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Brice Marden

Etchings to Rexroth: plates 6 and 22 (L. 40/6 & 40/22)

Estimate
$5,000 - 7,000
$8,890
Lot Details
Two etching and aquatints, on Rives BFK paper, with full margins.
1986
both I. 7 7/8 x 6 7/8 in. (20 x 17.5 cm)
both S. 19 1/2 x 16 in. (49.5 x 40.6 cm)
Both signed, dated and numbered 'PP 3' in pencil (printer's proofs, the edition was 45 and 10 artist's proofs in Roman numerals), published by Peter Blum Edition, New York, both framed.

Further Details

“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.


Kenneth Rexroth quoted in Jeremy Lewison, Brice Marden: Prints 1961-1991. A Catalogue Raisonné, 146.

Brice Marden

American | 1938

Born in Bronxville and working between New York City, Tivoli, New York, and Hydra, Greece, Brice Marden developed a unique style that departs from his Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist contemporaries. Drawing from his personal experiences and global travels, Marden’s works demonstrate a gestural and organic emotion channeled through the power of color. By the late 1960s, Marden received international recognition as the master of the monochrome panel and, in the late 1970s, began exploring the relationship between horizontal and vertical planes. His practice is deeply informed by his knowledge of classical architecture, world religion, ancient history, and spirituality. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998, Marden is represented in notable institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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