And, like the soul, it sails into the sight
And in the morning’s gone, no man knows why;
And is so lovely that it sets to right
What knowledge or its lack had set awry,

23
 So arrogantly pure, a child might think
It can be murdered with a spot of ink.54

How Marden pictorially constructs the “stones” also has an archi-

tectonic touch about it, not to mention the fact that the rectangles in
Years 3 approximate rudimentary flagstones, while the angles that the
graphite traces have the look of ground plans for structures unknown
and perhaps never to be raised.55 Remember that a glyph, apart from
being a sculptured mark or symbol, also designates a groove or chan-
nel, especially in the Doric frieze. Maybe tinges of the Doric mode’s
celebrated severity inform the most austere of the “stones,” such as
Helen’s Immediately. If so, this again resonates back to one of Marden’s
earliest interests — in walls. Living temporarily in Paris in the spring
and summer of 1964, Marden encountered André Malraux’s dramatic
cleanup of the city’s buildings: “They were re-plastering or stucco-
ing a lot of the walls. And I would just spend an afternoon watch-
ing them work down these walls. And then when I got back to New
York — there were paintings that I had started at Yale, and then I
just sort of reworked them, and they became more […] field-like.”56
Marden’s interest in antique frescoed interiors (Knossos, Pompeii, etc.)
is also well known. Such murals were done on plaster into which the
design was incised with a stylus, then colored. Marden neatly reversed
this procedure: the coloration on the stones comes first, followed
by the defining graphite lines.57 Attending to the connection with
frescoes in turn puts a different spin on the “field-like” minimal-
ism of Helen’s Immediately and For Blinky. If they look as modern as

24
Brice Marden’s studio on the
Greek island of Hydra, 2011
 Blinky Palermo’s abstractions and American Color Field art (including
Marden’s unique version of it) of the 1970s, another sightline might
compare them to the tomb frescoes of Paestum [fig. 10]. Nor can it
be forgotten that, by painting the stones, Marden turned them into
a more tangible species of marmi finti — the “fictive
marbles” that Early Renaissance artists such as Fra
Angelico placed amid the actual architecture in their
fresco ensembles [fig. 11]. As the art historian Georg-
es Didi-Huberman has proposed, these motifs were,
in a sense, literally modern color “fields” centuries
before their time: in the terms of the quattrocento,
campeggiare means “to color the field [campo] of the
painting.”58 They establish a venerable lineage for
Marden’s “stones” because their purpose might just
as well be his. They are planes for contemplation and memory (albeit
fig. 10 of theological matters) that represent the unrepresentable — the
East side of Tomb No. 210,
Gaudo Cemetery, 4th century bc spirit.59 By no coincidence, Marden’s Homage to Art 14 (1974) took a
National Archaeological Museum
of Paestum, Paestum, Italy reproduction of an angel from Fra Angelico and embedded it within
an ambient “plane image.”60
Finally, the painted marbles bring Marden’s creative wheel full
circle. Long fascinated by alchemy and kindred elemental mythologies
involving correspondences between things above and below,61 his use of
stone brackets the four elements — earth, air, fire, and water — that
alternately fashion and erode rock.62 Likewise, the stones of Greece
feature prominently in the series that was closely linked to the Homage
to Art, the Souvenir de Grèce works. The word “souvenir” speaks volumes.

