Brice Marden is poorly served by the obsequious reverence which attends the career of an aging and successful painter such as himself. There is the breathless talk about quality of light, and about the way surroundings and cultures shaped a painter's practice. It's old-fashioned stuff, and it leads you to wonder whether there is anything there at all. Surely Pollock's generation had the last word on abstraction? And isn't it a bad sign that Marden built his reputation during the return to painting in the 1980s? In short, one worries that Marden paints lovely pictures, but that there isn't much to say about them.
And, walking into MoMA's brief retrospective, one could add the charge of backpeddling, for Marden's early pictures are quite remarkably flat Minimalist expositions (and one was never meant to return to imagery from those). The earliest in the show, Return I (1964-5), is a grey monochrome with a very thin line of grey splattered canvas at the bottom. It's derivative of Barnett Newman, perhaps, but the approach is enough to summon an impressive sense of the monochrome as a vast, emptily-terrifying sky above a thin stretch of metropolitan bustle.
Marden continued in this manner for some time, and by the late 1970s his pictures had become larger, multipart ensembles contrasting different colour values. But there's no explanation for what comes next: all of a sudden he is painting his characteristic webs of lines. They are cack-handed at first, the loops and joins of the lines in the Cold Mountain series from the late 1980s bearing so many traces of slippage and uncertainty, and the cumulative effect is to create pictures with an air of demented construction, as the painter returns again and again to the loop motif. Yet they also have an exquisitely lulling, aquatic mood, as if all the lines were dangling weeds glimpsed in the depths of a still pond. There is the surface web of lines, and then there is the glutinous web of supporting lines fading back into the distance.
Perhaps this isn't art-historically important, and perhaps it lacks the power and sense of personality one finds in better, older abstract painters, but Marden's pictures are so delicious you can forgive him everything. He develops on his style, gets a tighter grip on his signature ribbons, and finds new effects, and then in the 1990s, in pictures like Skull with Thought (1993-5), he devises a wholly new idiom in which the ribbons are arranged to suggest a flickering assortment of colourful motifs, figure groups and friezes - and still he judges colour perfectly to create gorgeous lemon and lime backdrops. The exhibition ends with his largest paintings to date, eight panel canvases with the designs entwining from one part to the other. It's just a lap of honour, really, but by this stage you'll be happy for Marden to indulge himself.
Brice Marden: Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings
Until 15 January 2007
Museum of Modern Art
New York
11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues
New York, NY 10019-5497
Tel: +1 212 708 9400
Brice Marden, Attendant 5, 1996-99
Brice Marden, Skull With Thought (1993-95
)
)
)