<p>The exhilarating tracery of Brice Marden's new work affirms his
pre-eminence among U.S. abstract painters
</p>
<p>By Robert Hughes
</p>
<p> Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings of 1988-91--six of them, big ones, 9 ft. by 12 ft., backed up by a few
dozen drawings and prints--are now on view at the Dia Center
for the Arts in New York City. This is a show and a half. How
fast, how silently, the sight of a real sensibility at full
stretch can cut through the visual jabber and white noise of so
much of the gallery scene! On the evidence of these new works,
Marden, 53, is now the finest American abstract painter of his
generation.
</p>
<p> Every artist has prototypes, artists he or she admires and
learns from--an internal homage that never ends. The problem
is to subdue their authority, to bring their lessons into line
with one's instincts. The artist who does this may be called
mature. So with Marden, who with this show of huge, pale
canvases covered with a loose tracery of inky line has managed
at last to reconcile his inheritance as a late modern American
painter--chiefly, the work of Jackson Pollock--with his
interests in Oriental art. Marden has made intense and
complicated images out of this dialogue. His internal argument
about his sources is settled, and the show is an exhilarating
vindication of the expressive reach of abstract art: an argument
for beauty.
</p>
<p> Cold Mountain was not a place but a man, an 8th century
Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty who quit the imperial court and
retired to a mountain community of Buddhist monks and hermits.
There, for the rest of his life, he wrote verses (strict in
form, four couplets to a page, each a small tower of vertical
characters) declaring his independence from the material "world
of dust." Cold Mountain was one of those jokester sages in whom
Buddhist culture--Zen Buddhism in particular--abounded.
Marden, whose interest in Oriental poetry had been deepening in
the 1980s, seized on him not only because he liked the poetry
in translation but because of the beautiful and wayward
calligraphy of the surviving texts.
</p>
<p> Up to then, the look of Marden's paintings was familiar to
the point of seeming an art-world staple--humane Minimalism.
Since the '70s he had been working in a very controlled format
of blocks of subdued color butted up one against another; the
image was "built" from monochrome canvases. The quality of the
color and the proportional relationships of the canvases were
both crucial. He liked his paintings to be the size of a man
(or a woman), so that one would be induced without being quite
conscious of it to connect them to standing figures, other
"presences" in the room, rather than to view them as spectacles.
</p>
<p> Marden admired Jasper Johns--a critic in the '70s
brusquely but memorably wrote off an abstract twin-canvas
picture by Marden as "Jasper's Painting with Two Balls, without
the balls." And like Johns, he worked in a mixture of oil paint
and wax, a false encaustic that gave his surfaces both substance
and an inner glow, as if light were working its way through
layers of slightly dusty translucency. You thought of it as
skin. Marden was a brilliant colorist, in a very tuned-down way.
His warm grays and brick reds, his low thick blues and his
blocks of terre verte, betokened nature, suggesting planes of
light on sky and sea, old stone and vegetation. They had none
of the inorganic chemical look of so much post-Pop American
color. But their danger was that they could turn into a formula.
</p>
<p> To break the mold, Marden in the mid-'80s started doing
calligraphic drawings, not with a brush but with twigs of
ailanthus wood--ailanthus being the common weed tree that
grows in every sidewalk crack in Lower Manhattan but is known
to the Chinese as the tree of heaven. Stuck in a long holder and
dipped in ink, these flexible little sticks delivered a blobby,
rough line, far from the look of classical brush drawing but
with some of its improvised character.
</p>
<p> Of course, an enthusiasm for calligraphy guarantees an
artist nothing. For decades, America has been full of bad
abstract painting based on Chinese and Japanese ideograms--it
goes with wind-bells and Bay Area Zen. If Marden's work avoids
that cliche, it is because of his accommodation with Western
gestural drawing--specifically Pollock's--in its speed,
amplitude of space and openness to chance. In these paintings
you see Marden thinking about Pollock, rather slowly. Marden's
black, groping line offers a kind of schematic reduction of
Pollock's all-over web.
</p>
<p> "The line," wrote Paul Klee back in the days of the
Bauhaus, "likes to go for a walk." This is true of Marden's
paintings, which at first sight seem to consist of nothing but
line, moving across the surface in an improvised way full of
checks, turnings, erasures--a maze making itself. The nature
of the line is intimately involved with the tool Marden uses,
which is in effect the ailanthus twig writ large: a long-handled
brush with flitchlike bristles, floppy rather than stiff, whose
ramblings convey an air of reflective uncertainty. Not for
Marden the forceful calligraphic rush, the electric
ink-blackness, of some Zen characters.
</p>
<p> There is a small amount of color in these paintings--generally strokes of earth green and rubbed patches of raw umber--but the prevalent hue of the gray-to-silver monochrome seems
to change from canvas to canvas, emitting different tints of
light. Marden scrapes back and sandpapers the canvas, leaving
the ghosts of one layer of paint behind the other; this subtlety
(the equivalent of the nuances inside the coats of wax in his
earlier work) plays off against the roughness of the lines.
Sometimes a whole web of dark line gets canceled, whited out,
but roughly--on those thin grounds nothing can be concealed,
anyway--so that it forms a counterpart to the drawn structure,
a sort of ghost image behind the interlacing on top.
</p>
<p> There is also a lot of blurring of the line itself; it is
blotted when too dark or scrubbed so that smears are left; drips
run down and impede its forward movement. The effect of this,
however, is not to make the image seem tentative; it just slows
up the progress of the line enough to keep it from looking glib.
The word pedestrian comes to mind, though in a far from
disparaging sense.
</p>
<p> These are bold paintings, but not in a macho way. They
accept hesitation as part of the normal apparatus of
consciousness. You don't get the image all at once, and the size
of the canvases is meant not so much to impress you in the
familiar, take-it-or-leave-it American fashion as to draw you
slowly into the web. This, too, is part of Pollock's often
misunderstood legacy. Looking at the "Cold Mountain" paintings
one inevitably thinks of nature: thin they are, and austere, but
also full of light and space. They suggest mountain landscapes,
rocks half-effaced by blowing mist, sharp things incompletely
seen. They are materializations of the words of the Chinese
