The grief of losing a partner has been evoked by artists as various as Francis Bacon, with his “Black Triptychs” in the 1970s, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose billboard photograph “Untitled” (1991) lets the absence of figures in an empty bed be a reference for a giant loss.
With “The Grief Paintings,” an exhibition of 23 new works on view through Sept. 14 at the Gagosian gallery on Park Avenue at 75th Street, Helen Marden adds her own entry to the tradition — a painter mourning another painter with works in their shared medium.
The show comes a year after the death of her husband, Brice Marden, who was 84 and ranked among the most influential painters of his generation, earning a Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 2006 and big auction prices for his work. His current record is $30.9 million, set by the signature winding loops and swirls of “Complements,” a vivid diptych, at Christie’s in 2020.
The small, round works by his widow at Gagosian are not in the mourning register of blacks and grays that a viewer may expect. Quite the opposite, though she also chose to include one work by her late husband, the black diptych “Passing” (1970-83).
They are mostly in Helen Marden’s hot palette of reds and oranges, vibrant and shiny, and they have shells, feathers and bits of glass affixed, as if her memories happened to be flying by her and clung fortuitously to the works. Even the black ones have colored feathers attached.
“I have no conscious memory of how I decided to do them,” Marden said of the new works, which she began right before her husband died, completing most of them by the end of 2023. “It was the early grief. You don’t know where you are. I was in shock.”
Marden made her paintings by mixing resin and a hardening agent and then pouring in pure pigment, right before affixing the objects. She works fast and spontaneously.
“It’s all done in one big flourish,” said the 82-year-old artist, looking breezily casual in a black cashmere shawl, black pants and pink shoes. She was sitting in her studio on the Hudson Valley property that the couple shared for more than 20 years, one of the many homes all over the world that they acquired over the decades, including on the Caribbean island of Nevis and the Greek island of Hydra. The vibrant blanket on her chair was a flat weave from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.
The Mardens were together for more than 55 years. “Grief comes in waves,” she said. “I’m still grieving, obviously, but it’s different now.”
The floor of her studio looked like a glorious mess, with bright paint all over the place — smeared on a tarp, sitting in plastic buckets and cans, hardened on brushes. Any visitor who walked in was likely to walk out making a pink footprint. But she said as far as she was concerned, “each element is where it should be.”
The artist Kiki Smith, a friend of Helen Marden’s who witnessed the grief series underway, said there was “fearlessness and immediacy in her work,” adding that the bright palette made perfect sense, given her personality and her own language: “These colors belong to her.”
Marriages between two artists are famously complicated, especially when the level of acclaim is uneven. And so Brice Marden’s death was not only the catalyst of the “Grief Paintings,” but it also offered the chance for his widow to be seen on her own terms.
“Brice’s career casts a wide shadow,” said Larry Gagosian, the dealer and a friend of both artists for decades. He has represented Brice Marden since 2017 and Helen Marden since 2019.
“Maybe it freed her in a certain way as an artist,” Gagosian mused. “I think they’re the best paintings she’s made.”
Glenn Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, called her work “strong and vibrant, with an emotional charge that is very different from Brice’s.” He added, “It’s always difficult when two artists live together to see both of them with the clarity that each deserves, especially given Brice’s towering status as one of the greatest artists of his time.”
Having observed them for years as a couple, Lowry said he appreciated “the dichotomy in their relationship: that Brice was the cool, laid-back yin to her hot, intense emotional yang.”
That roughly tracks with Marden’s own version of her marriage. She called herself “tempestuous.”
Born Helen Harrington in Pittsburgh and raised in Williamsport, Pa., she received a B.F.A. in art from Pennsylvania State University in 1963, and then spent time traveling the world to places like Morocco (where she now has a home).
She moved to New York City, and then in 1966 or 1967 — she was vague on which — she met Brice at Max’s Kansas City, the famed watering hole for musicians and artists.
“I was the waitress, and he was the drunk at the bar,” she said. They married in 1968.
The couple split up for a while in the 1970s, at the same time that Brice was getting famous. “I was sick of everyone pushing me aside,” she said.
But the break didn’t last. “We really missed each other,” Marden said. They made some changes that included moving out of a loft and into a home with “doors that shut,” she said.
Feeling intimidated by the art world, she did not start painting in earnest until the early 1980s, after they had had two daughters. “I thought if I can keep them breathing, I can do anything,” Marden recalled, explaining that motherhood also gave her the confidence to make art.
The thought of taking painting seriously had her “scared,” she said, but she was encouraged by successful female artist friends, including Elizabeth Murray and Jennifer Bartlett.
“Jennifer said, ‘Just write your name over and over,’” Marden said. “And Elizabeth, of course, said, ‘Just start.’ And I did.”
Always working abstractly, she has experimented with different styles and methods, frequently emphasizing the drippy, splotchy and emotional potential of paint; she also makes watercolors.
Both Mardens were included in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Her paintings then were very different from the ones in her current show. Those acrylic works at the Whitney were covered in energetic slashes that she made with paint on the side of her hand, using it as a brush.
Her husband’s formidable status made for uncomfortable feedback. A New York Times review of the Biennial criticized her abstractions and seemed to imply that favoritism got her in the show.
“Everyone attacked me with oh so clever remarks,” Marden said, adding that she still remembers reading the Times review — and promptly stuffing it into the garbage.
Asked if she was still steamed by the response, she said, “Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
It did not keep her from creating new works, and the Mardens pursued abstraction in their separate studios all over the world for decades.
“He liked my opinion, but I would never go into his studio without being asked,” Marden recalled. “It was sort of formal. So when he would invite you, you knew it was because he wanted a take.”
Sometimes she would see a work in progress and tell him, “‘Stop before you ruin it,’” she said.
It made a difference. Lowry said, “Brice on numerous occasions said he didn’t know if a painting was done until Helen told him it was done.”
But trusting her opinion about his own work did not translate to encouraging her in her own painting on a regular basis, perhaps typical of the gender roles of the time.
“We just didn’t interact that way,” Marden said.
Not too long before he died, from cancer, her husband went into her studio and appraised the various works on hand.
“Brice looked around and he said, ‘Half of them are good,’” Marden said, letting out a laugh. “And then he left, and he never came back.”
He did not specify which half. “I thought that was so Brice,” Marden added.
He did, however, encourage Gagosian to look at her works several years ago, and the dealer obliged.
“That was strange,” she said of Brice’s actions in stumping for her work. “I was completely shocked.”
Marden understood early on that her husband just wanted to work.
“He was so driven,” she said. “We’d go somewhere, and I’d say, ‘Could you wait 20 minutes before you start drawing?’”
On one level, that suited her. “I loved that about Brice from the beginning when I met him,” she said. “I didn’t want to entertain someone. We were both loners in a way.”
Her grief paintings incorporate some of her memories of them being together — the use of shells in her work began after the couple rented a house in Provincetown, Mass. — but they also refer to her solo life as an artist.
When a bird smacked into a window of her studio several years ago, she had her studio assistant pluck it and she used the feathers in her paintings. She subsequently bought feathers for later works — “I can’t go around strangling birds” — including those in the grief series.
“I like what it conjures up — flight, death, despair,” she said.
Marden looked up at the grief works on her studio walls. “I’m delighted I have these,” she said. “They helped me.”
Read More: Helen Marden, Grieving in Bright Colors and on Her Own Terms
