The exhibition of Brice Maiden's work of the 1990s—on view at the Dallas Museum of Art until April 25, then at the Hirshhom Museum in Washington, D.C., the Miami Art Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh—establishes once again that this artist is arguably the finest abstract painter of his generation.

At a time when pundits were claiming that painting was dead—killed off by cameras, computers, laser beams, bulldozers, and other technological devices—along came Brice Marden to reinvent this supposedly obsolete medium. He has done so with such dexterity and authority that the paint surface—its color, texture, tonality, and size, and the way it absorbs or reflects light—can constitute the actual subject of a work. In the course of reinventing painting, Marden has been at pains to keep beauty, a modernist bugbear, at bay. If he sometimes fails to do so, it is because beauty, or what he calls "refinement," is a by-product of his painstaking perfectionism. His concerns go much, much deeper than mere surface attraction. As his friend the writer and curator Klaus Kertess has said, Marden "has pushed his paint ... to that edge where matter meets myth and spirit."

Marden would never have been able to get where he is and stay where he is had he not been driven by an adamant belief in abstraction, an addiction to very hard work, a fiercely competitive ego, and a compulsion to stay ahead of the game. This is not the side of his character that Marden presents to the world. He has such charm, such lucid and quirky intelligence, such ironic humor, and such ageless, movie-star looks—it is hard to believe he is 60—that one is apt to overlook his inherent toughness. Marden comes across as something of a paragon. The elegant austerity of his style is mirrored in the elegant austerity of his studio on the Bowery in New York. There are no mountains of old paint rags, no state-of-the-art technology to be seen. Everything has its place. His two-and three-foot-long brushes, which are essential to the gestural bravura of his work (Marden says he paints with "his whole body rather than just the wrist and the arm"), are aligned in meticulous rows. It comes as no surprise that his seemingly simple worktable is Ming.

Sticks allow Marden to work at the same distance from his sheet of paper that an observer would adopt.

The Mardens' handsome Federal house in Greenwich Village reflects the more protean taste of the artist's fascinating, forthright wife, Helen. From her many trips to India and eastern Asia she has brought back all manner of treasures, not least a small marble temple, which dominates the garden. The focal point of the living room is an imposing, marble Mogul bed. Helen uses it to show off her collection of antique lingams and other phallic artifacts of all shapes and sizes and cultures. Walls are hung with works by Brice and Helen and their painter friends as well as with photographs of the family by Robert Mapplethorpe and some wonderful Tantric miniatures. Animals abound: a shar-pei that looks like W. H. Auden, and various felines, among them an exotic pair of rex cats, which Fran Lebowitz, a close friend, has christened Sloan and Kettering. Helen's life-enhancing touch is evident in the mass of flowers she regularly brings back from the flower market—lilies, jonquils, paper-whites, the more sweetly scented the better—which are jammed into scores of vases all over the house, but mostly in her huge kitchen. Sitting by the fire and talking about her own, more abstract-expressionistic work and her children, she epitomizes the freedom of spirit of the 60s. Friends recall how, all those years ago at Woodstock, she danced like a maenad as long as the music lasted.

Brice Marden was born into the very heart of East Coast Waspdom—Briarcliff Manor in New York's Westchester County—to a likable Irish mother and a conventional-distant father, a Princetonian banker who, according to his son, enjoyed planting trees and building "beautiful dry stone walls." (In an attempt to explain his work to his father, Marden cited these walls: "Everything has to fit together in order for it to stand.") Marden had briefly contemplated a career in hotel management or—in wilder moments—the rodeo. However, by the time he was 20 he had decided to be an artist and enrolled at Boston University's School for the Arts. He proved to be so paint-obsessed that he would take the gray sludge cleaned from the students' brushes and see what he could do with it. In 1961 he moved on to the School of Art and Architecture at Yale, where many of today's finest artists would be his fellow students, among them Richard Serra, Robert Mangold, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Janet Fish. These future stars are said to have learned almost as much from one another as they did from their teachers, one of whom worried, presciently, that Marden might be painting himself into a corner. He was, but he made a virtue of it.

