The trigger was most cancers, in response to a household assertion shared by his studio. Mr. Marden, who was identified with rectal most cancers in 2017, was portray as just lately as Saturday, getting ready for a deliberate November exhibition at one in all Gagosian’s New York galleries.
A grasp of colour, gentle and texture, Mr. Marden was first identified for his mysterious monochrome canvases, the centerpiece of his New York debut in 1966 on the fledgling Bykert Gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Like Jasper Johns, whose works he had studied whereas working part-time as a safety guard on the Jewish Museum, Mr. Marden blended his oils with melted beeswax, making use of the thick paint with spatulas and knives to create a matte floor on the canvas. Inside a couple of years, he was incorporating a number of panels and colour combos into his works, which he likened to musical chords wherein one be aware, or colour, performed off the subsequent.
His early work had been usually grey, though the colour appeared to shift relying on the sunshine. Some had been impressed by his journeys to Greece, the place he would take detailed notes on the colour of the ocean, the sky or an olive grove that occurred to catch his eye: “evasive silver grey inexperienced, blue grey inexperienced gentle, black grey browns.”
Whereas his monochrome work had been resolutely summary, their titles had been way more concrete. “The Dylan Painting,” a piece of purplish grey, steered his affiliation with Bob Dylan and different Sixties people musicians whom he knew by his marriage to Pauline Baez, the older sister of singer Joan Baez. A piece named “Nebraska” was impressed by a drive previous Midwestern prairies. “For Helen” was primarily based on the scale of artist Helen Harrington, whom he later married (the canvas matched her top and shoulder width), with a pinkish colour impressed by a pair of her sneakers.
“Folks had been saying portray was useless. And this was my mind-set, properly, there are issues that haven’t been achieved,” he informed Harry Cooper, the pinnacle of recent artwork on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork in Washington, in 2009.
Though he was usually related to the minimalist artwork motion, Mr. Marden’s work had a mythic high quality that eluded labels. Reviewing a 2006 retrospective of his work on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, New Yorker artwork critic Peter Schjeldahl called Mr. Marden “probably the most profound summary painter of the previous 4 many years,” evaluating the impact of a Marden portray to that of a color-field work by Mark Rothko, the painter who stated he aimed to conjure a temper of “the one human determine, alone in a second of utter immobility.”
When he grew bored together with his early monochrome type, Mr. Marden pushed his work in new instructions, alternately engaged on larger and smaller scales. He included 18 interconnected panels in his portray “Thira,” accomplished in 1980, which alluded to the structure of historical Greek temples. He additionally turned to nature for his instruments, drawing with ink-dipped ailanthus twigs from his yard in New York, and with a three-foot-long stick that he used to make sweeping gestural marks on bigger canvases.
Starting within the late Eighties, he labored on a collection of work, drawings and etchings referred to as “Chilly Mountain,” impressed by the Zen writings of the Chinese language poet Hanshan. Mr. Marden learn the poems in translation and studied the unique Chinese language characters, drawing on their construction and association for his personal calligraphic items, which had been full of looping traces and squiggles that unspooled like a spider’s internet, crossing and recrossing the canvas. At instances he would “erase” the traces, portray white over black to leave ghostly markings in the background.
“Finally I’m utilizing the portray as a sounding board for the spirit,” his gallery, Gagosian, quoted him as saying. “You may be portray and go into a spot the place thought stops,” he added, “the place you possibly can simply be, and it simply comes out.”
Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. was born in Bronxville, N.Y., on Oct. 15, 1938, and grew up in close by Briarcliff Manor. His father was a mortgage servicer, his mom a homemaker. One in all his neighbors, a painter-turned-advertising-executive, inspired his curiosity in artwork, providing reassurance to Mr. Marden’s mother and father, who needed their son to get an Ivy League training.
They “had been very involved that I used to be going off to guide some horrible, beatnik life,” Mr. Marden stated in 2015 in an interview for the Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project.
Mr. Marden attended Florida Southern Faculty in Lakeland for a 12 months earlier than transferring to Boston College, the place he studied portray and spent his weekends visiting galleries and museums in New York, admiring the work of previous masters, together with Francisco Goya and Francisco de Zurbarán. He graduated with a BFA in 1961 and two years later acquired an MFA from Yale College, the place his academics included painters Alex Katz and Jon Schueler, and his classmates included future art-world stars Chuck Shut, Robert Mangold and Richard Serra.
“Once I obtained to Yale, I painted one self-portrait,” Mr. Marden stated, “and that was the final figurative portray I ever did.”
Along with his first spouse, Baez, he moved to New York, taking a shabby condominium on the Decrease East Facet. For a time they lived with Baez’s mother and father in Paris, the place Mr. Marden frequented museums, carrying his younger son Nicholas on his shoulders, and located sudden inspiration on the streets, the place he watched craftsmen apply plaster and stucco to the partitions as a part of a citywide cleanup challenge.
As he informed it, he was “underneath the affect of the partitions” when he did his first monochrome portray after returning to New York.
“You do one thing virtually by chance, and then you definitely do quite a lot of work, and you may intellectually justify it,” he stated within the oral historical past. He added that he was additionally moved by the work of Johns, who had turned recognizable photographs — most famously, an American flag — into abstractions in his work. “I felt I used to be doing a really comparable factor,” Mr. Marden stated, “besides I had no picture.” As a substitute, he was merely portray a rectangle, within the type of a canvas fitted to rectangular stretchers.
“It was this entire query of, what’s actual?,” he continued. “And I felt I used to be an summary painter portray actual issues.”
His first marriage led to divorce, and in 1968 he married Harrington, in entrance of witnesses that included artwork supplier Klaus Kertess and painter Robert Rauschenberg, for whom he labored as a studio assistant. Along with his spouse, Helen Marden, and his son from his first marriage, Nicholas, survivors embody two daughters from his second marriage, Mirabelle and Melia Marden; a sister; and two grandchildren.
Starting within the early Nineteen Seventies, Mr. Marden labored for a part of the 12 months on the Greek island of Hydra. He additionally had studios in Manhattan, which he adorned with shells, postcards and historical rocks; in Eagles Mere, Pa., the place he labored on fittingly darkish work from a dimly lit barn; and on the Caribbean island of Nevis, the place he and his spouse owned a lodge, the Golden Rock Inn.
Throughout a inventive low level within the Eighties, he traveled by Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, a journey that deepened his curiosity in Asian artwork, reinvigorated his curiosity in portray and helped spark his “Chilly Mountain” works. A later collection of large-scale work, referred to as “The Propitious Backyard of Airplane Picture,” was partly modeled on a remark from a numerologist buddy, who informed Mr. Marden that his “quantity” was 6.
“I used to be born on the fifteenth; 1 plus 5 equals 6,” Mr. Marden informed the Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I exploit six panels in these work, and every panel is 6 by 4 toes, which is 24, which additionally provides as much as 6. There are six colours and 6 variations.”
It was maybe an uncommon method to work, he stated, however “there are all types of the way of getting began on making a portray. You drive by Nebraska and say, ‘Nebraska is gorgeous and I’ll make a portray about it.’ That is one other manner.”
At age 80, in 2018, Mr. Marden unveiled the most important fee of his profession, “Moss Sutra With the Seasons,” a five-panel portray that included the monochromatic strategy of his early works and was put in in a particular gallery on the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Md. It took him 5 years to finish — a size of time that was maybe solely barely longer than common for Mr. Marden, whose studios had been usually full of unfinished works, leaning in opposition to the partitions or perched on a shelf.
Requested by the New York Instances how he knew when a bit was completed, he quipped, “When the truck’s out entrance.”
