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32 The Nation. January 29, 2007

geles that calls forth these outsized counter-arguments. In raising them I may now andthen have attributed to Hurewitz somegross formulations that don’t do justice tothe overall subtlety of his argument. Letme repeat, then, my admiration for thebook’s many strengths. Hurewitz’s prose is

always lucid and sometimes (scholars takenote!) downright exuberant—even whenhe’s writing about fairly arcane matters.He has not only mastered the secondaryliterature relating to his subjects but hasdug deeply into police records and news-paper accounts, as well as conducted a

wide-ranging set of interviews. It is Hure-witz, after all, who has amassed the dataand risked the interpretations that allowus to question aspects of his argument.If I sometimes longed for more precisedefinitions of “inner essence” and thelike, or wished that his conclusions about

“influence” were a bit more grounded andmodulated, I have no doubt whatever thatBohemian Los Angeles marks a major, ifflawed, contribution to several fields ofinquiry, and will stir much useful debate.I strongly suspect that we can expect muchfrom Daniel Hurewitz in the future.

Marden’s retrospective at the Museum of

Modern Art. It is hung with the signature

gray canvases that Marden himself came to

call “Brice Marden paintings” when he final-ly decided to stop painting them. What is

striking is that they are not just gray mono-

chrome rectangles. They are exactly gray in

Surface AppealARTHUR C. DANTO

“When philosophy paints its grey in grey,” Hegel wrote in his Philosophy of

Right, “then has a shape of life grown old.… The owl of Minerva spreads

its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” It is difficult not to think of

Hegel’s elegiac reflection when one enters the first gallery of Brice

ART

sion of three-dimensional space. This il-

lusion was conceived of more or less as

a stage animated by visual incident, and

the surface of the picture as the window

through which one looked at the stage.

But Manet began to pull the backdrop

of the stage forward, and those who

came after him…kept pulling it forward,until today it has come smack up against

the window, or surface, blocking it up

and hiding the stage. All the painter has

left to work with now is, so to speak, a

more or less opaque window pane.

Why then think of it as a window anylonger? In Johns and Giacometti, the visualincident took place in an illusory space. Thetask of “Modernist Painting,” as Green-berg titled his essay of 1960, was to arrive atan understanding of what the defining fea-tures of the medium were and, in the inter-

ests of purity, to purge it of everything else.For Greenberg, that “everything else” in-cluded illusion, despite its history. Painting,he believed, was in its essence two-dimen-sional and flat. Modernist painting, accord-ingly, was “flatter than anything in Westernart since before Giotto and Cimabue—soflat indeed that it could hardly contain rec-ognizable images.” Now that space andsurface coincide, there is no place left forpainting to go. As the ’60s ended, artists andcritics could be heard stridently declaringthat painting was dead. The first paintingsin Marden’s show date from the mid-’60s.

The question they ask is: Where do we gofrom here? What is left after Modernism isover? It ended with the discovery of flatness.Now what?

That Abstract Expressionism was deadwas the common wisdom in the artworld by the mid-’60s. Marden was al-most unique in realizing the deeper truththat Modernism was dead. But all

around him exciting new things were hap-pening in art, Pop most particularly, butalso Minimalism, which was closer to hisown impulses. The one painting that I be-lieve signals an awareness of Pop (and myfavorite painting in the show) is the won-derful down-to-earth rectangle Nebraska(1966), which approximates the shape thatthe state of Nebraska is represented ashaving in maps of the United States. Thedown-to-earthness is symbolized by its par-ticular tone of gray, a kind of greenishdirtiness. But mostly Marden tried to findhis way forward by joining his gray or gray-ish rectangles into diptychs or triptychs,as in For Helen (1967) or Three DeliberateGreys for Jasper Johns (1970), a tribute to

one of the great pioneers who, along withRobert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, ledNew York art away from Abstract Expres-

gray, with shadowy markings of darker

gray that had served other painters, like

Jasper Johns and Alberto Giacometti, as

backgrounds for the objects or figures thatcarried the primary interest of their works.