"In The Muses, I was working with a group of figures dancing, the Peloponnesian landscape, Dionysian madness."

While still at Yale, Marden married his girlfriend, a sister of Joan Baez, and fathered a son named Nicholas. After earning a master-of-fine-arts degree in 1963, he settled in New York. He rented a walk-up apartment in the East Village and lived mostly on yogurt. In due course he got a job as a guard at the Jewish Museum, and devoted the rest of his time to painting. The boredom of his museum job was mitigated by the excitement of the exhibitions that the progressive director, Allan Solomon, organized. For Marden, the 1964 Jasper Johns show was a revelation. Johns would confirm him in his allegiance to an infinite gamut of grays.

In the summer of 1964, Marden quit his job and took off for Paris. Courbet and Manet had as much to teach him as Picasso or Matisse. He seems to have been struck by Manet's revolutionary use of gray as an active color and by Courbet's use of a palette knife to build up the lowering grayness of rain clouds or the soggy greenness of the Jura's wetlands—climatic effects made palpable in paint, comparable to what goes on in Marden's own work. The visit to Paris coincided with Andre Malraux's well-intentioned but ill-advised campaign to scrub the face of Paris clean (ill-advised because the high-pressure cleaning left some of the older buildings susceptible to erosion). Never had Parisian limestone taken the light so gloriously. "The flat density of stucco, stone, and tile constantly drew Marden's attention," according to Klaus Kertess. "He sought to assimilate this wallness in his drawings.... He made frottage rubbings in his notebooks, as well as scratching tracks with his comb."

Back in New York, Marden and his wife divorced, and he went to work as an assistant to Robert Rauschenberg—"the most naturally intelligent person I've ever met," he says, "and he's very generous with his thinking." The job entailed little in the way of duties. Rauschenberg was not so much working as living it up—or should one say down? This was Rauschenberg's "dude period." He had taken to wearing a porcupine-quill jacket; his shoulder-length hair was elaborately coiffed, and he did little but drink too much bourbon, watch too much television, and gallivant around Europe. "It was really a weird job," Marden told the writer Calvin Tomkins. "Technically you're his assistant, but also you're being paid to sit around and drink with him. [Bob] was very lonely then, and sort of shaky." Marden was already so committed to a set of rules he had formulated for himself that he had no need of a mentor. What he gleaned above all from Rauschenberg was reassurance. He realized what it required to be a successful practicing artist. For years the Mardens had a turtle called Rauschenberg.

Like Rauschenberg, Marden spent a great deal of time at Max's Kansas City, the ultra-hip watering hole, which opened on lower Park Avenue in 1965 and lasted, in its original form, until 1974. As William Burroughs said, "Max's was at the intersection of everything." But Andy Warhol's claim that the place was "the exact spot where Pop Art and Pop Life came together" is not strictly true. To most of the abstractionists who congregated there, Pop art seemed like pretty thin stuff, just another form of representationalism. Marden gravitated to the "heavy hitters"—Serra and John Chamberlain and Carl Andre— who hung out in the front part of Max's. Warhol and his superstars—Ultra Violet, Sylvia Miles, and drag queens such as Holly Woodlawn—hung out in the back. The heavy hitters were apt to refer to Warhol as "Wendy Airhole," and to his associate, Bob Colacello, then editor of Interview, as "Kooky Jello."

