Art © 2021 Brice Marden / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
A painting of profound beauty and elegiac grace, Brice Marden’s Point from 1969 is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s highly celebrated monochrome paintings of the 1960s. Comprised of three abutting panels and rendered in luminous subdued tones, Point exhibits a sensitivity to color as an expressive means unparalleled in Marden’s highly celebrated oeuvre. While entirely non-objective and abstract, Marden nonetheless evokes the natural world through subtle shifts and nuances of hue. Reconciling the stringent reductionism of Minimalism, the painterly impulses of Abstract Expressionism, and the conceptual experimental gravitas of Jasper Johns, Marden’s Point seamlessly integrates numerous modes, illuminating the artist’s unique ability to wed objective materiality and poetic subjectivity in a single composition. One of only a select number of early triptych monochromes, Point exhibits a compositional complexity and ambition of scale that was unprecedented in Marden’s output up to that date; it was only in 1968, a year prior, that Marden began experimenting with multiple panels in his works. Notably, the present work was previously held in the collection of Charles Saatchi in London, a significant and early patron of Marden.
Dispensing entirely with considerations of figure and ground in favor of panels of color, Marden’s monochrome paintings resolutely declare the preeminence of color, shape, and form; and yet, while abandoning any adherence to illusionistic depth or perspectival space in favor of pure abstraction, Marden retains the emotional facet of painting. To create the richly nuanced monochrome panels of Point, Marden mixes beeswax with oil paint and turpentine, heating it before applying it to the canvas and building up a dense layer of colored wax and pigment that both absorbs and reflects light. The surface of Point preserves and reveals the artist’s process, the marks of the palette knife, the subtle ridges in the viscous material inflecting each panel’s uniform color and opacity with impressions of the painter’s working process. This evidence, along with the artist’s anachronistic tendency toward the lyrical, is what distinguishes his work from that of his Minimalist contemporaries who rely on a cool industrial quality. Marden’s monochromes remain amongst the most visually compelling and conceptually ambitious works of Marden’s entire oeuvre.
RIGHT: Edwin Dickinson, Cottage Porch, Peaked Hill, 1932. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Art © The Heirs of Edwin Dickinson, 2013
While his adherence to the monochrome roots Marden’s paintings of the 1960s to Minimalism, he departs from the stylistic strictures imposed by Minimalist strictures in search of something more emotionally charged and personal in his work. Marden was struck by the radically conceptual Neo-Dada movement heralded by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg that swept New York in the 1960s. In 1964 while working as a guard at The Jewish Museum, Marden saw Jasper Johns’ first retrospective, and Johns’ art, especially his encaustic monochromes such as Grey Rectangles (1957) deeply influenced Marden’s approach to painting. Inspired by the richly textured surfaces and brilliant dimensionality that Johns was able to capture while still working within the realm of “painting,” Marden began to experiment with his own medium, mixing oil paint with wax to create an encaustic-like substance. And yet, whereas Johns chose gray for its non-representational quality, Marden perceived monochromatic colors as rich in allusions and expressiveness, and in this regard, Marden's work is more in sympathy with Mark Rothko's paintings which sought an impassioned form of Abstract Expressionism.
Comparable Triptych Monochromes in Museum Collections
Marden often draws upon specific people, places, or other works of art as sources. In the present painting, elegant, luminous hues of bluish and greenish gray evoke the complex range of colors and subtle transitions of a natural landscape—the transient passage of a shadow, the evolution of light throughout the day. Remaining within the mode of abstraction frees Marden from specific association and allows him to fuse the discrete moments of sensual experience that comprise one’s immersion in a nature. While Marden wouldn’t take his first trip to Hydra, Greece until 1971, his rich, profound dialogue with nature—which would later become a pillar of his oeuvre for the decades to come—is already exhibited here.
