Brice Marden
Let the Painting Make You

In the late 70-early 80s, as when Bob Dylan in 1965 went electric, Marden shocked the art world by abandoning monochrome to take up the challenge of making gestural works. By the late 1980s he had made a complete transition from making Jasper Johns-ian paintings which emphasized their objectness, to Willem deKooning-esque gestural works that gave the impression of having been guided by intuition and the fluidity of paint. Much like Dylan’s departure from folk to rock, Marden’s move from his restrained monochromes to the dynamics of the gestural reflected a bold move away from his audiences’ expectations. In actuality, the shift was even more radical than it appeared to be in that these works were not spontaneous. The looping bands and gestural marks do not cross one another — on close inspection one can see Marden has stopped where they intersect — only to pick up on the mark or band’s other side. As such, he had painted the look of spontaneity, as well as creating the illusion of a foreground and background. 

 

Where the monochromes had been literally nothing more than a colored surface, these paintings were literally illusionistic. The fact that they are “just the opposite of what they appeared to be” hints at the fact that despite the loose and spontaneous appearance, Marden’s approach continued to be deliberate. From this perspective the shift to the gestural can be seen as an extension of his ongoing interest into dichotomy as a way to out-maneuver the confines of formalism’s critical prohibitions. By doing this, Marden strategically invites viewers to aesthetically engage not only with painting as a surface, a structure, and color but to look beyond their own initial impressions into the underlying complexity of the painter’s processes. 

 

While Marden’s shift from monochromatic paintings to the gestural was interpreted as a betrayal of minimalism and formalism’s reductive aesthetic for a more decorative or accessible mode, it’s essential to consider his move to be strategic at a time when painting had supposedly died, and modernist truths were no longer considered viable. On the surface, his work may appear to be decorative due to the arabesque nature of his gestures and his subdued and sophisticated palette, characterized by muted hues, and nuanced earth tones, but in actuality these works retain the formal concerns, which were prevalent in his monochromatic works. Process, surface, and literalism, continued to play a significant role in his gestural paintings while the illusion of spontaneity now allows him to exploit the tension between control and intuition that previously manifested itself in his drawings. 

 

Though Marden’s work has always been critically identified as being quintessentially modernist and formalist, his introduction of illusionism might actually be thought of in the context of the emergence of post-modernism in the late 1970s, when artists sought to challenge the progressive and developmental logic of modernism and its prohibitions. In this light, similar to Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings, Marden’s works represent both a synthesis of various influences and a simulacrum of the spontaneity of the gestural. In bringing them together Marden is using a supposedly depleted mode of gestural abstraction to challenge the traditional dichotomies of spontaneity and control, reductive austerity and decoration, painting as well as by bridging the gap between painting and drawing he challenges the traditional distinctions between the two practices. Likewise, the incorporation of color and its opacity served not only aesthetic purposes they were also a way for him to obtain a unity between color, form, and surface, His continuous exploration of  these elements and their possibilities were the source of  his dedication to the act of painting itself, something which is indicated by the title of this show; Let the Painting Make You.