The heady 60s combination of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll is what fueled the creativity at Max's. At first it was primarily an artists' hangout. Later, musicians performed in the upstairs room. Bruce Springsteen, Iggy Pop, Billy Joel, Alice Cooper, the Velvet Underground, and Kinky Friedman and his Texas Jewboys were just a few of those who appeared there. The rock 'n' rollers and the artists got along marvelously together. Max's was the only place in New York where it was possible to hear great music, get infinite credit, score drugs, and make out there and then with the gorgeous groupies who thronged the place. The waitresses in their little black miniskirts and black tops were a major part of the attraction—"more appetizing than the food," Dennis Hopper said. According to Yvonne Sewall-Ruskin, who lived with the proprietor, Mickey Ruskin, the waitresses "were treated like celebrities instead of indentured servants." They made so much money that some of them went to Europe when they had a few days off. The life and soul of these beauties was an adventurous girl named Helen Harrington, an aspiring painter who had swept in from Morocco. Marden was very taken with her. They were married in 1967. Despite sporadic separations (then as now Helen was also a character to be reckoned with), they are still very much together. Now that their two daughters are away at college, Helen has more time to devote to her own work and to travel.

Helen figures repeatedly in Marden's imagery. The year of their marriage, he paid tribute to her in a work entitled For Helen, which consists of two panels that are both five feet nine inches in height, as is Helen (Marden is five feet eight and a half), and painted a wonderful orificial pink. (Helen claims that the pink was inspired by a color Marden had never seen— the color of the wet sand at low tide in Cornwall—which she had described to him.) Less than a year later, after Helen temporarily deserted him, Marden dedicated seven more of these five-foot-nine paintings to her, this time single-panel ones, which are as obdurate as a slammed door. These are known as the Back Series, to signify that she had turned her back on him. (A photograph of Helen's naked back figured on the poster for the exhibition of this series.)

Before Marden married Helen, he had found inspiration in another of Max's girls: Nico, Andy Warhol's superstar (Chelsea Girls), who also sang with the Velvet Underground. Amazingly, this big blonde German sexpot, who had spent most of her life on heroin, died falling off a bicycle on Ibiza. Nico Painting is done in the pale corn color of Germanic hair; it is so physical that you want to touch it—kiss it. During one of his separations from Helen, Marden commemorated his love for two other fascinating singers, the raw-voiced superstar Janis Joplin and the poet and songwriter Patti Smith. Both of these "portraits"—titled, respectively, For Pearl and Star—consist of three monochrome panels that are tightly jammed together, without the vertical gap that endows For Helen with a more overtly human presence.

Among the other works in which Marden memorialized heroes and kindred spirits around this time, pride of place must go to the great horizontal painting—a darkish, purplish gray the French would call taupe—in which Marden adulates Bob Dylan. (This was recently acquired by San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art for about $2 million.) No less powerful is a pair of dark-gray vertical "portraits": the self-referential For Me, which belongs to Rauschenberg, and For Otis, a painting Marden was working on when he heard that Otis Redding had died. Another memento mori done about the same time, entitled T.K.B., after one of Marden's closest friends, who had OD'd, is terrifying in its intensity: darkness, maybe death made tangible. Like several of Marden's major works of the period, T.K.B. has a strip along the bottom which is free of the impasto covering the rest of the canvas. This device (borrowed from Jasper Johns) permits the artist, as it were, to take up one edge of the skin of paint and show us the Jackson Pollock-y splotches and dribbles underneath. These aleatory marks hint at the secrets—memories, false starts, aspirations, loves, and griefs—that are buried, like so many bees in amber, under the layers of oil paint and heated beeswax (hence the beautiful matte sheen) and months and months of obsessive work.

During the summer of 1971, Helen steered Marden to the Aegean island of Hydra—a much wilder, more hippieish place then than it is today—and they have spent most summers there ever since. Their first house was so tiny Marden had to work outdoors at a rickety table under a grape arbor. Over the years, they have increased their Hydriot holdings: a clump of whitewashed cottages on the hill above the town, known as the Up House, and, more recently, an imposing 18th-century sea captain's residence just above the port, known as the Down House. Helen has her studio above; Marden his spectacular studio below. For the first 20 summers on Hydra, Marden did no paintings, only drawings, but the light and color, the sea and sky, and the halcyon aura of the Aegean inspired a number of works, which he produced back in his New York studio—notably his celebrated Grove Group series, in which he dissolves Hydra's genius loci in layer after mysterious layer of pigment.

