Brice Marden, 1938-2023, RIP - Notebook 2023-6 — Briarcliff Manor-Scarborough Historical Society

Early this month the world lost a great artist and son of Briarcliff Manor when Brice Marden died at his home in Tivoli, New York, on August 9, 2023, at the age of 84. Writing in The New Yorker in 2006, the critic Peter Schjeldahl described Marden as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades". This is reflected in the length of his obituary in the New York Times – Two full pages!

“Born July 16, 1909 to John and Kathryn Owens Fox of Jersey City, N.J., Brice Marden’s mother, attended Dickinson High School. She lived in Briarcliff Manor for 48 years, prior to moving to Ossining in 1979. She was a member of All Saints Episcopal Church, where she served as secretary in the 1950s. She worked at Teague Library at the former Briarcliff College and at the Warner Library in Tarrytown in the 1960s. Co-incidentally she passed away on the same day (August 9) and at the same age (84 years) as her son, Brice.

Mrs. Marden married Nicholas Brice Marden in Harrison in February 16, 1933. He worked for a mortgage company.” 1

The Marden family lived in a house at 729 Pleasantville Road. The house, which no longer exists, was similar to the houses on Dalmeny built by Walter W. Law to house workers with families and farm managers. It stood on property very near to the high-tension wires near the intersection of Pleasantville Road and the Taconic State Parkway.

Brice Marden’s Family Home at 729 Pleasantville Road

“Brice played football and tennis, and was active in Chorus, The Bulletin, and the senior play. In his years beyond Briarcliff, Brice Marden was to go on to become one of the most accomplished contemporary artists.” 2

“In 1960, Brice Marden married Pauline Baez (sister of Joan) and together they had a son, Nicholas. The marriage to Pauline ended a few years later and by 1968 he was remarried to artist Helen Marden. He and Helen had two daughters, Mirabelle and Melia. His son, Nick Marden, is a bassist who has participated in the New York punk scene since the late 1970s playing in bands such as the Stimulators and False Prophets. The Mardens' daughter Mirabelle Marden was a proprietor of Rivington Arms, an art gallery in New York. She is also a photographer. Melia Marden is the chef of the New York restaurant group The Smile.

From 1987 to 2000 Marden’s studio was located on the Bowery. At the time of his death the artist had a Manhattan studio in a 10th-floor penthouse duplex on West Street with around 5,000 square feet of space and one two-story window looking onto the Hudson River. The Mardens bought an estate in Tivoli, New York, called Rose Hill, in 2002. At its center is a stately 1843 main house on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River. The studio was carved out of an old carriage house and has been converted into a large, light-filled space with western and northern exposures. At Rainbow Farms, the family's 400-acre summer residence in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania, since 1991, an old barn was converted to a third workspace with almost no natural light. On Hydra, Marden and his wife traded up houses (as they did elsewhere), moving into the current one in 1989. In 2006, the couple bought a fifth property, Golden Rock Inn, on the Caribbean Island of Nevis, with plans to build yet another studio there. “ 3

A 2015 Interview with his daughter Mirabelle Marden shows how his life in Briarcliff Manor led him to become an artist:

“MIRABELLE: We were supposed to interview someone about a decisive moment. And I asked you when you knew you wanted to be an artist.

BRICE: And I said, “Falling asleep up in the woods in Briarcliff.” I think I was in seventh grade. There was a big field out behind my house that went up into a wooded hill.

MIRABELLE: This was in Briarcliff Manor, New York – which is on the Taconic.

BRICE: Yeah, this is right next to the Taconic Parkway. Eventually they tore the house down and expanded the parkway.

MIRABELLE: Do you remember, years ago, we visited where your house was and looked at the trees that your dad had planted.

BRICE: My father planted those trees because they were going to put Con Ed power lines going up the hill. He fought it and fought it. They put them up anyhow. I think he planted those trees as visual protection. But, yeah, I used to go wander in the woods, and one time I was in this little grove. I fell asleep and woke up lying in these reindeer ferns, and it just seemed to me that when I woke up, I was different than when I went to sleep. I always took that as the point that I become an artist.