26
Intended not in the meaning of tourist knickknacks but rather as
defined by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French, Symbolist, fig. 11
Fra Angelico
and other comparable artists — among them, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Madonna of the Shadows (detail)
ca. 1438–50
Corot and his many souvenirs of landscape sites, Vincent van Gogh’s Fresco
Museum of San Marco, Florence
Peach Tree in Blossom (Souvenir of Mauve) and Matisse’s Blue Nude, Souvenir
of Biskra 63 — the “souvenir” is memory pure and simple. That the
Souvenir de Grèce series lasted for twenty years (1974–96) attests, as
does much other evidence within Marden’s still evolving corpus, to
the stately unfolding of his vision over time. Nor can a souvenir rightly
be of something ugly, which would lead to an oxymoron. Rather, the
souvenir embodies actual or perceived beauty, matters that touch the heart.
Constellate memory, slowness, and beauty, and together these quali-
ties perhaps summon one name in particular, Marcel Proust’s — with
the proviso that some might add the English poet John Keats and his
odes as a forebear of the same lineage. Let us end with that thought.
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) is
one vast souvenir. Like Marden’s art, its fabric is cyclical, a protracted
process in which the same ideas and sensations are approached from

27
different angles. Indeed, we might almost say that Marden’s work is
a comparable roman fleuve for the eye (and neither is it happenstance
that his drawings include studies evoking the flow and flicker of the
surface of water).64 Proust figures consciousness as endlessly stratified.
This is why he too focuses on stone: “No fissures, indeed, no geologi-
cal faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of color which in
certain rocks, in certain marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and
formation.”65 To Proust’s “auditory hyperesthesia” Marden presents
a visual one and, in equating colors with people and places, engages
synesthesia.66 What does Marden’s enterprise fulfill on the physical
level if not Proust’s emotional request that “I ask my mind to make
one further effort, to bring back once more the fleeting sensation. […]
And then for the second time I clear an empty space in front of it”?67
For Marden, that “fleeting sensation” might be glimpsed in an Old
Master such as Fra Angelico and his exquisite chromatic traceries, in
the proportions of his wife’s back, in the sunlit flutter of leaves in an
Aegean olive grove,68 in the thought of Sigmar Polke’s odyssey, or the
perpetuated tint of ancient Chinese Ru ware. Remembrance is all.69
The Proustian dimension also clarifies why some of the shrewdest
writings on Marden address the temporal issues that his work raises.70
A corollary is the theme of psychically letting go, of forgetting or
losing oneself in the sustained course of the aesthetic process.71 This
dissolution of consciousness occurs in the celebrated opening scene
of À la recherche du temps perdu, during which the narrator gradually drifts
in and out of sleep, forgetting and reconstituting himself in terms of
fragmentary sense impressions. For Marden, the creative impulse is

28
“like knowing yourself by forgetting about yourself,” and one of the
things he wanted “to do [in the Cold Mountain group] was to lose myself fig. 12
Jackson Pollock
in the same way that I lose myself when I am drawing.”72 In particular, Mural, 1943
Oil on canvas
it is the slow tempo epitomized at the start and the end of Proust’s 97 ¼ x 238 inches; 247 x 605 cm
University of Iowa Museum
roman fleuve (“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the of Art, Iowa City
Gift of Peggy Guggenheim
chain of the hours […] and, at the moment of waking, he will have
no idea of the time”)73 that Marden has made his own. This is the
genius of his misprision of Pollock. Whereas Pollock’s whiplash line
sped furiously through space, as in the great frieze of Mural [fig. 12],
Marden’s lineation in Polke Letter unfurls across the visual field like the
melody in an adagio, curling back constantly upon itself so that it could
not possibly accelerate even if it wished to do so, endless Möbius strips
pressed flat into dreamy, lovely, fleeting traces.74 Pollock conjured restless
maelstroms; Marden weaves sublimely circuitous, beguiling snakes-
and-ladders. In the final analysis Marden’s art stands or falls on a
property that contemporary taste has questioned or even denigrated:
beauty. His workaday motto might be what Ludwig Wittgenstein

29
thought: when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to
draw it.75 On this score, Marden’s ambition shares the same stately
dominion as Keats’s Grecian urn (in the ode of that name), that “foster
child of silence and slow time,” its visual music attuned to “the spirit.”76
The message that the urn conveys, through Keats’s ekphrastic poetry,
from its antique past into the questing present, affirms Marden’s credo,
“an artist’s life is an intense search for truth”—“Beauty is truth, truth
beauty.”77

30
notes
In preparing this essay, my special thanks go to Frederick Bearman, Brice Marden, John Murtagh, Joseph Newland,
Nigel Spivey, and my indefatigable editor and former Phaidon colleague Craig Garrett. d. a.