These five Grove Group paintings (1973—80) are executed in a name-defying color, a kind of celadon, which varies from silver to pewter to lead and evokes the recto and verso of the olive leaf. Sea and sky contribute to this color; so possibly do the prevailing wind (the meltemi) and the prevailing thistles. These seemingly blank, monochromatic paintings can be seen as a kind of distillation. They put me in mind of a ritual which took place every autumn in the vineyards of Provence where I used to live. After the grapes had been pressed, the residue—grape skins, pips, leaves, twigs—would be fed into a steam engine. Out would come marc or some other spirit, which I liked to think of as a distillation not just of the grapes but also of all the other elements—sun, soil, rain—that go into the making of it.

Hydra, or rather the boat trip to and from the island, inspired several of the works in the Sea Painting series, which play the blues on the port side off the ever so slightly different blues to starboard. While exploring the mainland, Marden had become engrossed in the study of ancient Greek architecture. Little by little he saw how its simple, sacrosanct proportions could give his seemingly blank surfaces a semblance of structure. By adding a horizontal panel to the top of a two-panel composition, he could evoke the post-and-lintel portal of a temple and confer an air of monumentality and mythic antiquity on his basic rectangles.

In 1975 the Guggenheim gave the 36-yearold Marden a retrospective, which established him as a romantic visionary in the American tradition of the sublime. His stock rose even higher when the Pace Gallery showed his Annunciation series (1978—80)—five large compositions, each consisting of four vertical panels of varying width and color—which celebrates the conception of his elder daughter, Mirabelle. These panels, in which the sacred joins forces with the profane, were inspired by a 15th-century sermon describing the five successive stages of the Virgin Mary's reaction to the Annunciation: Conturbatio (disquiet), Cogitatio (reflection), Interrogatio (inquiry), Humilitatio (submission), and Meritatio (merit). Marden has no specific religious beliefs; however, as a child he was an altar boy and was "very much involved in the ceremonial aspect of the [Episcopal] church." Later, at college, he discovered that "so much of Western architecture and art is based on [Catholicism]. It's all about what's supposed to happen mystically. I've always been very intrigued by that." John Russell, the New York Times critic, claimed that the Annunciation series is "one of the richest, clearest, and most fulfilled of our century's grand designs. It is a misfortune for us all that it was not bought for an American museum and is now widely dispersed."

While working on the Annunciation series, Marden accepted a commission to design 15 stained-glass windows for the cathedral in Basel. After slaving away for seven years (1978-85), he shelved the project in the face of Swiss stinginess and opposition from reactionary city fathers. However, the experience was valuable in that it obliged Marden to move on from his opaque monochrome rectangles and experiment for a change with planar transparency and the juxtaposition of symbolic colors (reds, yellows, blues, greens, which stand for fire, air, water, earth). Hence the series of incandescent Window studies, which allow for a play of light and a breath of air and—a new departure—a variety of shorthand symbolic signs. Nonfigurative purists denounced this foray into figuration as counterrevolutionary, but Marden forged on. "I wanted to find something ... melodious," he said.

Marden's preoccupation with paint does not rule out a preoccupation with drawing. "They are not very far apart, but they are very far apart," he says. Now that he had drifted away from austerity, it was above all drawing that enabled him to find fresh solutions to the problems of minimal (as opposed to Minimalist) imagery. He took his lead from Jackson Pollock. Besides a baster, Pollock had used sticks to apply paint in a sensational new way. Marden followed suit, and came up with an even more idiosyncratic technique. Instead of making marks on paper with a conventional pen or pencil, he uses sticks he has picked up on the street—sticks up to three feet long from the weedlike ailanthus trees, which have invaded New York's vacant lots—and dips them in ink or paint. These sticks allow Marden to work at the same sort of distance from his sheet of paper that an observer would adopt. He says that they oblige him to learn to draw all over again. It has been well worth it. Marden has been able to adapt drawing to his own special needs and introduce a romantic hint of ghostly figuration into his hitherto totally abstract work. For all their seeming spontaneity, these drawings have often been worked on for two or three years—like the paintings—which explains the smallness of Marden's output. Even after he has handed over a painting to his dealer, he has been known to insist on its return and spend months reworking it.

