Carol Vogel

It is both abstract and hypnotic, begging viewers to look closely at the finely wrought composition. But what makes this drawing different is its raw intensity and the unusually dark, brooding palette.

While the work was a private musing — one page in a notebook filled with drawings — his illness has been unusually public. The news shot cannon-like through the art world when, on Sept. 6, 2017, Helen Marden, the artist’s wife, who is also a painter, photographed her husband while he was undergoing chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering and posted it on Instagram.

“I wanted to make it accessible,” Helen Marden defiantly explained. “The more you put it out there, the more comfortable people are with it. I also was hoping that by making it public it would help others.”

And it has. Marden said she has heard from total strangers who are going through similar treatments — the artist has rectal cancer — who have thanked her for her candor.

After her initial post, many assumed that Brice Marden would slow down a bit, but instead, he has become more prolific than ever, painting or drawing every day even when he travels, which seems constant.

“I guess I was lucky,” the artist said on a recent wintry afternoon, perched on a sofa in his studio here, a converted carriage house with sweeping views of the Hudson River that is part of Rose Hill, the couple’s home. Looking as he always has, with gray curls peeking out of his signature wool cap, black jeans and a plaid scarf, he went on: “I have been able to work through it all. It hasn’t made me hurry things up. It hasn’t made me work any differently. It’s just been an extra thing to think about.”

In October, the month Marden turned 80, “Moss Sutra With the Seasons,” the largest commission of his career, was unveiled at Glenstone, the private museum in Potomac, Maryland, that is the creation of Mitchell P. Rales, the Washington industrialist, and Emily Wei Rales, his wife and a curator. Hanging chapel-like in a specially designed gallery, it is composed of five panels and took five years to complete. The painting is a visual diary of sorts, incorporating the artist’s most familiar stylistic elements — from monochromatic compositions reminiscent of his work from the 1960s when he used a kitchen spatula instead of a conventional paint brush, to recent loops of calligraphic shapes.

“When people stop in that room, they suddenly get really quiet,” Emily Rales noted. The Raleses have been collecting Marden’s work for years. Its enduring quality, they say, is one reason. Another is the artist’s singular vision: He has spent his career exploring abstraction in many forms. “Who else do you know that has a style like his?” Mitchell Rales asked. “There are very few painters who are so unique, so labor intensive and so accomplished.”

While Marden is reluctant to discuss his health — and is determined not to make it the center of his life — he did say that he has had good news from his doctors and is having regular sessions of immunotherapy, with minimal side effects.

After his diagnosis, Marden said his first thought was “wait a minute, I’m supposed to die. It’s a reality,'’ adding that he feared the Glenstone project “might be my last, it had taken so long.” But then he began creating new paintings that were all in terre verte, a green pigment made from the earth. “They came very fast,” he said, explaining that he hasn’t stopped working since.

A younger generation of painters seem to be paying attention. “He’s an inspiration because he stays in front of the canvas,” said British artist Chris Ofili. “Even in this digital and mechanical age, it is his commitment to old-fashioned painting, but painting that has a kind of freedom to it.”

In July, the artist had a sellout, one-night-only exhibition and dinner at Villa Malaparte, the 1938 Modernist house perched over a cliff on the Gulf of Salerno in Capri, Italy. Organized by the artist’s dealer, Larry Gagosian, the evening attracted collectors from Qatar to Beverly Hills — art world personalities like Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund manager; Nicola Del Roscio, president of the Cy Twombly Foundation; and Jimmy Iovine, the record producer, who arrived with LeBron James.

A few weeks later, Marden was again in the spotlight, this time closer to home at Bard College, where four of his canvases were transformed into scrims for the new staging of T.S. Eliot’s poems “Four Quartets,” the work of choreographer Pam Tanowitz and scenic designer Clifton Taylor. Alastair Macaulay, then the chief dance critic of The New York Times, called it “some of the finest stage imagery of our time.” (The production opens at the Barbican in London in May.)

