Sean Scully Galerie Lelong Art Basel Sean Scully Blame

Brice Marden with MOMA exhibition catalgoue; photo: Kendall Herbst

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"Who is Brice Marden painting for?" That's what one veteran painter asked after visiting the Brice Marden retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Feeling impressed but dispassionate, he observed: "Information technology's as if Marden constantly looks over his shoulder as he paints."

In a 1976 interview, Mr. Marden answered the question: "I paint for myself. I paint for my wife … really at eye, [I paint for] anybody who wants to see it."

Every artist wants an beholden audience; otherwise, what's the indicate? A painting is there to be seen, implicitly, past someone else. Still, in that location's a departure between taking an audition into account and playing to the crowd. Mr. Marden fits into the latter category, and it'due south worth pondering who—or what—constitutes the "oversupply."

The standard complaint almost Mr. Marden is that he's elegant to a mistake, whether information technology'south applied to the early monochromatic canvases that put him on the map or the expansive networks of looping calligraphic lines that he's pursued in recent years. It's an apt, if frequent, criticism: Mr. Marden rarely shakes off his penchant for the immaculately contrived marker. He can't help but advertise his ain expert taste when putting brush to canvas.

In that regard, he has something in mutual with Sean Scully, some other gimmicky abstract painter with a major reputation. Mr. Scully'due south contempo paintings, drawings and prints are featured in Wall of Light, an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sean Scully,Raphael (2004), oil on canvas, 108″ ten 144″; courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully clearly take inspiration from Abstract Expressionism: the encompassing "American calibration" of painters like Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko; the romantic notion that nonrepresentational form can deport spiritual portent; the conviction that fine art-making is a quest of heroic proportions. The work of both men is inconceivable without the example set past the New York School.

It'south as true that their careers have been predicated on slipping out from under its imposing shadow by looking to cultures and epochs far removed from our own.

At Mr. Marden's MoMA show, there'south a suite of painfully self-witting collages using reproductions of antique sculptures and paintings by Goya and Fra Angelico to highlight the tradition in which he works. The Cold Mountain series and subsequent canvases are as frank, if more circumspect, about his debt to Asian art, specially Japanese calligraphy.

Mondrian, Rothko and Philip Guston inform Mr. Scully'south stacked arrays of jutting blocks of colour. His palette—smoldering, dusky, elegiac and occasionally punctuated past vibrant tones—points to the blacks, grays and tans found in the paintings of Goya, Zurbarán and Velázquez.

These links to precedent are palpable and admirable. Tradition or, every bit Mr. Marden has it, "that one big affair," is a vital strength, an indispensable foundation. Yet what practice Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully contribute to that tradition, really?

Mr. Marden'south prowess with color is indisputable: Any painter whose palette is unnamable, even when a canvas is defended to a single hue, clearly possesses a gift. The Whitney's tripartite Summer Table (1972-73) is, in its implacable richness, about impossibly evocative. The later canvases are divers more than past drawing than painting, but his ever broadening line admits to velvety and, at times, pulp tones.

Mr. Scully's talent is for color likewise. You've got to love how a lonely vertical slab of brooding light-green anchors Barcelona White Bar (2004), an orchestration of deep reds, oranges and grays. Nevertheless bulky and monolithic the compositions, Mr. Scully's palette enlivens them with bold rhythms and counter-rhythms.

Overall, however, the handsomeness of both men's work is suffocating.

Mr. Marden is incapable of making an honest marking. However intuitive, spontaneous and worked his surfaces and brushwork announced, they are calculated from the go-go. Effect, not exploration, defines the work. A colleague suggests that placing a Marden sail adjacent to a vintage Pollock would offer an middle-opening comparing. I'm more inclined to run across how 1 would fare alongside a Richard Diebenkorn painting; Mr. Marden's pictorial techniques have their ground in Diebenkorn'southward quietly tenacious procedure.

If Mr. Marden flaunts his sensitivity, Mr. Scully bullies the room. It's not an unappealing arroyo: Forthrightness, even arrogance, tin exist bracing in art. But Mr. Scully is content to reiterate compositional formulas—his puzzle-like variations on the grid are, at this date, a trope that has lost its reason for being. The wisps of vivid color that peek out from behind the crevices of his geometries are an easy and annoying mannerism. The physicality of his paint-handling is, in its own manner, as overbearing equally Mr. Marden's and sometimes confused: The touch is oftentimes woolly and vague when it wants to be fleshy or architectural.

Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully deserve our attention, in role for the modest pleasures their work affords, but more then equally signposts of our jumbled culture. They are modernists pointing not to new possibilities, but to pictorial platitudes that go down too easily to inspire dandy fine art.

History is the audience these two painters play to, and in the end, information technology's their straitjacket. Tradition develops and mutates, often when artists least wait it. Henri Matisse, a painter both men admire, knew that tradition reveals its continuities and truths only when ruthlessly chosen into question. Mr. Marden and Mr. Scully are too cozy and also polite in their expertise to stretch that far. Sometimes civilisation wants something a bit rude—as do the rest of us.

© 2006 Mario Naves

Originally published in the December ten, 2006 edition of The New York Observer.

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Source: https://mnaves.wordpress.com/2006/12/10/brice-marden-at-the-museum-of-modern-art-sean-scully-at-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art/

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