Brice Marden, whose elegant fusion of minimalism and Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s revivified painting and established him as one of the most admired and influential artists of his generation, died on Thursday at his home in Tivoli, N.Y., in Dutchess County. He was 84.<\/p>\n
The cause was cancer, his wife, Helen Marden, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
In the mid-1960s, when conceptual art, Pop Art and minimalist sculpture were in the ascendancy and painting was declared dead by many critics and artists, Mr. Marden issued a powerful counterstatement.<\/p>\n
His paintings, first exhibited in New York at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, seemed irreducibly minimalist at first glance \u2014 a solid field of color for each canvas, in ambiguous gray and green tones, with an unpainted one-inch strip at the bottom where drips of paint ran over. On closer inspection, the matte surfaces, achieved through a mixture of oil paint and liquefied beeswax, opened up to reveal intricate textural layerings, applied with brush and spatula, that reflected his preoccupation with masters like Zurbar\u00e1n, Goya and C\u00e9zanne and his total rejection of the impersonal aesthetic of conceptualism and minimalism.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems as though, because the early paintings were just one color, one could say one color, no feelings \u2014 but instead of no feelings they were all<\/em> this feeling,\u201d Mr. Marden told Bomb magazine in 1988. \u201cEach layer was a color, was a feeling, a feeling that related to the feeling, the color, the layer beneath it. A concentration of feelings in layers.\u201d<\/p>\n The critical response was overwhelming, propelling Mr. Marden to art-world stardom while still in his 20s. Hilton Kramer, reviewing the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum\u2019s retrospective of his work in The New York Times in 1975, called Mr. Marden not simply a painter but the leader of an entire school.<\/p>\n \u201cThe art journals follow his work with close attention,\u201d he wrote. \u201cYounger painters, scarcely out of school, take his work as a model the way their counterparts once took Willem de Kooning\u2019s and Jasper Johns\u2019s and Frank Stella\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Marden maintained this exalted status throughout his career. In his five \u201cGrove Group\u201d paintings of the early to middle 1970s, inspired by the olive trees he saw on his annual visits to the Greek island of Hydra, he introduced modulated greens, browns and blacks into his canvases; in the vibrant \u201cSummer Table\u201d (1972-73), he introduced pulsing blues and a searing yellow. \u201cAfter a summer in Greece I felt the light should be intenser, clearer and less shrouded,\u201d he wrote in 1973.<\/p>\n In the 1980s, Mr. Marden took a dramatic new turn. After seeing an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy, and visiting Asia for the first time, he developed a style based on Chinese calligraphy, weaving loops and ropes of color into webs of overlapping and intersecting lines that covered large-scale canvases. Initially angular, they evolved into sinuously elegant ribbons of color.<\/p>\n The \u201cCold Mountain\u201d series, produced between 1989 and 1991 and based on the Zen poems of the Chinese writer Han Shan, epitomized his new approach, which seemed to wed Asian influences with the linear work of artists like Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock.<\/p>\n Where Mr. Marden led, his audience followed, as did critical acclaim. In 2006 he was the subject of a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art that gave an official stamp to his standing as a major artist. He was, The Wall Street Journal wrote, \u201camong the handful of living artists established enough to be considered part of art history.\u201d Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker called him \u201cthe most profound abstract painter of the past four decades.\u201d<\/p>\n Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. was born on Oct. 15, 1938, in Bronxville, N.Y., and grew up in nearby Briarcliff Manor. His father worked for a mortgage servicing company. His mother, Kathryn (Fox) Marden, was a homemaker.<\/p>\n As a teenager, he made the pages of The New York Times when he sold $5 shares in himself to finance a trip to Texas, pledging to return principal and interest to his investors. He came back rich in experience but with only $10 in his pocket.<\/p>\n A lackluster student, he enrolled in Florida Southern College with an interest in art that had been encouraged by a kindly neighbor who bought him a subscription to Art News. After a year he transferred to Boston University, where he painted self-portraits and still lifes and, in 1961, earned a B.F.A. degree from the School of Fine and Applied Arts.<\/p>\n While in Boston, he became immersed in the city\u2019s folk music scene and married Pauline Baez, the older sister of the singer Joan Baez. