Brice Marden, Paintings and Drawings

Book excerpt: Brice Marden's art is deceptively austere. Within the seemingly narrow color range of his paintings and drawings, he orchestrates remarkable thematic variations of color, light, scale and mood. His monochromatic gray palette of the 1960s, expressing a "vocabulary of ambiguities,'' gave way to limpid motions and a neoclassical exploration of color-and-light relationships. Kertess, a curator at New York City's Whitney Museum, links the elemental grace of Marden's more recent works to this American artist's summer sojourns on Hydra, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. In Marden's organic, cellular structures, Kertess sees the influence of Chinese calligraphy and Marden's trips to the Far East. Illustrated with 158 plates (133 in color), this handsome monograph follows Marden's metamorphosis from a pure abstractionist to an artist seeking to objectify the spiritual, as he does in his Annunciation series and in the Elements, which are symbolic paintings rooted in medieval alchemy.