1. Brice Marden, “The Grove Group Note- 11. Interview with Pat Steir in Brice Marden:
book” in Robert Pincus-Witten, Brice Marden: Recent Drawings and Etchings (New York: Matthew
The Grove Group (New York: Gagosian Gallery, Marks Gallery, 1991), n.p.
1991), 16.
12. Cf. Klaus Kertess, Brice Marden: Paintings and
2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time I. Swann’s Drawings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992),
Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence 15: “He [Marden] wanted an ‘art in extremis,’
Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 2005), 52. and in his visual fixation on the plane, he sought,
like Zurbarán, ‘to go beyond.’” (Kertess, interview
3. With due acknowledgement to Willem de
with Marden, June 21, 1989.)
Kooning’s quip, “I have to change to stay the same.”
13. Interview with Brice Marden in Janie C. Lee,
4. Marden, “The Grove Group Notebook,”17, 21.
Brice Marden Drawings: The Whitney Museum of American
5. The exact site of the kilns at Baofeng Art Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of
Quingliangsi in Henan province was only securely American Art, 1998), 23.
identified as lately as 1986.
14. These and other aphorisms, which have
6. This was reportedly the injunction of the become mainstays in the literature on Ingres and
Song Emperor to his workshops. beyond, were first gathered in Henri Delaborde,
Ingres, sa vie, ses travaux, sa doctrine: D’apres les notes manus-
7. For the most recent Letters, see Brice Marden crites et les lettres du maitre (Paris: H. Plon, 1870).
(Zurich: Thomas Ammann Fine Art AG, 2012).
15. Marden (1978) in Dieter Schwarz, “Plane
8. Marden in Douglas M. Davis, “‘This Is and Line: Structures of Drawing in the Work
the Loose-Paint Generation’: The New Painting Books” in Brice Marden: Work Books 1965–1995,
Harks Back to Abstract Expressionism,” National eds. Dieter Schwarz and Michael Senff
Observer (August 4, 1969), 20. (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1997), 25.
9. Braque’s aphorism was the last of twenty 16. Richard Shiff, “Force of Myself Looking”
collected and published by Pierre Reverdy in his in Gary Garrels, Plane Image: A Brice Marden
journal Nord-Sud (Paris), December 1917. Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2006), 31.
10. Walter Friedlaender, David to Delacroix
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: 17. Friedlaender, David to Delacroix, 75.
Harvard University Press, 1952), 72.

31
18. Although the support for a majority of the and Theories of Practice (New Haven and London:
paintings is actually linen, it is still common Yale University Press, 2010), 252–3.
parlance to speak of “canvas” and “panel.”
31. Garrels, Plane Image, 16.
19. Statement in “New in New York: Line Work,”
32. See Art at the Rockface: The Fascination of Stone,
ed. Carl Andre, Arts, no. 41 (May 1967), 49.
eds. Andrew Moore and Nigel Larkin (London:
20. On compression, see Shiff, “Force of Myself Philip Wilson, 2006), 88.
Looking,” 62–6.
33. Marden’s titles have referenced adults
21. Ibid., 74. (his wife), children (his own), and the departed
(Janis Joplin).
22. On the centrality of the body in Marden’s
procedures, see Yve-Alain Bois, “Marden’s 34. See David Anfam, Mark Rothko: The Works on
Doubt” in Bois and Ulrich Loock, Brice Marden: Canvas — Catalogue Raisonné (Washington, DC,
Paintings 1985–1993 (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, New Haven, and London: National Gallery of
1993). Art and Yale University Press, 1998), 1 et passim.