MIRABELLE: Did you dream something?”

BRICE: I don’t remember any dream. All I remember is waking up and feeling there had been a change while I was sleeping.

MIRABELLE: I didn’t know that you wanted to be an artist when you were that young.” 4

“Brice attended the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts, where he received a BFA in 1961. At the Yale University School of Art and Architecture he earned an MFA in1963.

From 1969 to 1974, Brice was on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has been exhibiting his contemporary artwork annually since his student days. His first solo exhibition was in 1964, at the Wilcox Gallery of Swarthmore College. In 1975, at the age of only thirty-six, Brice was accorded a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum.

Although he is acclaimed for his monochrome canvases, Brice’s work is chiefly noted for its interplay of color and shape.

By 1968, Brice was painting multi-panel works joined either vertically or horizontally and done in a wide range of hues and shapes.

According to Current Biography, one of Brice’s best-known works, Grove Group (1972–76) is thought to be a turning point in his career. It consists of five paintings and to heighten the effect of each color, plane, and brushstroke, Marden developed the unique process of adding beeswax and turpentine to oil paint and applying the mixture in many thin layers. Marden employed this technique for the Grove Group paintings. Another work, Thira (1979-80) conveys a Greek temple in eighteen panels, the colors of which connote earth, sea and sky. This intent with Thira, Brice has remarked, was to express “the still point of balance where land and myth, sky and sea, form and space come together”.

In his later works, Brice has continued to explore a variety of artistic mediums, textures and forms of expression.” 2

An example o the Cold Mountain Series, 1990s.

“In 1983, Marden and family traveled to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India; the artist became fascinated by the art, landscape, and culture of parts of Asia. Marden subsequently incorporated numerous elements of certain Asian traditions into his work, making them one key to his process (the Shell Drawings, 1985–87). A visit in 1984 to the exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, 8th-19th Century, encouraged Marden to use form, a predominant influence in his recent work—which can be seen in his acclaimed Cold Mountain series, both paintings and works on paper, 1989-1991. Combining airy calligraphic scaffoldings of line with whitish or palely tinted backgrounds, these 9-by-12-foot paintings were the biggest Marden had created up to that point. An infatuation with Chinese calligraphy and poetry helped spark the change in his art toward line and gesture, works inspired by the free-spirited eighth-century Chinese hermit and poet of that name (en: Cold Mountain - Han Shan, in Chinese). At first, lines in Marden's paintings and drawings were arranged in neat rows, like Chinese writing. But the lines have got looser, and hence more evocative of landscapes and figures. As a Minimalist, Marden was concerned with grids and patterns. Looking to add freedom to his work without abandoning order, he found Chinese calligraphy inspiring, with its system of drawing characters in rows Article.

In 2000, Marden embarked on The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, a series of paintings that began in 2000 with the third version being completed in 2006. The painting consists of six panels whose backgrounds are each defined by one of these colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The lines bend, loop, and twist within the panels. The are made with oil on linen and the longest two of which measure 24 feet” 3

An example of The propitious Garden of Plane Image, 2000-2006

Sources cited:

1. The Gazette. Obituary Marden, Kathryn, F. Week of August 19-25, 1993.

2. Adapted from “Brice Marden, Class of 1956. Inducted Fall 1996” (Hall of Distinguished Alumni).

3. Brice Marden Wikipedia Article

4. From Interview. Brice Marden, by Mirabelle Marden, January 4, 2015.

Additional Sources:

Brice Marden, Still True to His Vision. By Carol Vogel , New York Times, March 19, 2019

Brice Marden, Who Rejuvenated Painting in the 1960s, Dies at 84. New York Times By William Grimes, Aug. 10, 2023

Brice Marden obituary (The Guardian, Charles Darwent, August 25, 2023).

For a more comprehensive list of works by Brice Marden see Brice Marden: List of works - All Artworks by Date.

Brice Marden (b. 1938, Bronxville, New York), by Rachel Federman, SFMOMA.

Brice Marden A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings [MOMA Brochure] from a October 29, 2006-january, 2007 Exhibition, Plane Image: A Brice Marden Retrospective.