布萊斯‧馬登

瑪麗‧布恩畫廊，紐約
1987年現有藏家購自上述人士處

「為阿米蒂奇芭蕾舞團籌款展覽」，紐約，瑪麗‧布恩畫廊， 1987年6月

This painting is in excellent condition. Under UV light, there are no apparent restorations. There is an small arced linear scuff, possibly part of artist’s process and brushwork, located 19 ¼ - 21 ¼ from the left edge and 5 ½ - 6 ½ in. from the bottom. The canvas is not framed.
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In 1984 Brice Marden attended the Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8^th-19^th Century exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. In retrospect, this was a watershed moment of revelation that marked an extreme shift from his single-color, multi-panel paintings of the 1960s and 1970s to the remarkably erudite and resonantly beautiful paintings of the 1980s such as Untitled (Grey) from 1987. Based originally on objects in nature and life, calligraphy, over the centuries, "went on to gather sophisticated aesthetic and pictographic complexity and refinement, [while] it retained the mesh of the traces of the kinesthetic movements of the hand with the patterns of the forces of nature." (Klaus Kertess, Brice Marden: Paintings and Drawings, New York, 1992, p. 41). Consequent to his encounter with the 1984 exhibition, Marden immersed himself in the study of calligraphy and it became a predominant influence in his work. He developed an admiration of Buddhism and Chinese poetry during this time, and in addition to his interest in the content of the poetry, he was also inspired by the way the poetry was aligned on a page, in columns of rectangles. These intimate networks of angular forms would give birth to the artist's own lexicon of shapes termed "glyphs" that make up the compositional structure of Untitled (Grey) and its sister paintings. Marden's "glyphs" were also influenced by the organic forms of volute shells he encountered during visits to a seashell museum in Thailand in 1984, the same year as the Asia Society show.

Charles Wylie cited the influence of calligraphy in his essay for the catalogue of the Dallas Museum of Art's traveling exhibition of Marden's work of the 1990s: "Here was an art that possessed an energy of line and motion, that appealed to Marden's pictorial sense but adhered to a set of rules that dictated the placement of intricate forms within rows and columns of austere measure. (Charles Wylie in: Exh. Cat., Dallas, Dallas Museum of Art, Brice Marden, Works of the 1990's: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints, Dallas Museum of Art, 1998, p. 28).

Influenced by the lyrical gestures of elegant calligraphic poetry writing, Marden reveled in a return to gestural mark-making, through copious drawings on paper and then in the single panel vertical paintings of 1986-87 with dusky colored backgrounds of which Untitled (Grey) is a poetic example. The wealth of compositional variations in Marden's new linear and geometric aesthetic is further elaborated by Wylie: "From 1985 to 1990, Marden created his first paintings and works on paper influenced by this new mode of thinking. Using line as his compositional tool under the influence of the Chinese characters found in poetry, Marden tried out various pictorial possibilities that he had previously not allowed himself to entertain. These included the very simple act of placing lines on canvas that stood on their own, lines that would not be covered over by oil and wax but that would need to be brought into relation with other lines to create a composition. In two exhibitions at the Mary Boone Gallery and Mary Boone/Michael Werner Gallery, both in New York, Marden exhibited paintings in which he experimented with depth as well, something that he had not investigated in his paintings, by placing repeated triangular forms one over the other and filling areas of overlap with opaque white. His colors across the spectrum assumed new and extremely idiosyncratic tonalities, resulting in some of the most intriguing treatments of contrasting color schemes that Marden had yet risked." (Ibid., p. 29).

Untitled (Grey) is a quintessential example of Marden's trajectory as an artist, encompassing a dramatic shift in his painterly vocabulary that defied critical concepts about the boundaries between seemingly contradictory schools of painterly expression. The titular reference to "grey" is an important link to one of the primary tonal ranges in his palette for the earlier 1960s monochromatic masterpieces but the painting's visual impact belonged to Marden's future direction. In Untitled (Grey), Marden combined the curving organic forms of shells with the frontality of calligraphy and vertical monolithic space to explore a method for balancing gesture with planar composition.