23. Hence Ingres’s famous anatomical distor- 35. Interview by Mark Rosenthal in Jeffrey
tions, which the extrusion, gravitational sway, Weiss, Mark Rothko (Washington, DC: National
and torsion of Marden’s glyphs parallel. Gallery of Art, 1998), 360.

24. James Reginato, “Marden’s Retreat,” W, no. 26 36. Marden singled out this very painting, ibid.
(November 1997), 264.
37. On Rothko’s diverse technical effects, see
25. Lee, Brice Marden Drawings, 13. Anfam, Mark Rothko, 84ff.

26. Marden (1966) in Shiff, “Force of Myself 38. “Notecards, circa 1950 –1960” in Writings
Looking,” 62. on Art: Mark Rothko, ed. Miguel López-Remiro
(New Haven and London: Yale University
27. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” in T. S. Eliot: Collected
Press, 2006), 143.
Poems: 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber,
1963), 194. 39. Nobuyuki Hiromoto, “Toward the
Authenticity of Painting” in Mark Rothko (Tokyo:
28. Brenda Richardson, “Even a Stone Knows
Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005), 213.
You” in Garrels, Plane Image, 77.
40. Notes (November 20, 1966) in Shiff,
29. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the
“Force of Myself Looking,” 51; Marden in ibid.
Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism and the American
Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 97–8. 41. Jeffrey Weiss, “Correspondence” in Brice Marden
Letters (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2010), 41.
30. On the merger of observational drawing
with idealizing strategies, see also Deanna 42. The body — alongside its logical attendant,
Pertherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories gravity — is a leitmotif that justly runs throughout

32
the literature on Marden. For an especially focused 50. Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte l’Opere d’Architectura
treatment of this theme see David Rimanelli, (1537).
“Skin and Bones” in Brice Marden (New York:
51. Anfam, “To Fathom the Abyss,” 100–4.
Matthew Marks Gallery, 1995).
52. John Yau, “An Interview with Brice Marden”
43. See Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book,
in Brice Marden (Zurich, Berlin, and New York:
Painting, Text (Chicago and London: University
Daros Services and Scalo, 2003), 54.
of Chicago Press, 2006), 329–73. Going beyond
Abstract Expressionism, Stewart cites the illegible 53. Compare the horizon line or saddle framed
scripts created by, inter alia, artists such as Pablo by V-shaped plunging hillsides in Marden’s
Picasso, Cy Twombly, Henri Michaux, and drawing Greece Summer (1974) reproduced in
Ann Hamilton. Of course, the look of Chinese Schwarz and Senff, Brice Marden: Work Books
calligraphy is also at least as important as the 1965–1995, 70.
meanings conveyed.
54. Yeats, “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”
44. Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing in W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry, ed. A. Norman Jeffares
(London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 27–9. (London: Pan Books, 1974), 150–1.
45. See Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart 55. Photographs of Marden’s studio in Hydra
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago in 2011 show that some of the slabs were
Press, 2000). originally meant to cover floors; see also Michael
Duffy, “Two and Four Make Six: In the Studio
46. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London:
with Brice Marden” in Plane Image, 128.
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 22.
56. Marden (2004) in Garrels, Plane Image, 15.
47. Handwritten statement (ca. 1950) in
Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, and Reviews, 57. Marden in conversation with the author,
ed. Pepe Karmel (New York: The Museum February 20, 2013.
of Modern Art, 1999), 24.
58. Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico:
48. Lisa Liebmann, “Finding Marden’s Dissemblance & Figuration, transl. Jane Marie Todd
Marbles” in Brice Marden: Paintings on Marble (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
(New York and Göttingen: Matthew Marks Press, 1995), 18.
Gallery and Steidl, 2004), 6; Richardson,
“Even a Stone Knows You,” 79. 59. Ibid., 31, 56–57.

