“At a certain point, I started looking beyond Western Art.”
—Brice Marden
Brice Marden’s love of poetry shines in his series of prints Etchings to Rexroth, dedicated to a poet whom he greatly admired. At the time, Marden’s artistic practice was undergoing a significant stylistic shift. He was moving away from the flat, clean grid that associated him with Minimalism and toward freer, calligraphic lines. The graphic triangular shapes in the two plates featured in this lot are fluid and deliberate like the ink dripped and scratched by a pen on paper. They bring a rhythm and movement evocative of the cadence and swing of poems translated by Kenneth Rexroth.
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet and translator, deemed by many to be the godfather of the Beats Generation. Marden encountered Rexroth’s translations of poems by eighth-century Chinese poet Tu Fu in the middle of working on the prints that would become Etchings to Rexroth. Rather than directly illustrating specific poems, the series takes inspiration from their overall sense of “exile nostalgia” exercised through “complex sensations and values, a completely different nervous system,”i as Rexroth describes Tu Fu’s work. An example of this nostalgia is evident in the poem “For Up the River”:
A pair of golden orioles
Songs in the bright green willows,
A line of white egrets crosses
The clear blue sky. The window
Frames the western mountains, white
With the snows of a thousand years.
Anchored to the pilings are
Boats from eastern Win,
Three thousand miles from home.
The complete portfolio of twenty-five prints was published by Peter Blum alongside thirty-six of Rexroth’s Tu Fu translations.
