Recent Acquisition:
Brice Marden's 3 Hydra Rocks (2001 - 04)

Previous Acquisitions: Catherine Sullivan's Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land | Yayoi Kusama's Fireflies on the Water |

In the early 1970s Brice Marden (b. 1938) began traveling regularly to Hydra, Greece, a small island in the Aegean Sea (about 80 miles from Athens) where he eventually took a residence. He has said that his visits to Greece were "important to me visually, in terms of space, light, and color."1 Since then, Greece has continued to inspire the artist, informing both Marden's earlier Minimalist style of the 1970s and the more curvilinear style he developed in the 1990s. According to art historian Klaus Kertess, "Hydra became the base for his deepening relationship with nature, as well as for Marden's rediscovery of Greek culture." 2

Marden worked on 3 Hydra Rocks over a period of three years while traveling back and forth between his New York studio and his summer residence in Hydra. Chromatically, the painting relates to his previous work Prayer Flags (1985/1994-96), in which he similarly paints red, orange, and yellow curving lines along with differing values of blue. Actual prayer flags the artist saw while traveling with his family to Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand in 1984 inspired the color palette in the painting. He would reexplore this palette in paintings such as The Sisters (1991-93) and Chinese Dancing (1993-96). In these earlier works, red, orange, and yellow circuitous lines intricately overlap and span the entire plane, rather than remaining distinct in space. Marden again takes up this palette in 3 Hydra Rocks. In contrast to the earlier works, however, in this painting the artist uses space as much as color to delineate the triad, as evidenced in the left, middle, and right registers of the canvas, where the three writhing bands of color assume a more distinct sculptural contour. This left-to-right movement also recalls the narrative progression of a frieze on a Greek temple. Indeed, working in Hydra deepened Marden’s interest in Greek sculpture and architecture, as well as its history and mythology, and serves as a further source of inspiration, witnessed in his series The Muses (1991-99). The number three also references the ancient Greek legend of the Three Graces--three daughters of Zeus who personified grace, beauty, and charm. 

Each of the warm hues that distinguish the colorful triad fluctuate against the dark blue background as sunlit reflections of the rocks might dance across the water's swelling surface. Kertess wrote of Marden's impression of Hydra's rocks: "Viewed from the sea, the sheerness and relative flatness of the rocks push the volume of the island into a silhouette that mirrors the parallel silhouette of the Peloponnesian peninsula. For Marden, these two silhouettes become a vessel that contains the sea."3 One easily sees this in 3 Hydra Rocks, where the colorful silhouettes highlight the depths of the sea, as represented by the painting's indigo background. The rhythmic bands of bold, warm color contrast with the dark coolness of the background, lying closer to the surface of the canvas. Marden weaves a cool, gray-blue strand among the three saturated colors, linking the foreground and background of the painting, and effectively creating a middleground that underscores a recession into space. A similar thing happens with the bands of dark blue and green that seemingly lie beneath the orange and yellow, respectively; these cool, dark bands help to expand the depth of the painting. Furthermore, the background shifts between subtle differences in value, augmenting the atmospheric density of the work, so that the plane of the canvas alternately recedes and advances below the distinct lines, much like the motion of the sea. Movement is thus propelled by both the seemingly infinite linear curves and the background shifts in color modulation. In fact, the "indisputability of the picture plane" has remained a steadfast concern throughout Marden's oeuvre.4 While acknowledging the flat, bounded surface of the plane, Marden spatially expands it, creating the illusion of depth through his layering process. He establishes a complex, interrelated network of colorful lines that undulate across the demarcated field, so that in 3 Hydra Rocks the picture plane is never static.

1. Brice Marden, interview with John Yau, in Brice Marden, Eva Keller and Regula Malin, eds., exhibition catalogue. (Zurich: Daros Services AG, 2003), 49. 

2. Klaus Kertess, Brice Marden: Paintings and Drawings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), 10.

3.  Ibid., 9.

4. Brice Marden, "The Grove Group Notebook," in Brice Marden: The Grove Group, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1991), p. 25.

Text written by Apsara DiQuinzio, curatorial assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art