49. Richardson, “Even a Stone Knows You,” 60. See Eileen Costello, Brice Marden (London
80, 94–5; see also David Anfam, “To Fathom and New York: Phaidon, 2013), 74, 76.
the Abyss” in Anish Kapoor (London and New
61. On alchemy, see William Zimmer, “Marden
York: Phaidon, 2009), 102; and Moore and
1982: Hermeticism Made Visible” in Brice Marden
Larkin, Art at the Rockface, passim.
(New York: Pace Gallery, 1982).

33
62. Glass, the medium intended for the Basel 71. Cf. Shiff, “Force of Myself Looking,” 65:
Cathedral project, is of course made from minerals: “Marden’s ‘Lecture Notes’ include a second
the ancient Egyptians called it “the stone which quotation from Thoreau: ‘Life is but the stream
flows.” I go a-fishing in.’ ”

63. Richardson, “Even a Stone Knows You,” 81. 72. Marden (1991) in Shiff, “Force of Myself
Looking,” 29; Marden in Costello, Brice Marden, 111.
64. See Shiff, “Force of Myself Looking,” 60–1.
73. Proust, In Search of Lost Time I. Swann’s Way, 3.
65. Proust, In Search of Lost Time I. Swann’s Way, 223.
74. Cf. Roger Shattuck, Proust (London:
66. Although almost every writer on Marden
Fontana, 1974), 120: “[in Proust’s prose account
(myself included) notes his use of terpineol,
of a musical recital] First comes a slowly built-
none (to the best of my knowledge) add that
up deposit of successive playings, which he
it is a fragrant alcohol, its odor similar to lilac,
describes as ‘a volume, produced by the unequal
which is an ingredient of various perfumes. On
visibility of the different phases.’ Later Marcel
synesthesia, Cf. Roger Shattuck, Proust (London:
can project and immobilize the different parts
Fontana, 1974), 93: “Proust’s universe hangs
‘on a uniform plane.’”
together at the start more substantially by places
than by people. […] Each important place takes 75. Wittgenstein in Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and
shape as a vividly experienced and basically Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
stable association of light effects, smells, tastes, 1999), 3.
sounds.”
76. Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in John Keats:
67. Proust, In Search of Lost Time I. Swann’s Way, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge,
52–3. Massachusetts, and London: Belknap Press,
1978), 282.
68. Marden has his choice grove in Hydra.
Proust had his favorite fictional grove of trees at 77. Ibid., 283. Cf. also Denis Donoghue,
Combray. Speaking of Beauty (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2003), 78–9: “What it
69. Cf. Marden in Jonathan Hay, “An Interview
[the urn] says is prophetic rather than descrip-
with Brice Marden” in Chinese Work (New York:
Matthew Marks Gallery, 1997), 30: “I’ve always tive. It is as if the urn, now that it has been
been very romantic about titles. I think about removed from its historical setting, can speak of
remembrance, and one of the things about visual a time when Beauty and Truth will be one and
art is there’s a constant remembrance.” the same because they will alike and equally be
products of the imagination. This ‘time’ is an-
70. Harry Cooper, “Marden Attendant” in
ticipated by the experiences of reading, writing,
Brice Marden (London: Serpentine Gallery,
and remembering.”
2000); Bois, “Marden’s Doubt”; Rimanelli,
“Skin and Bones.”

34
This IsWhat I Do BRICE MARDEN

Yellow bark acacia, fever acacia, wet areas

misty white blue green, yellow greens
umber stems, yellow bark fever acacia
darker warmer greens, jades, umbers, soft yellows
white blue green up to dark blue green, dark
warm green.
lake manyara, tanzania, africa

