Brice Marden: Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, 1961–2023

This volume documents nearly five hundred paintings made by Brice Marden over the course of his six-decade career, between 1961 and 2023. Edited by Tiffany Bell, it represents the most definitive and comprehensive study to date of Marden’s painting oeuvre. A master of color and touch—from his early subtle, shimmering monochromes to the calligraphic compositions that characterized his later work—Marden extended and refined the traditions of lyrical abstraction.

The catalogue raisonné section features full cataloguing details and illustrations of Marden’s paintings on canvas and on marble; explanatory notes employ the artist’s own words, often from unpublished sources. The book reproduces images of nearly ninety works that have never been published, several more that have not been published in color, and more than seventy works that have never been included in an exhibition. Several unpublished works are studies for an unrealized project, dating from the early to mid-1980s, to create stained-glass windows for the Basel Cathedral, and they illustrate an important shift in the artist’s strategy from monochromatic panels to the gestural work that would become his signature from mid-career onward. Fittingly, the catalogue raisonné closes with never-before-seen studies for stained-glass windows to be installed posthumously in a deconsecrated church in Tivoli, New York—where the artist primarily lived and worked in the last two decades of his life—which will become a community and cultural center.

The book includes an introduction by Larry Gagosian, an essay and note to the reader by Tiffany Bell, and a detailed, illustrated chronology by Bell and Anna Gray. Two texts by Marden, from early and late in his career, provide bookends to his approach to painting. When read together, they present clear through lines of ideas that preoccupied Marden throughout his practice—the influence of surrounding nature, his wish to work within given restraints—while the second text offers insight into later works and how his painting evolved as his world expanded.