A traveling show of 60 drawings will arrive at the Gagosian Gallery in Paris on April 4, having been on view at the Yves Saint Laurent museum in Marrakech. It includes studies for six new paintings that are in various stages of completion in his Tivoli studio. (The new Menil Drawing Institute in Houston is also planning a major exhibition next February.)

Drawings have long been a critical first step to what eventually ends up on the canvas. “I always have a notebook going, so I’m not scared to death when I start painting,” Marden said.

When he is not traveling, the artist spends most of his time in Tivoli, in a large studio composed of rooms filled with paintings and drawings; carefully labeled paint samples, as well as sticks gathered from the surrounding landscape, which he dips in ink to draw. The atmosphere is mostly quiet except for the occasional loud whistle of a passing train.

That his studio is not far from either Olana, home of painter Frederic Edwin Church, or that of another American painter, Thomas Cole, is not lost on Marden. The history of these artists has been ingrained in his memory since childhood. Growing up in nearby Briarcliff Manor, his father, a mortgage servicer, worked along the Hudson. “My father loved the river,” Marden recalled. “Often after dinner he’d say let’s go out and watch the sun set.” Not surprising then, that the landscape — the green of the moss on the trees; the light coming off the river; the changing seasons — influences his color palette.

These traditional references are also a reflection of his education, first as a student at Boston University, a place Marden described as “deliberately conservative,” and later at the Yale School of Art. After graduating from Yale in 1963, he moved to New York and became a guard at the Jewish Museum just as Jasper Johns was having a retrospective. “Jasper has been a big influence on my work and my thinking,” Marden said. “He added another dimension to what is reality in painting. Is a flag real?” Marden remembers being so shy during his time at the Jewish Museum that he enlisted a guard to ask Johns to sign the show’s flag poster.

Three years later, in 1966, the artist had his first one-man show — monochromatic paintings and drawings — at the Bykert Gallery on West 57th Street in Manhattan. Reviews were mixed. Klaus Kertess, the gallery’s co-founder, advanced Marden $700 to buy paint for the show. “The money ran out the same time the show did,” Marden said. Through his friend, artist Dorothea Rockburne, he was able to get a job as Robert Rauschenberg’s studio assistant, where he worked for four years.

The New York art world was a small, cozy community in those days, as abstract expressionism was fading from the spotlight and pop and minimalism were beginning to emerge. But these days, Marden feels far more akin to the spontaneity of the abstract expressionists. “I’m a great believer in late Jackson Pollock,” he said, showing a visitor a reproduction of “Scent,” one of Pollock’s last paintings, a dense work from 1955. “I have looked at that painting so hard I think I see things happening in it.”

It is that kind of depth and feeling of movement that he is trying to achieve in the six new canvases in various stages of completion in his studio.

While most artists generally don’t let outsiders see their works-in-progress, Marden is surprisingly candid, talking about what it takes to create a painting and his constant struggle to achieve the desired effects. He is soft-spoken and direct when discussing his process and often, after explaining something, he pauses, and then bursts out laughing. “If there’s a conscious thing — and there is — I don’t want to say it’s spiritual or get into some new age-y kind of thing, but they’re all based on intuition,'’ Marden said.

He often starts by drawing a grid of black markings, which become the underpinning of a work. In the body of this new canvas, the grid is made up of a square of 15 marks by 15, which is all that is visible right now.

How did he choose 15? “A numerologist once told me that my number is 6 (1+5 = 6) and someone said it was a Buddhist number, but nobody told me why,” Marden said with a chuckle. It is from there that he starts to build the composition — slowly, layer upon layer — often scraping things off the surface that he doesn’t like or simply painting over them, but leaving vestiges of what is underneath visible. These are in the early stages, he warned. “By the time they are finished, they could look very different.”

In his latest paintings, Marden is going back to his more calligraphic motifs, but this time the perspective has changed. He has purposely left the sides of each painting spare with just a lightly, scraped-down color so the viewer’s eye is forced right to the center, where the composition is filled with interlocking shapes. He is also experimenting with bolder colors — one canvas is the shade of a cantaloupe — and there is even a painting in which he is experimenting with white. “White to me has always been a corrective color. You paint things out with white,” Marden said. “I’m trying to break my own rules.”

