SFMOMA, Floor 4 · Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.

Three paintings, three decades. The first is a closed surface of muted color and wax, so dense it reads almost as a wall. The last is a tangle of lines on a nearly square field, painted as if the wall had come apart into the paths a hand walks. Brice Marden's room is short, but it shows one of the biggest changes any painter on this floor made: from the most silent kind of abstraction to one full of movement, without ever giving up on the idea that a painting should be complete in itself.

Becoming a Painter (1938–1966)

Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. was born on October 15, 1938, in Bronxville, New York, and grew up in nearby Briarcliff Manor. He went to Florida Southern College for a year, 1957–58, then to Boston University's School of Fine and Applied Arts, where he earned a BFA in 1961. In 1960 he married Pauline Baez, the sister of Joan Baez; their son Nick later played bass in New York's punk scene. The marriage ended a few years later.

At the Yale School of Art he studied with Esteban Vicente, Alex Katz, and Jack Tworkov, and took his MFA in 1963. Chuck Close and Richard Serra, both with rooms on this floor, were at Yale with him. He moved to New York that year.

His first New York job put him in a gallery as a guard. In 1964 he stood watch at the Jewish Museum during Jasper Johns's retrospective, looking at Johns's encaustic flags and targets day after day. In 1966, on Dorothea Rockburne's suggestion, Robert Rauschenberg hired him as a studio assistant. A video in this room has Marden speaking about how he admired both men. The same year, the Bykert Gallery gave him his first New York solo show, which included the first of his oil-and-beeswax paintings.

The Room

Untitled (1968). Beeswax and oil on canvas, 69 by 90 inches, two vertical canvases joined side by side. This is the early Marden: no image, no gesture, no visible brushwork, a surface built up in layers of oil mixed with wax and scraped smooth so that the color lies like skin on the canvas. The colors in these years were muted grays, greens, and tans; Marden later said that palette only allowed "chords."

The date matters. He was thirty, two years into working for Rauschenberg, whose White Painting the museum also owns, and four years past those weeks guarding Johns's wax-surfaced flags. Marden took something from each: the single-color surface, the wax, the idea that a painting is first of all an object hanging on a wall. Then he made it quieter than either of them. The joined panels matter too. The seam between them is the only line in the painting.

Between the Paintings (1968–1991)

By 1968 Marden had married the artist Helen Harrington, known as Helen Marden. They had two daughters, Mirabelle and Melia. In 1971 the family visited the Greek island of Hydra, and in 1973 they bought a house there. Greek light changed his color. He wanted, he said, "something more like fugues." From 1978 to 1985 he worked on designs for the windows of Basel Cathedral.

In 1984 he saw the exhibition Masters of Japanese Calligraphy, and he started looking hard at Chinese and Japanese writing with a brush. From 1989 to 1991 he painted the Cold Mountain series, named for Han Shan, the Chinese hermit-poet of the eighth century. Following the rules of calligraphy, he started each painting at the upper right and worked left and down. The characters are his own invention. They are not words, only the way words move.

The Room, Continued

The Sisters (1991–1993). Oil on linen, about seven feet by five. Painted straight after Cold Mountain, it uses the same looping, continuous lines, now in a vertical canvas. The curator Charles Wylie described the painting as being about Marden's two daughters: "two figures next to one another," but more about how one person can be "part of and separate from another." The lines cross, lean on each other, and pull apart. There is no image of two girls here. The relationship is drawn instead of the people.

It is worth standing between this and Untitled (1968). The single seam in the earlier painting, where two canvases meet, has become dozens of lines that keep crossing. In both, two things sit side by side and are also one painting.

Epitaph Painting 1 (1996–1997). Oil on linen, about eight feet square, hung without a frame. By the late 1990s Marden had loosened the calligraphic grid of Cold Mountain. "I just went into these paintings and started a line," he said. The line here doesn't follow writing order. It travels, doubles back, and fills the square field. Across his work of these years you can see corrections: lines rubbed out, sanded down, left as shadows behind the newer ones. An epitaph is the writing on a grave, words chosen to sum up a life in a few lines. Whatever Marden meant by the title, the painting is writing without words, and it keeps its earlier drafts visible.

What the Room Shows

Marden once said, "I paint nature." Nothing in this room is a picture of anything. But the wax painting has the stillness of stone, and the late paintings have the paths of vines or water. In 1968, the painting was about holding still. By 1997, it was about the line moving. The thing he never gave up was that each painting answered only to itself.

In 2006 the critic Peter Schjeldahl called Marden "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades." Marden died at his home in Tivoli, New York, on August 9, 2023, at eighty-four. 🌁

Timeline — Brice Marden

• October 15, 1938 — Born in Bronxville, New York.

• 1957–1958 — Florida Southern College.

• 1960 — Marries Pauline Baez.

• 1961 — BFA, Boston University.

• 1963 — MFA, Yale; moves to New York.

• 1964 — Guard at the Jewish Museum during the Jasper Johns retrospective.

• 1966 — Becomes Rauschenberg's assistant; first New York solo show, Bykert Gallery, with his first oil-and-beeswax paintings.

• By 1968 — Married to Helen Harrington (Helen Marden).

• 1968 — Untitled, beeswax and oil.

• 1971 — First visit to Hydra.

• 1973 — Buys a house on Hydra.

• 1978–1985 — Works on the Basel Cathedral windows.

• 1984 — Sees Masters of Japanese Calligraphy.

• 1989–1991 — Cold Mountain series.

• 1991–1993 — The Sisters.

• 1996–1997 — Epitaph Painting 1.

• 2006 — Schjeldahl calls him "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades."

• August 9, 2023 — Dies in Tivoli, New York.