A Picture Can Cure Cancer
Brice Marden
One of the great surprises about being retired is that you get to think about what it is you want to think about. It’s a simple, but to me, profound surprise: And the thing I want to think about is art. Having time enables me to be in a sort of a constant communion with the immortals, my great friends and heroes, my teachers and my inspirators on the long train of art history, upon which I am a proud and happy passenger.
Not long ago, on the heels of receiving two alarmingly luscious art books about the painter, Sean Scully, I asked my wife, “Isn't it enough for a painting to be beautiful?”
Two days, later, my dear friend (though I never knew him), Brice Marden passed away. He had said, about painting, “If you could get the exact perfect right color for that shape and if you had absolutely correctness of form, you could make a painting that could cure cancer.” Which satisfied the question for me.
I can’t remember how I first learned about Brice Marden, must’ve been in the early nineties. I had made paintings in the eighties that were primarily monochromatic, and I was stunned to find Brice had already made nearly the exact same pictures in the mid-sixties. As I followed his career, I found later that he and I had similar formal problems that we were trying to solve, but he was, as was the case before, decades ahead of me. I saw his paintings at the Pompidou one time and thought, “Man, if I had time to paint…”
And its true actually, time to paint is time to think about painting, and Brice had been successful right out of the Yale box. He had had the great fortune to spend a lifetime painting and thinking about painting, working with and learning from a couple of other modern masters, Rauschenberg and Johns. I have lived and worked somewhat vicariously through him, looking over my shoulder and ahead with binoculars to him - until now.
It’s curious that although Brice had an incredible pedigree of art instruction, and his experience and practice was in large part determined by the formalism of painting (though I think he would disagree), he sought something that seems at least parodoxical: Transcendence through painting. He, like Frank Stella considered the picture plane inviolate, and he believed that the transformative power of painting resides in the space between the picture plane and the image. Unlike Frank Stella, he loved the integrity of the rectangle. While Stella and Elizabeth Murray and even Sean Scully were reimagining the picture plane in any number of dimensions, and permutations, Brice, I think, used the rectangle not merely as a formal device (to keep the image in), but also as an emotional field that he believed could accomplish unimaginable things, as he said, like cure cancer. He wanted to make his paintings miraculous - able to transcend time and thought and enter into a spirituality - as Rothko had prescribed.
Even in his early monochromatic paintings, the ones that looked like mine 20 years earlier, Brice’s purpose ran counter to the minimalists intentions, which as far as I can tell, goes something like, it is what it is. Brice’s intention, even in these early Johns influenced semi-encaustic encrusted paintings, was to make a human connection. His surfaces became the oblique window, constructed of layered veils of paint, each contributing to, when seen as a whole, a sublime emotional statement. They were the edge between the picture plane and the image.
In the early nineties when I discovered him, he was well past the earlier monochromatic paintings, as was I. He articulated for me the problem we shared as he struggled to incorporate more drawing into his painting. He wanted to “get some human thing out there.” It was a crisis for him as you might imagine, being as fastidious about the formal systems and rules of painting as he was. He discovered his, “stone of release,” like Ferdinand Cheval had in the Palais Ideal over a century earlier, in the forms of Chinese calligraphy. Arranged in gridlike fashion, Brice was able to place his own interpretation of these calligraphic symbols within the rectangle, and through subsequent layering connect them into winding overlapping linear expressions that obeyed all of his formal demands. Quite a neat trick.
Brice continued to be engaged in this discovery. He would create increasingly complex scenarios for his work, but at its core the paintings of lines and the colored veils of emotion, would remain his formal device. Painting and scraping layers, exposing and hiding their intent, listening as the imagery organically (as Pollock instructed) would rise from within, Brice was chasing emotion. He was chasing his ecstatic vision across continents and studios from Hydra to the Caribbean to upstate New York. Willing into form and color the energies of nature and seeking a truth in painting that could, if done right, reveal some essence that would transform the formal experience into the miraculous.
Brice was one helluva painter. I’ll miss my pal, and his constant invention to, as he said, keep his work from devolving into cliches. In my life, I didn’t have formal training and didn’t have a chance to think as deeply about painting as Brice. I didn’t have his pedigree. But I get to think about it now, and hopefully like some of the great last acts, Brice will be with me as I get to think more deeply about art and the pictures I’m making. Thanks for all of the beauty, Brice. You made the world better.