Marden seems to have brought them for-

ward to coincide with the surfaces of his

paintings, making his surfaces his subjects.

In some of the early works, Marden left

about an inch of raw canvas to catch the

drips, which serve as a symbolic reference to

the Abstract Expressionist movement that

had inspired him and many other young

painters of his generation. In the mid-’60s,

when Abstract Expressionism was per-

ceived as a finished movement, the drip re-

mained an emblem of painterly legitimacy,

evoking the physicality of pigment and the

gestural sweep of the painter’s arm. Even as

cool an artist as Andy Warhol retained the

drips on the silk-screened sides of his Brillo

boxes, as a way of claiming descent from the

founding fathers.

What “shape of life,” then, to return

to Hegel, has grown old in Marden’s

early work? Modernist painting, obvi-

ously, as understood by its deepest theo-

rist, Clement Greenberg. As Greenberg

argued in his 1954 essay “Abstract andRepresentational”:

From Giotto to Courbet, the painter’s

first task had been to hollow out an illu-Brice Marden, 6 Red Rock 1, 2000–02 © 2 0 0 6 B R I C E M A R D E N / A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y ( A R S ) , N E W Y

O R

K



January 29, 2007 The Nation. 33

sionism into unexplored territory. AndMarden widened his range of grayish huesto include blues and reds. It was not untilthe early ’80s, however, that he felt com-pelled to change in a more radical way: “Igot to a point where I could go on making‘Brice Marden paintings’ and suffer that

silent creative death.… You get to this pointwhere you just have to make a decision tochange things.”

I don’t think it is widely enough appreci-ated how much courage this kind of changetakes. There is an overwhelming tendencyin America to brand artists, so that the wellinformed can identify an example of anartist’s work in a single, simple act of instantrecognition: That is a Pollock, a Kline, aNevelson, a Shapiro, a Ryman, a Rothko,a Marden. Warhol is a counter-example.Not only do his paintings vary profoundly

over the years but also he worked in a vari-ety of media, including film and television,reinvented cabaret, wrote books, evolveda style of aphorism and became his ownmost famous product. In this respect, War-hol was more like the German mastersSigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, whohave experimented liberally with differentstyles, including, in Richter’s case, abstrac-tion as well as photographic realism. (As ithappens, Polke and Richter came to prom-inence as practitioners of an East Germanschool of Pop Art coyly known as “Capi-talist Realism,” and deeply indebted to

Warhol.) Perhaps branding is uncharacter-istic of younger artists today, who expressthemselves through performance, installa-tion and video, as well as the more tradi-tional genres. Marden’s change was not asradical as that of Philip Guston, who in1970 abandoned abstraction in favor of akind of loutish political comic figuration.Marden only went from one abstract styleto another. Quite apart from taking a com-mercial chance, moving to an abruptlydifferent style raises questions of sinceritythat are never easy to deal with.

The change paid off, and opened uppossibilities beyond gray in gray. It waslike raising a window shade, revealing newrealities.

Marden changed to a style of as-it-wereOriental calligraphy—in other words, heappropriated the look but not the reality ofwriting. Writing in its nature is on the sur-face of silk or paper. There is no impulse topostulate an illusory space for it to occupy,as in a drawing. So it is “modern” by de-fault. Mixing writing with drawing, as in theJapanese or Chinese tradition, insured thatthere would never be in either culture the

kind of history of art that defined Westernpainting, with its conquest of visual appear-ances and such devices as perspective or

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chiaroscuro. This is why until the emergenceof Modernism, there was a tendency totreat Oriental art either as decorative or in-ferior. Part of the reason the Impressionistsmay have been so taken with Japanese print,for example, was that its flattening of formsmade the surface into something one was

aware of rather than a transparency throughwhich one looked into space. So even ifMarden thought of his calligraphies asdrawings or even paintings, they remained,as it were, on the page.

