Rauschenberg and Brice Marden in the kitchen of Rauschenberg鈥檚 Lafayette Street studio, New York, 1968.
Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos
Rauschenberg and Brice Marden silkscreening Plexiglas panels for Soundings (1968)
in the chapel of Rauschenberg鈥檚 Lafayette Street studio, New York, 1968.
Photo: Attributed to Mel Bochner
Detail of contact sheet: auschenberg and Brice Marden silkscreening Plexiglas panels for Soundings (1968) in the chapel of Rauschenberg鈥檚 Lafayette Street studio, New York, 1968. Photo: Attributed to Mel Bochner
Brice Marden silkscreening Plexiglas panels for Rauschenberg鈥檚 Soundings (1968)
in the chapel of Rauschenberg鈥檚 Lafayette Street studio,
New York, 1968. Photo: Attributed to Mel Bochner
Rauschenberg and Brice Marden, 2003. Photo: Sidney B. Felsen
Brice Marden
Brice Marden is a renowned visual artist who gained international recognition in the 1960s for his monochrome panel paintings. He earned his bachelor of fine arts from the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1961 and his master of fine arts from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, in 1963. Marden was introduced to Rauschenberg by Dorothea Rockburne, who knew Rauschenberg from Black Mountain College during the early fifties. In 1966 Marden became Rauschenberg鈥檚 studio assistant, working on the completion of several motorized, silkscreened Plexiglas works, including Revolvers (1967), Solstice (1968), and Carnal Clocks (1969). He refabricated a group of Rauschenberg鈥檚 White Paintings (1951) for a 1968 exhibition. Marden鈥檚 work has been showcased at Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1972), and he has had several solo exhibitions, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Serpentine Gallery, London. In 2006 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a major retrospective of Marden鈥檚 work that traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and to the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Marden lives and works in New York.
Excerpt from Interview with Brice Marden by Mary Marshall Clark, 2015
Well, a lot of it was sort of worked out before. One time he sent me up to Look magazine, to collect images for him to use in the drawings. Because he liked the way Look鈥攕辞尘别丑辞飞 Look magazine was printed in such a way that the kind of frottage thing worked very well. And I spent a week in Look magazine, cutting out these things for him to use. And you鈥檙e working with someone for years and you鈥檙e involved with the work. And you鈥檙e trying to get these Rauschenberg images. And I just totally missed. I think he used one. Sometimes you would come in and there would be a stack of Scientific Americans on the kitchen table this high. You鈥檇 come in the next day and they鈥檙e all gone. And there are all these tear sheets. And they鈥檙e perfect Rauschenberg images. But had you been going through the same thing simultaneously, you just wouldn鈥檛 have gotten it. And so he was just drawing. I think a lot of it was, he was always drawing. And I found it very, very amusing that you just couldn鈥檛 predict it. He just turned it into his own thing so fast.