In the early 1980s, Marden suffered what he called a midlife crisis. It was as if he had turned the clock back to the wild days of Max's Kansas City. He took a lot of drugs. He broke up with Helen, who had recently given birth to a second daughter, and embarked on an affair with Heather Watts, the vivid star of George Balanchine's New York City Ballet. And although his work was attracting enormous attention and enormous prices, he took a dislike to his gallery: "I would work on a single painting for a year [his 18-panel Thira,], just as a fuck-you to my gallery...It got boring." And then he lost his appetite for Sturm und Drang and went back to Helen and the kids and the house in Greenwich Village and the summers on Hydra. He also switched dealers, ultimately joining the more sympathetic and understanding Matthew Marks in New York and Thomas Ammann in Zurich. Marks asks anything from $500,000 to $1 million for one of Marden's current paintings. The record price for an earlier work is $2.7 million.

To put their lives back together again, the Mardens took their children on a yearlong trip around the world. This coincided with Marden's newfound passion for Chinese calligraphy, an abstract blend of imagery and script that has had a decisive influence on the figuration in his recent work. The trip reinforced Marden's taste for Asian art; it also had a very therapeutic effect on his and Helen's spirits. Marden was particularly excited by a visit to a "shell museum"—more of a shell bazaar—in Krabi, on the southwestern coast of Thailand, where he was able to study the speckled surfaces and structures of the shells. The markings have engendered some of his finest drawings. So that he can continue working on these drawings, Marden takes them with him from New York to Greece, and also to Pennsylvania, where he has a 400-acre estate, Rainbow Farms, near a place called Eagles Mere.

Marden's preoccupation with Chinese calligraphy inspired what are arguably his greatest, certainly his most ecstatic paintings: the Cold Mountain series (1988-91). These commemorate the so-called Cold Mountain poet, a seventh-century Chinese hermit named after the holy mountain where he had his hermitage. In these six huge paintings (not to speak of numerous related drawings and a suite of etchings), Marden animates the calligraphic characters in the poet's formulaic couplets and transforms them into a layered tangle of dancing, proliferating strands. In their intricacy and density, the Cold Mountain paintings recall Jackson Pollock, one of whose dried-up pots of silver paint Marden keeps as a sacred relic in his New York studio; for better or worse, however, Marden's work is less tortured, more lyrical than Pollock's.

In 1995, Marden harnessed his work to yet another Asian art form. On a trip to China he visited the Garden for Lingering in Suzhou, with its celebrated centerpiece, the Cloud-Capped Peak, a natural rock formation like a column of petrified smoke. The "flow of energy" from the CloudCapped Peak has fueled much of Marden's recent work. He was also very taken with the cave paintings at Dunhuang—especially those depicting the "Ribbon Dance," which inspired the joyous Chinese Dancing in the Dallas show. That kind of movement, Marden says, is figural. "You're painting it with a long brush, so you're moving. In a sense it becomes a transference of your own dance to the canvas." Marden's concept of dance was reinforced by reading Robert Graves's Greek Myths: "I like it when [Graves] talks about the Muses as maenads, these Bacchanalian women wildly dancing in the mountains. That's what I was working with in The Muses. Just a group of figures dancing, the Peloponnesian landscape, Dionysian madness." Look hard into this painting and you will be able to distinguish in the tangle of lines the nine Muses, who stand for music, poetry, history, science, and the arts. (Too bad there are no Muses of painting or sculpture.) This work also envisions something more personal: the artist's beautiful, maenadic daughters cavorting on the slopes of Hydra much as the Muses supposedly did on Mount Olympus. As for the "Dionysian madness," I suspect this is what Marden kept hidden away underneath all those volcanic deposits of paint.

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