He is most successful, in my view, in thedrawings, where the white of the papercontributes a certain sparkle, and livensthe rather deadish colors he carried withhim into this phase of his work. Marden

appears in these to have hit on somethinglike the “grass” writing of Oriental calligra-

phy, loopy and lyrical, in which the brushrarely leaves the surface, and the artist im-provises to the point that one needs specialskills to read it. But the grass-writer in-scribes an actual text, whose meaning in-variably inflects the work’s feeling. Mar-den’s calligraphy is entirely abstract— gibberish, in effect—yet the strange thingis that it is evocative of language; it seemsto communicate meaning while remain-ing entirely uncommunicative. Han ShanGoes to the Tropics (1991) is a beautifulexample of this. “Han Shan” is Chinesefor “Cold Mountain,” though it designates

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a possibly mythical poet whowrote about Cold Mountainin a body of poetry fromTang times. Han Shan has theattributes of a Taoist hobowho lives in close communionwith nature and has risenabove material needs. It was infact an edition of ColdMountain’s poems that in-spired Marden. For my taste,however, the painted calli-graphic canvases are too pasty

for the lyricism he sometimesachieves on paper—too an-gular, awkward and almostclumsy for the spirit I supposethey mean to convey. There is

if de Kooning had painted a Pollock.Brenda Richardson has written that “Pol-lock is a very real presence in Marden’sCold Mountain work.” According to theshow’s curator, Gary Garrels, Pollock’sinfluence “was one not simply of look andstyle but also of spirit.” I am glad to see the

term “spirit” making an appearance incontemporary discourse. “Spirit,” Kantwrites, “in an aesthetical sense, is the namegiven to the animating principle of themind.” Spirit puts the material to which themind applies itself “into swing.” Whetherthe same spirit that animated Pollock fiftyyears earlier animates Marden is an issue onwhich critics will differ. But the only piecein which I sensed the presence of Pollock’sspirit is Dragons, where it almost looks outof place. Marden may not see it this way,but I think it is kind of a compliment to say

that the artist, in the crowning exhibition ofhis career, shows promise.

By a happy coincidence of scheduling,visitors to MoMA have the opportunitynot only to see the end of Modernism,in Marden’s exhibition, but its begin-ning, which Clement Greenberg attrib-

uted to Édouard Manet. For students ofModernism, this offers a singular opportu-nity to examine Manet’s The Execution of

Maximilian for signs of the great movementManet opened up. Certainly, Manet couldhave had no idea that his innovations would

a limit to a Westerner’s capacity to inter-nalize and realize an Asian sensibility.

In the latest works, Marden finds a wayof working flat-on-flat, with colored rib-bons interlacing one another on the kind ofgray-in-gray surface he in a way had madehis own. These really seem uninterestinglyempty to me, vastly too large for the mini-

mal meaning that is their reward. But then,in Dragons, working in colored ink onpaper, he achieves something glorious, as

lead, in the course of a century, to the gray-in-gray monochrome. He would have saidthat he was infusing French painting withwhat he had discovered in Spanish art, par-ticularly in the work of Velázquez andGoya, which he probably saw on a trip toMadrid in 1865. But we, visitors from thefuture, as it were, can see what it was about

Manet’s work that led Greenberg to thinkof him as the first Modernist.The execution was the result of an ill-

Édouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1867–68 T H E N A T I O N A

L G A L L E R Y , L O N D O N



January 29, 2007 The Nation. 35

advised imperial adventure in 1862 by Na-poleon III, seeking to establish a French-backed monarchy in Mexico, which hadbecome an independent republic in 1823.Together with some Mexican conservatives,he persuaded Maximilian, a Habsburg, toaccept the throne, promising him military

support. There was considerable resistance,and when the United States, emerging fromthe Civil War, supported the Mexican re-publicans, Napoleon cut and ran, as we saythese days, leaving Maximilian unprotect-ed. He was captured and shot by a firingsquad in 1867, despite widespread appealsthat he be spared. Napoleon was blamed forMaximilian’s death, and it was perhaps be-cause of Manet’s antimonarchical politicsthat he decided to paint the event. He pro-duced three large paintings of Maximilian’sexecution, as well as a smaller study and a

lithograph, and it can be argued that thebeginnings of a distinctively Modernist sen-sibility emerged in the course of this effort,though there were already indications, asGreenberg noted, of a new vision in hiswork as early as 1863.

