Lines That Go for a Walk

By ROBERT HUGHES

Brice Marden's "Cold Mountain" paintings of 1988-91 -- six of them, big ones, 9 ft. by 12 ft., backed up by a few dozen drawings and prints -- are now on view at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City. This is a show and a half. How fast, how silently, the sight of a real sensibility at full stretch can cut through the visual jabber and white noise of so much of the gallery scene! On the evidence of these new works, Marden, 53, is now the finest American abstract painter of his generation.

Every artist has prototypes, artists he or she admires and learns from -- an internal homage that never ends. The problem is to subdue their authority, to bring their lessons into line with one's instincts. The artist who does this may be called mature. So with Marden, who with this show of huge, pale canvases covered with a loose tracery of inky line has managed at last to reconcile his inheritance as a late modern American painter -- chiefly, the work of Jackson Pollock -- with his interests in Oriental art. Marden has made intense and complicated images out of this dialogue. His internal argument about his sources is settled, and the show is an exhilarating vindication of the expressive reach of abstract art: an argument for beauty.

Cold Mountain was not a place but a man, an 8th century Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty who quit the imperial court and retired to a mountain community of Buddhist monks and hermits. There, for the rest of his life, he wrote verses (strict in form, four couplets to a page, each a small tower of vertical characters) declaring his independence from the material "world of dust." Cold Mountain was one of those jokester sages in whom Buddhist culture -- Zen Buddhism in particular -- abounded. Marden, whose interest in Oriental poetry had been deepening in the 1980s, seized on him not only because he liked the poetry in translation but because of the beautiful and wayward calligraphy of the surviving texts.

Up to then, the look of Marden's paintings was familiar to the point of seeming an art-world staple -- humane Minimalism. Since the '70s he had been working in a very controlled format of blocks of subdued color butted up one against another; the image was "built" from monochrome canvases. The quality of the color and the proportional relationships of the canvases were both crucial. He liked his paintings to be the size of a man (or a woman), so that one would be induced without being quite conscious of it to connect them to standing figures, other "presences" in the room, rather than to view them as spectacles.

Marden admired Jasper Johns -- a critic in the '70s brusquely but memorably wrote off an abstract twin-canvas picture by Marden as "Jasper's Painting with Two Balls, without the balls." And like Johns, he worked in a mixture of oil paint and wax, a false encaustic that gave his surfaces both substance and an inner glow, as if light were working its way through layers of slightly dusty translucency. You thought of it as skin. Marden was a brilliant colorist, in a very tuned-down way. His warm grays and brick reds, his low thick blues and his blocks of terre verte, betokened nature, suggesting planes of light on sky and sea, old stone and vegetation. They had none of the inorganic chemical look of so much post-Pop American color. But their danger was that they could turn into a formula.

To break the mold, Marden in the mid-'80s started doing calligraphic drawings, not with a brush but with twigs of ailanthus wood -- ailanthus being the common weed tree that grows in every sidewalk crack in Lower Manhattan but is known to the Chinese as the tree of heaven. Stuck in a long holder and dipped in ink, these flexible little sticks delivered a blobby, rough line, far from the look of classical brush drawing but with some of its improvised character.

Of course, an enthusiasm for calligraphy guarantees an artist nothing. For decades, America has been full of bad abstract painting based on Chinese and Japanese ideograms -- it goes with wind-bells and Bay Area Zen. If Marden's work avoids that cliche, it is because of his accommodation with Western gestural drawing -- specifically Pollock's -- in its speed, amplitude of space and openness to chance. In these paintings you see Marden thinking about Pollock, rather slowly. Marden's black, groping line offers a kind of schematic reduction of Pollock's all-over web.

"The line," wrote Paul Klee back in the days of the Bauhaus, "likes to go for a walk." This is true of Marden's paintings, which at first sight seem to consist of nothing but line, moving across the surface in an improvised way full of checks, turnings, erasures -- a maze making itself. The nature of the line is intimately involved with the tool Marden uses, which is in effect the ailanthus twig writ large: a long-handled brush with flitchlike bristles, floppy rather than stiff, whose ramblings convey an air of reflective uncertainty. Not for Marden the forceful calligraphic rush, the electric ink- blackness, of some Zen characters.

There is a small amount of color in these paintings -- generally strokes of earth green and rubbed patches of raw umber -- but the prevalent hue of the gray-to-silver monochrome seems to change from canvas to canvas, emitting different tints of light. Marden scrapes back and sandpapers the canvas, leaving the ghosts of one layer of paint behind the other; this subtlety (the equivalent of the nuances inside the coats of wax in his earlier work) plays off against the roughness of the lines. Sometimes a whole web of dark line gets canceled, whited out, but roughly -- on those thin grounds nothing can be concealed, anyway -- so that it forms a counterpart to the drawn structure, a sort of ghost image behind the interlacing on top.

There is also a lot of blurring of the line itself; it is blotted when too dark or scrubbed so that smears are left; drips run down and impede its forward movement. The effect of this, however, is not to make the image seem tentative; it just slows up the progress of the line enough to keep it from looking glib. The word pedestrian comes to mind, though in a far from disparaging sense.

These are bold paintings, but not in a macho way. They accept hesitation as part of the normal apparatus of consciousness. You don't get the image all at once, and the size of the canvases is meant not so much to impress you in the familiar, take-it-or-leave-it American fashion as to draw you slowly into the web. This, too, is part of Pollock's often misunderstood legacy. Looking at the "Cold Mountain" paintings one inevitably thinks of nature: thin they are, and austere, but also full of light and space. They suggest mountain landscapes, rocks half-effaced by blowing mist, sharp things incompletely seen. They are materializations of the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao- tzu:

The Tao is something blurred and

indistinct,

How indistinct! How blurred!

Yet within are images,

How blurred! How indistinct!

Yet within are things.