The American painter, Brice Marden, who was born in 1938, is widely regarded as one of the finest living American artists, and one of the most important abstract painters of the second half of the 20th century. He is more celebrated on his own side of the Atlantic than ours, and has never had a serious showing in Ireland. Prior to the Serpentine Gallery's current, outstanding exhibition covering his recent work, plus a selection drawn from the last decade, his last major London show was in 1985.
Since then, his art has undergone the most extraordinary sea-change. While a student at the School of Art and Architecture at Yale, he was deflected from the realist regime there by the excitement of Abstract Expressionism. But by the time he was ready to make serious paintings himself (while employed as a museum attendant and later as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg), he had worked through the realisation that there was no point in rehearsing the achievements of the Abstract Expressionists.
His severe, extremely disciplined approach came out of Minimalism. One unifying quality of his work is his penchant for working within arbitrary constraints, and he established his reputation for austere but beautifully made paintings that adhered rigidly to a very precise formula. Their juxtaposed, monochromatic rectangular panels are impassive but boast seductive surfaces which owe their texture to beeswax. It was a fruitful if limiting procedure and he eventually tired of it. His own description, which uses a musical analogy, is altogether apt: "Using the monochromatic palette in the past basically all I could get were chords. I wanted to be able to make something more like fugues, more complicated, back-and-forth renderings of feeling."
A period of crisis in the mid-1980s set him off in a new direction. Reputedly, an abortive commission to design stained-glass panels initially encouraged him to extend his formal vocabulary. But the clincher was his developing interest in Chinese calligraphy, something remote indeed from the flat, minimally inflected panels of colour he had made up until then. If calligraphic gesture was going to find its way into his work, he would have to redefine the work - and redefine calligraphy for that matter, to enable him enact it on a much larger scale.
In the event, he did both, overcoming en route the incidental problem that he felt his left-handedness posed to the rightbiased calligraphic style. By attaching brushes to long sticks he was able to stand back and make big, looping gestures. The result of these various initiatives was a golden period in his art, during which he completed his celebrated and still unsurpassed Cold Mountain series, a superb example of which is included in the Serpentine show.
His use of the term Cold Mountain is indicative of his almost teasing, flirtatious way with titles.
Although the references to landscape are absolutely apposite, Cold Mountain is in fact a translation of the name of the eight-century Chinese poet, Han Shan.
Typically, given his liking for arbitrary constraints, Marden devised rules for the paintings based on the formal construction of Han Shan's poetry. But none of this matters when you look at one of the paintings.
Against a thin, scraped-looking, greyish ground, several colours set off to make circuitous linear journeys around the compositional space, weaving in and out of each other. There are splashes and drips, and the work is certainly gestural, but it is also poised and restrained, with a quality of relaxed precision. The effect is a bit like Jackson Pollock revisited by a cooler, more judicious, more technically sophisticated sensibility. Indeed, the links with Pollock are startlingly direct, and part of the excitement of the work is the way it takes the legacy of the Abstract Expressionists and shows it to be a potent source of ideas rather than an outworn stylistic episode.
Marden is very good at knowing when to stop. His reference to fugal form is very appropriate because his basic technique is to set several related colour lines, or voices, loose in a painting and allow them achieve an appropriate level of energetic balance. There's always a lot going on, but the space never becomes clogged or cluttered, there's no ornament. It is true that his most recent paintings, which are slightly harder edged and heightened in colour, don't seem quite as convincing as their predecessors, but it's a characteristic of his work that the closer you get to it, the better it looks, and these are no exception. His small drawings, with their spidery, fallible lines, are outstanding.
The previous show at the Serpentine was a survey of Gillian Wearing's relentlessly downbeat video projects which necessarily turned its back on the gallery's beautiful situation in Kensington Gardens. For the Marden exhibition, the windows are exposed, the winter light floods in and the exhibition looks stunning in the context of the landscape outside. There has been much comment about the fact that the Serpentine, with its cutting edge reputation, should put on the Marden at all.
It's actually quite a canny move. Strangely enough, there is a growing appreciation for the achievements of the postwar American artists, right up to Marden's generation. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the conventional view was that, culturally, we had finally awakened from the modernist nightmare and were all right now. Hardly anyone would have thought that one of the finest achievements of American art of the final two decades of the 20th century would come in the form of Marden's Cold Mountain series. This while younger artists, not to mention the major part of the curatorial profession in the US, were fussing around with countless, laboured, self-congratulatory politically correct projects, heavy on theory and largely devoid of aesthetic qualities and artistic personality. It's a funny old world.
The Brice Marden exhibition is at the Serpentine Gallery, London, until January 7th. The gallery is closed December 24th, 26th and January 1st