the title of the talk is This is what I do

This is what I try to do

I’ve just been in Hydra, Greece, where there

is the tail end of the spring burst of wild flowers and
the return of some warming sun. In a walled garden I made
notes for this talk. Roses, jasmine, lavender
blooming. I was working a painting on marble, started
last summer. I was with my beautiful wife. We read
poems by Greek poets, drank coffee, ate fruit. Close
to ideal. I arrive here in London and find my notes
way too romantic, complicated, and confused.
Things like “my embrace of the square” — infinite
possibilities evolving into repetitious clichés — the belief
in the hand (arm to body), so trained as it may be,
can still deliver individuality, or through muscularity,
express and deliver inner workings of the human with
infinite subtlety — hand to human connection
dance — inner expression brought out / the jasmine
window — capturing the evocation, being about something
not a picture of it. Detachment, transformation, is
balance form? — perfect balance — to follow the
dictates of the image/ambiguity — inquiétant —
oppositional forces — opposites-equals — yin-yang
acknowledged and allowed to turn into feelings
creating an elevated sense which puts you back
in touch with being human in this environment.
Subject matter — I acknowledge nature and form as my
guides — form as incorrectable — form as the incorrectable
attainment.

Stop the motion, freeze the energy, only to show

the motion, keep it moving, retaining the
energy. “Perpetuate the validity of vagueness.”
“Pictures must be miraculous” Mark Rothko
In the Acropolis Museum — the Greek light on

38
the marble of the sculptures — it’s working, everything
becomes enhanced — the Peplos Kore — in perspective —
in the distance. Giacometti — the specifics of her subtleties
the light, the marble. Images quivering on the
brink of becoming alive.

I like to work within given restraints — a given

shape, a wall, a specific space.
I like number systems — I have worked with a grid of 4 and 3 —
4 representing the elements and 3 the Trinity
And I had a numerologist friend who told me my number was 6.
So I made a painting called The Propitious Garden of Plane Image
( Plane Image is just another way I refer to myself or the studio or
whatever).
The painting was made up of 6 panels — each with 6 colors,
they were 4 x 6 — which is 24 — which is 6. I was beginning to feel
this was some sort of ultimate self-portrait.
I showed two of them in a show at the Modern, in New York. I
invited my friend Jeffrey to come to the opening, and he said,
“Why was I invited?” And I said, “You said my number was 6.
I’ve made all these paintings.” He said, “Your number is 15.”
So now I’m working on 15, I call them Stele paintings.
There was a poet named Victor Segalen, he was a very interesting
guy, a doctor. It was he who bought all the Gauguins that came up

39
for auction in Tahiti. And he was an early Orientalist. And he
wrote a group of poems based on these Stele, which were stone
tablets they put up, inscribed with poetry or instructions on how to
deal with your life. So I have five of these in three different
studios, each with three lines of five characters. And I’m working
on them in the different studios because I want to see what the
differences will be by being in different places. So I have a group
in Nevis, in the Caribbean. And I have a set in New York City.
And I have a set upstate in Tivoli. They haven’t gone very far.
But it’s a plan.

avoidance of the givens. The square (the perfect abstraction)

always keep it a little off
acceptance of the given — my recent embrace of the square

I had these extra 6 x 8 foot canvases around the studio, and I’d
been doing these horizontal paintings, and I just turned it vertical,
did a 6 x 6 foot square. And it didn’t look square. And that
became part of what. . . .

What I am doing now

I am making a painting to be titled The Moss

Sutra — it consists of a large center panel

40
9' x 15' — 4 side panels 8' x 6'
each. The center panel is divided into 4 horizontal
areas, the largest being the center, which holds a grid
of 35 vertical lines of 5 “characters” each. I took this
form from a piece of calligraphy that an expert
told me was a Sutra. I love moss. A favorite
image is the Muso Soseki Dry Stone Waterfall
in the Moss Garden (Saiho-ji) in Kyoto, Japan.

The side panels are to be painted as the seasons.

