by Onajídé Shabaka - 27 Oct., 2006

   Roberta Smith in Boca Raton

    by Onajídé Shabaka

Roberta Smith, senior art critic for The New York Times, was in Boca Raton speaking with both the public and students at Florida Atlantic University. Her approach as Eminent Scholar of Arts and Humanities at the university was one of attempting to position herself at the same level of her audience but, there was a factor of intimidation because of her standing and titles. That however, did not stop some members of the audience to question her on some of the things she'd written about or her position regarding aspects of the visual arts.

Her lecture to students was a presentation of slides showing an excursion through the history of Western painting. During her talk she spent more time talking about certain painters, one of which was Brice Marden. And, behold, today's NY Times has an article on Brice Marden by Ms. Smith. Since she also mentioned Donald Judd even more times than Brice Marden, I wonder if there is a Donald Judd piece in progress?

This is actually a very interesting development although, the exhibition is not local, as I've been thinking about Marden's work of late and wanted to go look at some. Are there any works in local public (or private) collections that are accessible?

The exhibition shows him as an artist who has spent his career assiduously converting the rule-ridden zone of Minimalist abstraction into a capacious yet disciplined place, pushing it toward landscape and the figure while reconnecting it to its roots in Abstract Expressionism and beyond, in non-Western art.

Mr. Marden’s dense planes of color [from the 1960s] simply emphasized to the exclusion of all else the most obtrusive fact of most paintings — shape and background color. He brought them forward and made them unavoidable, not unlike Donald Judd’s Minimalist boxes.

Basically Mr. Marden was making visible, through line, the gestures by which he had previously layered his paint onto his monochrome surfaces. The worn jade green surface of “Untitled 3” (below), from 1986-7, is lashed down, you could say, by lines of blue, red and gray, with some interstices faintly masked by white.

“Brice Marden: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings” opens Sunday (29 Oct., 2006) and continues through Jan. 15 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street; (212) 708-9400.

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