These compositions reflect decades of reading the work of figures including Kenneth Rexroth, an American poet who was also a translator of Chinese, Japanese and classic Greek poets. (Marden’s Cold Mountain Paintings, perhaps his most famous body of work, from 1989-91, were inspired by the writings of the ninth-century Chinese poet Cold Mountain (Han Shan.) While traveling, Marden visits flea markets and galleries looking at ancient art and has taken to collecting the naturally occurring rocks from riverbeds and mountainsides admired by Chinese scholars, who believed they could find paradise inside these spirit stones. Their shapes and surfaces, smooth or textured, energize Marden, too. “At a certain point, I started looking beyond Western art,” he explained.

That was more than 30 years ago. Today, he is still experimenting.

“I’m deliberately trying to be more intuitive and going for something that is more natural,” he said. “I’m not thinking of these paintings as a kind of summation. I’d rather they lead to something else.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="e15c119e-fa50-472b-976a-525fb4668159" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/arts/design/brice-marden-gagosian-abstract-.html">The New York Times</a>.

TIVOLI, N.Y. — The day he learned he had cancer, Brice Marden, among the world’s most celebrated artists, made one of his much-coveted drawings: a field of dense interlocking loops loosely inspired by Chinese calligraphy, a signature theme.

Brice Marden, still true to his vision

After his diagnosis, Marden said his first thought was “wait a minute, I’m supposed to die. It’s a reality,'' adding that he feared the Glenstone project “might be my last, it had taken so long.” But then he began creating new paintings that were all in terre verte, a green pigment made from the earth. “They came very fast,” he said, explaining that he hasn’t stopped working since.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/arts/design/brice-marden-gagosian-abstract-.html" id="588d240b-61e8-3279-a3e4-72fe78d5ee9a">The New York Times</a>.

TIVOLI, N.Y. — The day he learned he had cancer, Brice Marden, among the world’s most celebrated artists, made one of his much-coveted drawings: a field of dense interlocking loops loosely inspired by Chinese calligraphy, a signature theme. It is both abstract and hypnotic, begging viewers to look closely at the finely wrought composition. But what makes this drawing different is its raw intensity and the unusually dark, brooding palette.

Brice Marden, Still True to His Vision

His death was confirmed by Shelley Wanger, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf.

In a seven-decade career, Richardson wore about as many hats in the art world as anyone could. Along with being a historian and curator, he was at various times an artist himself, a dealer, an industrial designer, an auction-house executive and a collector.

Self-taught but possessing an unfailing eye and impeccable taste, he could spot a misattributed painting at an auction or zero in on the only gem among piles of junk at a flea market.

He also collected a wide circle of friends, including artists — Picasso, Georges Braque, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol — as well as writers: Jean Cocteau, W.H. Auden, Nancy Mitford and Tennessee Williams. A celebrated raconteur, he was described by W magazine as “the man all New York wants to sit beside at dinner.”

Richardson was an usher at photographer Cecil Beaton’s memorial service and delivered a eulogy at Warhol’s funeral. He also advised cosmetics mogul Helena Rubenstein on which works of art in her collection were valuable and which were fakes.

For about a month in the late 1960s, he rented his London apartment in the fabled Albany complex to Greta Garbo, who lived there under the pseudonym Miss Brown.

“The entire time Garbo was there, my housekeeper, who loved the movies, had no idea who she really was,” Richardson recently recalled at dinner in his Manhattan loft.

His classic good looks made him a magnet for artists. Freud and Warhol painted him. In July he flew to Los Angeles at the invitation of David Hockney to sit for a portrait.

British artist Jenny Saville, another friend, photographed him several times, both clothed and nude. “He has a potent mixture of life force and vulnerability,” she said in an email before his death. “I like the way he leans into you when he’s talking, like a soothsayer.”

Freud once said of Richardson, “His Proust-like instincts about the foibles and intricacies of the people around him made him ideally equipped as a human portraitist, a biographer.”

