Brice Marden:
A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings
October 29, 2006–January 15, 2007

the MOMA
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, sixth floor
The Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries, third floor

FW:RE:NY TIMES BRICE MARDEN….
 
“Did you see Sunday Times? I don’t understand that article,” said the woman to a docent at the MoMA’s recently opened Brice Marden exhibition. It’s all about his houses, and that’s not what the art is about. It’s all about culture. Having overhead this much, and received several messages about the subject. we of course searched out our own copy of the Sunday NY Times Arts & Leisure Section to see what the fuss was all about.
 
Right there on Page One, we confronted the article “A Subtle Sense of Place” by Ted Loos, which, while stopping to describe at several points the relationship of what the artist paints to where he paints it, dwells so long on descriptions of the Mardens’ various digs, that the piece would definitely be at home as the “and don’t you just wish YOU could live like this” feature in the Real Estate section.
 
Having spent the significant portion of the afternoon at the museum taking in nearly four decades of work by Brice Marden, work that reflects the history of art and at the same time changed the course of art in the 20th Century, the intimacy of the materiality, the line, the textures of the graphite and the paint, the broad gesture and the obvious touching of the surface to refine the message, the approach taken by the New York Times this Sunday seemed out of synch. Perhaps it is we who are out of synch with the way a media mainstay perceives the frame in which readers prefer to understand their art.

Mark Wiener & Linda DiGusta
Editors
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