Terre verte under all — season color — yellow green
red blue as ground color — a formal system
a cycle of blue on yellow red on spring (yellow)
yellow on green blue on summer ( green)
green on red yellow on autumn (red)
red on blue green on winter ( blue)
then
green on spring
red on summer
blue on autumn
yellow on winter

all panels have all seasons

41
through this layering, diverse drawing
opportunities will open up. (all layers are joinings
of “characters,” marks — my own fictitious calligraphy.
The layering process where the image reveals
itself by coming up — emerging from — positive
application (that’s where I draw something down) then negation
(which is I get the whole thing working and then paint over the
whole thing, scrape it down, and see what starts talking to me),
search, reapplication,
negation, search. (explain)
This is where we are now.

The ultimate aim of painting is not decorative

beauty but truth. What is truth? It must
not be confused with formal resemblance;
indeed formal resemblance only reaches the
appearance of things, whereas the function
of truth is to capture their essence.
shi tao

— this talk was delivered at tate modern , s starr auditorium,

london, may 14, 2012
RU WARE PROJECT
Ru Ware Project, 2007–12
Oil on linen
Nine canvases, each 24 x 18 inches; 61 x 46 cm
Overall: 24 x 162 inches; 61 x 411 cm
lift
PAINTINGS ON MARBLE
#9, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
16 ⅜ x 15 ¾ inches; 42 x 40 cm
Joined, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
26 ¾ x 6 ⅝ inches; 68 x 17 cm
Years, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
25 ⅝ x 6 ⅞ inches; 65 x 18 cm
View, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
31 ½ x 17 ⅜ inches; 80 x 44 cm
First Square, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
15 ¾ x 9 ⅞ inches; 40 x 25 cm
Chinese Landscape, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
41½ x 7 ⅞ inches; 105 x 20 cm
Swirl, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
10 ⅝ x 9 ¾ inches; 27 x 25 cm
Formal Marble, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
28 ⅜ x 25 ⅛ inches; 72 x 64 cm
#3, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
19 ¾ x 8 inches; 50 x 20 cm
For Blinky, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
29 ¾ x 11⅝ inches; 76 x 30 cm
Helen’s Immediately, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
19 ½ x 31 ½ inches; 50 x 80 cm
#10, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
23 ⅝ x 15 ¾ inches; 60 x 40 cm
Chinese Landscape 2, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
35 ½ x 3 ⅝ inches; 90 x 9 cm
Years 2, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
21 ¼ x 11 ¼ inches, 54 x 29 cm
Years 3, 2011
Oil and graphite on marble
17 ⅜ x 31 ½ inches, 44 x 80 cm
POLKE LETTER
Polke Letter, 2010–11
Oil on linen
72 x 96 inches; 183 x 244 cm
 Brice Marden: Ru Ware, Marbles, Polke
is published to accompany an exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery,
502 and 526 W22nd Street, New York, from April 21 to June 23, 2012.

editorial director Craig Garrett

project editor Ted Turner
copy editor Charles Gute
designer Catherine Mills
production manager Sue Medlicott
separations Robert J. Hennessey
printing Meridian Printing, East Greenwich, Rhode Island

All works by Brice Marden © Brice Marden

Essay © 2013 Art Ex Ltd.
Catalogue © 2013 Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

photography
Ronald Amstutz: cover, pp. 19, 45, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 81
Ryan Hart: pp. 2, 25, 35
© Trustees of the British Museum: p. 7 (first three images)

Courtesy Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford: p. 7 (fourth image)

© 2013 Tate, London: p. 16

Image courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago. Artwork ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko /
Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York: p. 18
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.
Artwork © 2013 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York: p. 20
Image courtesy The Estate of David Smith. Artwork © The Estate of David Smith /
Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY: p. 21
Bill Jacobson: p. 22
Courtesy Museum of San Marco, Florence: p. 27
Image courtesy the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Artwork © 2013 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation /
Artists Rights Society (ARS ), New York: p. 29

isbn 978-1-880146-67-5

Matthew Marks Gallery

523 W 24th Street, New York, NewYork 10011
www.matthewmarks.com

Frontispiece and p. 35: Brice Marden’s studio on the Greek island of Hydra, 2011