Brice Marden, Painter Who Redefined Abstraction, Dies at 84

Brice Marden, an acclaimed painter whose abstractions quietly pushed the style in new directions, repeatedly injecting it with new life during an era when painting was presumed to have hit a wall, has died at 84.

His daughter, Mirabelle Marden, wrote on Instagram that Marden had died on Wednesday in his home in Tivoli, New York. “He was lucky to live a long life doing what he loved,” she wrote, noting that he had continued painting up until Saturday.

From the 1960s onward, Marden painted in many different modes, often taking the oil-on-canvas approach at a time when other painters were untethering the medium from traditional ways of working. Marden’s style may have made him different from many of his colleagues with more explicitly conceptual ambitions, but he continued to find admirers because of it.

The critic Roberta Smith, writing on the occasion of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 2006, once said that Marden had obtained “a kind of flame-keeper status—something like the Giorgio Morandi of radical abstraction, a maker of inordinately beautiful, exquisitely made (and expensive) artworks.”

His first solo show, in 1966 at New York’s Bykert Gallery, featured a grouping of monochromes in muted colors, each with surfaces that had been rendered matte via the use of beeswax. Critics didn’t respond well to them at the time, finding them to be knockoffs of works by other, more famous artists, including Jasper Johns, whose 1964 Jewish Museum show was manned by guards such as Marden himself.

But by the end of his career, Marden’s art had significantly diverged from that formula. He painted abstractions featuring spaghetti-like lines arrayed across vibrantly colored planes and drew minimalist drawings that took their inspiration from Chinese painting. He proved himself a restless innovator time and again.

Marden had been battling cancer for the past few years. While Marden had not often discussed his disease in interviews, his wife, the artist Helen Marden, often documented his treatments, in an attempt, she said, to encourage others to feel more familiar with the ailment.

A full obituary will follow.