Indeed, chronicling the life and work of Picasso was his ultimate triumph. Michiko Kakutani, then the chief book critic of The New York Times, called his multivolume “A Life of Picasso” “magisterial and definitive.”

“Mr. Richardson leaves us not only with a deep appreciation of Picasso’s Promethean ambition and prodigious fecundity,” she wrote, “but also with a shrewd understanding of his tumultuous, subversive and often disturbing art.”

The first volume, which covered Picasso’s earliest years, 1881-1906, was published in 1991 and won the Whitbread Award, honoring writers from Britain and Ireland. The next two volumes came out in 1996 and 2007 and covered the artist’s life through age 50. The fourth volume was close to completion at Richardson’s death, although no publication date has been set, Wanger said.

Richardson used his friendship with Picasso, his family and friends — along with exhaustive research — to chronicle the artist’s life and work in granular detail, employing colorful stories and previously unpublished material.

He first met Picasso in Paris in the summer of 1948, when Douglas Cooper, the art historian with whom Richardson lived for 10 years, took him to the artist’s studio. Richardson, who was 24 at the time, was immediately captivated.

“This was in Paris after the war, and Picasso would hold open studio days once or twice a week,” he recalled in an interview. “They weren’t exactly a mob scene. The first time I went, there must have been around 25 people there, and you’d have a two-minute chat with Picasso, nothing very serious.”

The two did not meet again until about 1951, when Richardson and Cooper visited Picasso at his home in Vallauris, on the coast of southeastern France.

“At one moment he turned his eyes on me and held my gaze for long enough to induce a responsive quiver,” Richardson recalled many times. "He was good at spotting susceptible individuals.”

It was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until Picasso’s death, in 1973.

Richardson and Cooper were also living in southeastern France at the time, in the palatial 13th-century Château de Castille, halfway between Avignon and Nimes. They had transformed the castle, which Cooper had purchased, into a sort of museum, filling it with Cubist paintings by Picasso, Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris.

In his 1999 memoir, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Picasso, Provence, and Douglas Cooper,” Richardson described his life there as a constant social whirlwind, highlighted by elaborate dinners that the two men would host, with local Gypsies hired to provide musical entertainment.

Richardson’s last act, beginning in 2008, was as a consultant to the Gagosian Gallery in New York, where he organized six Picasso exhibitions starting with “Picasso: Mosqueteros.” Roberta Smith of The New York Times called it “one of the best shows to be seen in New York since the turn of the century.”

Through his connections with members of Picasso’s family, Richardson was able to secure paintings that had never before been seen publicly. He was also able to persuade major museums and celebrated collectors to lend late Picasso paintings and prints for the exhibition, at Gagosian’s West 21st Street gallery in Chelsea.

It was a hit. For the entire run of the show, lines snaked around the block. His last exhibition, “Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors,” was held at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill space in London in 2017. At his death he was working on an exhibition of Warhol portraits that was also to be held at the Grosvenor Hill gallery, although an opening date had not been set.

John Patrick Richardson was born in London on Feb. 6, 1924, the eldest son of Wodehouse Richardson, who was 70 when John was born, and Patty (Crocker) Richardson.

John’s father, a former quartermaster general in the Boer War in South Africa, helped found the Army and Navy Store, a London-based department store chain with branches in Bombay and Calcutta. Patty Crocker had been a store employee when she met Wodehouse Richardson.

Richardson’s father was knighted by King Edward VII, son of Queen Victoria, and Richardson himself was knighted in 2012 by Edward’s great-granddaughter, Elizabeth II. “My father was totally fascinating and rather impressive,” Richardson told The Guardian in 2012.

Sir Wodehouse died when John was 6. At 13 he was sent to Stowe, a boarding school in Buckinghamshire, England, known for its grand gardens designed by the 18th-century landscape architect Capability Brown. It was there that Richardson was introduced to the work of artists like Picasso, who was then in his mid-50s.

After Stowe, Richardson enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art in London. But with the onset of World War II he was drafted into the British army, only to be soon discharged after catching rheumatic fever.

