Word: marden
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...Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings of 1988-91 -- six of them, big ones, 9 ft. by 12 ft., backed up by a few dozen drawings and prints -- are now on view at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. This is a show and a half. How fast, how silently, the sight of a real sensibility at full stretch can cut through the visual jabber and white noise of so much of the gallery scene! On the evidence of these new works, Marden, 53, is now the finest American abstract painter of his generation...
Every artist has prototypes, artists he or she admires and learns from -- an internal homage that never ends. The problem is to subdue their authority, to bring their lessons into line with one's instincts. The artist who does this may be called mature. So with Marden, who with this show of huge, pale canvases covered with a loose tracery of inky line has managed at last to reconcile his inheritance as a late modern American painter -- chiefly, the work of Jackson Pollock -- with his interests in Oriental art. Marden has made intense and complicated images out of this dialogue...
...rest of his life, he wrote verses (strict in form, four couplets to a page, each a small tower of vertical characters) declaring his independence from the material "world of dust." Cold Mountain was one of those jokester sages in whom Buddhist culture -- Zen Buddhism in particular -- abounded. Marden, whose interest in Oriental poetry had been deepening in the 1980s, seized on him not only because he liked the poetry in translation but because of the beautiful and wayward calligraphy of the surviving texts...
...then, the look of Marden's paintings was familiar to the point of seeming an art-world staple -- humane Minimalism. Since the '70s he had been working in a very controlled format of blocks of subdued color butted up one against another; the image was "built" from monochrome canvases. The quality of the color and the proportional relationships of the canvases were both crucial. He liked his paintings to be the size of a man (or a woman), so that one would be induced without being quite conscious of it to connect them to standing figures, other "presences...
...Marden admired Jasper Johns -- a critic in the '70s brusquely but memorably wrote off an abstract twin-canvas picture by Marden as "Jasper's Painting with Two Balls, without the balls." And like Johns, he worked in a mixture of oil paint and wax, a false encaustic that gave his surfaces both substance and an inner glow, as if light were working its way through layers of slightly dusty translucency. You thought of it as skin. Marden was a brilliant colorist, in a very tuned-down way. His warm grays and brick reds, his low thick blues and his blocks...