I recently became a member of MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) which allows me to get in for free for a year. I think it is well worth the money since the admission charge is like going 3x a year. I signed up two weeks back to get a sneak peek of the Brice Marden exhibition that is now currently on display.
There are two rooms in the show that display the beginning of his career and they are extraordinary while the following rooms left me wondering what honestly went wrong. Don't get me wrong, I do think there were stellar paintings to follow later in his career but nothing is as incredibly strong, and exciting to me, as his Nebraska piece or any of the monochromatic paintings. The painting below is one of my favorites from later in his life and it obviously looks much more fantastic in person, given that you can't see any of the under-painting in the photo, which was pretty much my favorite part. Marden isn't though to have changed painting like Picasso or Pollock.
The show starts with the svelte, luminous monochromes that Mr. Marden made back in New York, for his first show. Each is gray, but each is different, variously tinged with tones of silver, green, yellow and plum. Their closed surfaces are seductively smooth and strangely matte, because Mr. Marden was adding beeswax to his oil paint and applying it to his canvas, like the workmen, with a palette knife.
The art critic who dismissed these paintings as ''Jasper Johns backgrounds'' was right to some extent, although these ''backgrounds'' came as much from Goya, Manet and Velazquez as from Johns. Mr. Marden's dense planes of color simply emphasized to the exclusion of all else the most obtrusive fact of most paintings -- shape and background color. He brought them forward and made them unavoidable, not unlike Donald Judd's Minimalist boxes.
From single-panel paintings, Mr. Marden moved to two and three panels, keeping theme vertical. One of these is the imposing yet delicate ''D'après la Marquise de la Solana,'' inspired by Goya's portrait of the pert, lavishly gowned aristocrat standing on and in front of an ambiguous plane of shadowy gray. Mr. Marden distilled the basic elements of the image into
slablike planes of gray-green (background), gray-gray (garments) and grayed pink (flesh). A collage spells it out, juxtaposing three postcards of the Goya with three rectangles of graphite built into hard, shiny planes.
And then yesterday I went to see the Manet and the Execution of Maxmillian, the newer show at MOMA and the one I spent a lot more time in, surprisingly since it was maybe 4 paintings and about an eighth the size of the Marden show. I definitely think there was some present political situation undertones if you look close enough and read (between the lines) the info on the walls. The show was literally the three main paintings Manet created about the execution, three other paintings which helped in the painting of the Execution painting, and a few walls of photographs and sketches of the actual site where Maxmillian was executed, the executioners, and various other people involved. Obviously they look strikingly similar to Goya's painting of the the French prison revolt which is one of my favorite paintings, ever. I love Goya, so much that my college thesis was on him, and so much that I am once again entertaining the idea of doing something with his Disasters of War series in my current work.
The history from MOMA behind the painting created by Manet is: Between 1867 and 1869, Edouard Manet completed a series of compositions depicting the execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. Maximilian, a member of the Hapsburg family of Austria, had been installed in power in Mexico by Napoleon III of France in an attempt to recover unpaid debts and establish a European presence there. This endeavor failed miserably, ending with the execution of Maximilian and two of his generals by firing squad on June 19, 1867. The execution was by order of Benito Juárez, who had been displaced as president when the French took control of Mexico.
I found it inspiring and interesting to see how two paintings led up to the main Execution painting. One is barely present since I guess it was destroyed somewhere in history and the other is much more free flowing and out of control. The much more expressionistic version also shows the executioners in Mexican guerilla outfit, while the two others have the executioners in French military gear a sign on where Manet stood politically. I think the
progress of the painting is very interesting to see since it shows clearly how it becomes a much stronger piece.
I also think that the photographs and the other imagery and info in the show is equally as important in setting the scene as the paintings are themselves. I would highly recommend that you check out both shows if you get into MOMA.
And finally the Executioner of Maxmillian painting:
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