During the war he lived in London with his mother and two siblings: a sister, Ruth Judith Richardson, who died in 2011, and a brother, David John, who survives him. He worked as an industrial designer by day and an air-raid warden and firefighter at night. But even the war did not dampen his social life. He described London during the blitz as “kind of amazing.”

“There were these great nightclubs in bombed basements in Soho,” he told The Guardian in 2012. “And there would be a feeling of tremendous excitement because quite a few of the men would be going off the following day to Egypt. And people were so great with each other during the war. People weren’t petty or bitchy; they were out for basically whatever thrills they could get before they were bombed or packed off to the battlefield.”

Richardson started writing for The New Statesman and other publications soon after the war, sometimes using the pseudonym Richard Johnson. It was during those years that Cuthbert Worsley, the magazine’s theater editor and deputy literary editor, took him to a party for Paul Bowles’ new novel, “The Sheltering Sky,” where he met Cooper.

His relationship with the complex and often prickly Cooper came to an end around 1960, at which time Richardson went to New York. Two years later he organized a sprawling Picasso exhibition mounted in nine New York galleries.

“It was during the summer, and the galleries stayed open till nine o’clock in the evening,” Richardson said. “In those days there wasn’t the traffic there is now, so you could spend an evening wandering around the galleries. It was a very civilized way of looking at art.”

While preparing for the shows, Richardson went back to France to consult with Picasso and there was struck by the idea of writing his biography. It was also during those years that he became friends with Warhol.

“When I met Andy he was still living with his mother,” Richardson said in an interview. “I was one of the few people who knew that Andy had for a long time gone to Mass every day of his life. Not that he always stayed, but he would often go by and take some holy water.

“But suddenly,” he continued, “I realized that the repetition in Andy’s work — the 100 Coca-Cola bottles or the 25 Marilyns — had their source in the priests who, during confession, would say three Hail Marys or 12 Our Fathers. It was very much a part of him, which explains a lot.”

In the early 1960s, Christie’s, the London-based auction house, hired Richardson to open a New York office. He left Christie’s in 1973 to work for the Knoedler Gallery, also in New York, where he was put in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting. Richardson was later named managing director of Artemis, an art investment fund. By the 1980s he had abandoned dealing in favor of writing for publications like Vanity Fair, where he was a contributing editor, and The New York Review of Books.

For the past 20 or so years he divided his time between his 5,000-square-foot loft near Union Square in Manhattan — a grand enfilade of rooms overflowing with everything from Picassos and Braques to flea-market finds he had collected from every corner of the globe — and an equally brimming country house in the hills of western Connecticut, in New Milford.

He balanced his days between organizing exhibitions for Gagosian and writing the fourth and final volume of his Picasso biography. He also wrote “Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters,” a 2001 collection of profiles of artists and tastemakers, and had started a second volume of memoirs.

Richardson showed his love for the unconventional to the end. At 92, he happily allowed Saville to spend hours photographing him naked at the Ritz Hotel in London, where he was staying.

“That day of modeling was beautiful,” she recalled in an email. “He stood naked in his hotel bedroom for quite a while crouched over,” leaning on a cane, “and still talking about Picasso every moment.”

She added, “Not many models are as free as John, and certainly not as funny.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/obituaries/john-richardson-dead.html" id="449f64f3-fee7-302f-ab25-63193886fdc3">The New York Times</a>.

John Richardson, the British-born art historian and curator who devoted more than a quarter century to writing a monumental four-volume biography of Pablo Picasso, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan while still at work on the final installment. He was 95.

John Richardson, Art Historian and Picasso Biographer, Dies at 95

The two did not meet again until about 1951, when Richardson and Cooper visited Picasso at his home in Vallarius, on the coast of southeastern France.

John Richardson, Art Historian and Picasso Biographer, Is Dead at 95

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Carol Vogel

Articles written by the author

Brice Marden, still true to his vision

Brice Marden, Still True to His Vision

John Richardson, Art Historian and Picasso Biographer, Dies at 95

John Richardson, Art Historian and Picasso Biographer, Is Dead at 95