Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Architecture
Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective Details
In the autumn of 2006, The Museum of Modern Art will present Brice Marden: A Retrospective, the artist's first major American retrospective. The exhibition, which will travel to San Francisco and Berlin, will constitute an unprecedented gathering of Marden's work, with more than 50 paintings and an equal number of drawings, balanced across the artist's career. The accompanying catalogue is the first book to take readers through the full course of Marden's work as it has developed over more than 40 years from the early 1960s to the present, showing his gradual, deliberate evolution, along with his constant exploration of light, color and surface at every turn. Marden's first 20 years of work, characterized by the luminous monochrome panels for which he won his first acclaim, will for the first time appear alongside the celebrated production of the past 20 years, which followed a shift in the mid-1980s to calligraphic gestures in shimmering grounds, and another shift in the past decade to heightened color. Two of Marden's newest paintings appear here for the first time. Gary Garrels interprets Marden's work and places it in historical context. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, of the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art at Harvard, examines issues of materials, processes and conservation. Richard Shiff, Brenda Richardson and Michael Duffy explore Marden's early use of a grid and his engagement with time and space in the studio, as well as his observation of the elemental qualities of nature, his representational links to nature, and the distinctive emotional effects of the abstract monochrome works for which he was initially recognized. Marden himself addresses his working methods in an interview, and a comprehensive chronology, exhibition history and bibliography close the book out.
Reviews
I've always admired Marden's work and have read other publications about it, but this one is different. It's much more than a catalogue of work and it's well beyond being a good book about a painter--it's actually a treatise on what it was like to be an artist during the change-over from the modern to the postmodern time period, along with the technical trappings and considerations that can accompany such a transition.The text is a combination of essays from five different authors and covers both the struggles and the influences that Marden has experienced over the course of his career which began around 1963, the year he received his MFA. Quite surprising was the level of detail that was mentioned concerning his own studio practice such as the binders of his paint, i.e., the switch from wax medium to the terpineol that he now mixes his oils with.Brice Marden's recipe for success as an artist lies in how he blends the most formal of influences from the West with all the formalism the East has to offer. The text brings forth this fact masterfully, never forgetting to mention that this artist's early work was heavily infuenced by that of contemporary Americans, while his recent paintings were produced under the overt sway of Han-dynasty tomb figures and garden rocks.In its depth of coverage of Brice Marden, this book is unrivaled. In its account of the plight of an individual growing into an artist during a time of great aesthetic change, this book is vital.