Greenberg drew particular attention tothe graphic flatness of the pantaloons inThe Piper, and Courbet is said to have re-marked that Olympia appeared “flat...likethe Queen of Hearts coming out of a bath.”(Olympia’s flatness may explain why it ap-peared to Manet’s contemporaries almostcomically inept, and wound up in the Salon

des Refusés.) This flatness was, for Green-berg, distinctively Modernist. In classicalModernism, he wrote, “Design of layout isalmost always clear and explicit, drawingsharp and clean, shape or area geometri-cally simplified or at least faired and trued,color flat and bright or at least undifferenti-ated in value and texture within a givenhue.” He might as well have been describingthe Japanese prints that made such an im-pression on Manet and the Impressionists.Could the flattening out of forms be theresult of bringing into Western art theidiom of the Japanese woodcut?

Along with flatness of composition,Manet introduced a flattening of affect, anew form of cool detachment. The Execu-tion of Maximilian, whose final version wascompleted in 1869, is a perfect example ofthis, particularly when set against Goya’sThe Third of May, 1808 (1814), whichManet presumably saw at the Prado. TheThird of May also depicts an execution, anearly event in the so-called Peninsular Warbetween France and Spain. NapoleonBonaparte invaded Spain in 1808, captur-ing its royal family and replacing them with

his brother, Joseph. The French were asunpopular in Spain as they later were inMexico, and they encountered a fierce in-

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and hatred on the part of Spanish viewers.Goya’s is a highly romantic picture of adeeply emotional episode.

Manet’s painting, by contrast, couldhardly be cooler. The three victims, holdinghands, face the firing squad with fortitude.The officer standing apart loads his rifledispassionately, in case any of the victimssurvives. We do not see the faces of the fir-ing squad itself. The scene is treated dispas-sionately and journalistically. There was nophotographic record of the event, since itwas forbidden. Manet shows it the way aphotograph would, which was not an op-tion for Goya, since photography had notbeen invented in 1814.

Manet’s successive versions of Maximil-ian’s execution reflect an effort to visualizethe story as it unfolded in dispatches bycorrespondents, which were eagerly readby Europeans, who had no clear picture ofwhat Mexico or Mexican soldiers actuallylooked like. One wonders if what was tobecome a Modernist painting, accordingto Greenberg, was not initially an effort toemulate the camera and produce somethinglike a photographic print. Manet showed

it from the perspective of a near eyewit-ness—so everything was brought forward,and inevitably flattened, the way the cameralens of Manet’s time often flattened forms.It was as if photographs showed us withoptical veracity how we actually see theworld. In America, the photographs ofMathew Brady and Timothy O’Sullivanvisually defined the Civil War for distantviewers. Goya, by contrast, drew on theconventions of academic historical paint-ing, however romanticized.

One cannot but wonder whether Mod-ernism was not the combined result of two

modes of printing—the woodblock printand the photograph, each of which in-volved a kind of flattening. There wouldbe a further question of whether Green-berg did not make a mistake in transferringto his analysis of the essence of paintingwhat really defined the medium of the print.Maybe illusion is not that alien to paintingafter all, and those who feared that the in-vention of the camera meant the death ofpainting were barking up the wrong tree!If the progressive flattening of the surfacehas been the great journey of Modernist

painting, abstraction, it turns out, wasonly one of its destinations, especially in

an age of photography.

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