What ought our reaction to be when we hear that an artist has passed away who we didn’t particularly like or weren’t moved by? Or maybe didn’t even know?
It happens all the time: You hear a memorial—on the radio for instance—about an artist whose name is unfamiliar; you read something on the back page of a magazine mourning the passing of a painter or singer whose lifetime of work had made no impression on you at all. Do we feel anything? Should we have some sort of reaction when we hear about the death of a semi-famous artist?
I think the answer to that is Yes. I think that when we hear about an artist passing away, even if we never heard of them, our first reaction ought to be “the world is a lesser place now.”
Because if you’re hearing about the passing of some artist, even if you don’t know them, somebody does, and the work of that artist has risen to some level of acclaim. Whether I like, admire, or even know the artist in question, the sad truth is that a conduit of creation has been snuffed out. And because of that the world you and I live in is a little less vibrant.
Brice Marden was a painter that had always been on the periphery of my awareness. I had seen his stuff and didn’t think much of it, although his name always drifted in and around some artists that I really do like.
Marden was born in Bronxville, New York in 1938. He got a BFA from Boston University in 1961 and an MFA from Yale in 1963. He had his first solo show in New York City in 1966. That year he also started working as an assistant for Robert Rauschenberg. That’ll open doors.
ArtNews said that Marden “quietly pushed [abstraction] in new directions, repeatedly injecting it with new life during an era when painting was presumed to have hit a wall….” I like that, and can see it when I look at his works and note the dates on them. In the 1980s, influenced by calligraphy, he worked through several paintings he called his Cold Mountain series. These are canvases full of very lyrical, semi-repetitive motions painted in graceful lines. They look a little like what you’d get if you took all the drips and drops off a Jackson Pollock painting. They’re really mesmerizing.
Peter Schjeldahl called Marden a “late-entry Abstract Expressionist: a conservative original, the last valedictorian of the New York School,” and later, he said he was “the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades.” Brice Marden died earlier this month on August 9. He was 84.