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Helen Marden, his second wife, he is survived by a son from his first marriage, Nicholas; two daughters from his second marriage, Mirabelle and Melia Marden; a younger sister, Mary Carroll Marden; and two grandchildren. His brother, Michael, died in 2010.<\/p>\n While attending Yale University\u2019s summer school in Norfolk, Conn., Mr. Marden ventured into abstract painting, He continued to follow that path at the Yale University School of Art, where his classmates included the painters Nancy Graves and Chuck Close and the sculptor Richard Serra. It was at Yale that he began working with a muted palette and pledged allegiance to the rectangle, at a time when many painters, notably Frank Stella, were starting to use shaped canvases.<\/p>\n \u201cI had this whole idea, especially with the monochromatic paintings, of you could get the exact perfect right color for that shape, and if you did, if you really got it right \u2014 say, if you had absolute correctness of form \u2014 God knows what the painting was capable of doing,\u201d he told Harry Cooper, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, during a studio visit in 2009. At the same time, many of his titles, referring to people, places or events, invoked a world beyond the painting\u2019s frame.<\/p>\n After receiving a master\u2019s degree in fine arts in 1963, Mr. Marden moved to New York. He found a part-time job at Chiron Press, a silk-screen printing shop, where he worked on the first \u201cLove\u201d poster by Robert Indiana. He was hired as a guard at the Jewish Museum, where a Jasper Johns show greatly influenced his ideas about touch, surface and abstraction. He later worked as a studio assistant for Robert Rauschenberg.<\/p>\n His first monochromatic panels were exhibited in 1964 at Swarthmore College and, soon after that, at the Bykert Gallery. \u201cPeople were saying, painting was dead. And this was my way of thinking, well, there are things that haven\u2019t been done,\u201d he told Mr. Cooper of the National Gallery.<\/p>\n In 1968 he began joining his panels in twos and then threes, as in the final painting of the \u201cGrove Group\u201d and in the \u201cRed, Yellow, Blue\u201d series\u201d of 1974. The monochromatic painting reached a kind of apotheosis in the \u201cAnnunciation\u201d series of 1978, five three-panel works in primary colors alluding to the five states of mind experienced by the Virgin Mary after she was told by the Archangel Gabriel that she was to bear the son of God. John Russell of The New York Times called the series \u201cone of the richest, clearest and most fulfilled of our century\u2019s grand designs.\u201d<\/p>\n In the early 1980s, as neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel brought turbulence and drama to painting, Mr. Marden began searching for a new idiom. \u201cI came to feel that my work had reached a point where it was too preoccupied with refining a concept,\u201d he told Art in America in 1987. In an interview with Flash Art magazine in 1990, he said that he faced \u201csilent creative death.\u201d<\/p>\n A long trip to Sri Lanka and India kindled an interest in the arts of Asia, reinforced by an exhibition at Japan House and the Asia Society in New York, \u201cMasters of Japanese Calligraphy.\u201d He embarked on a series of paintings and drawings using a long-handled brush or long twigs to create gestural, calligraphic works that became the signature of his later career. The structure of Chinese calligraphy, he told Mr. Cooper, was \u201cbasically like a grid, so it wasn\u2019t that far removed from what I was already doing.\u201d<\/p>\n The scaffoldlike forms of paintings like \u201cDiptych\u201d (1986) and \u201cUntitled No. 3\u201d (1986-87), with their echoes of C\u00e9zanne and Cubism, loosened into the looping rhythms of the \u201cCold Mountain\u201d series, his largest-scale works to date, with their orchestrated tangle of lines in black and brown, or assertive primary colors, against pale backgrounds.<\/p>\n In the \u201cRed Rock\u201d series, executed between 2000 and 2002, Mr. Marden employed vibrant colors, as he did with his \u201cGrove Group\u201d series; he also simplified his lines, with stunning effect. Doubling down, he took the same approach to a series of six-panel works, on an even grander scale, called \u201cThe Propitious Garden of Plane Image.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to his home in Tivoli, Mr. Marden maintained homes and studios in Manhattan; Eagles Mere, Pa.; and Hydra. In 2017 he learned that he had cancer, a diagnosis that did nothing to stem his output or his packed exhibition schedule. The next fall, the five-panel \u201cMoss Sutra With the Seasons,\u201d five years in the making, was installed in its own chapel at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Md. It was the largest commission of his career.<\/p>\n \u201cI paint because it\u2019s my work,\u201d Mr. Marden told the documentarian Edgar B. Howard in 1976. \u201cAnd I paint because I believe it\u2019s the best way that I can pass my time as a human being. I paint for myself. I paint for my wife. And I paint for anybody that\u2019s willing to look at it.\u201d<\/p>\n Maia Coleman contributed reporting.<\/p>\n