Group of 4 (of 6) lithographs (one with screenprint) on Italia paper, 1972. Each 662x484 mm; 26x19 inches (sheets), full margins. Each signed, dated and numbered in pencil, lower margin (edition sizes range from 42 to 48). Printed and published by Untitled Press Inc., Captiva Island. Very good impressions of these scarce lithographs.
Brice Marden's (born 1930) early artistic leanings, while a student at the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts in the late 1950s, were toward the paintings of Mark Rothko and Abstract Expressionism. As he explained, "I would be standing in front of these paintings trying to figure them out, and I realised that what I liked about Abstract Expressionism was that it didn't pay to get terribly analytical about it. It was better if you just went with the painting."
This is perhaps Marden's most Abstract Expressionist-styled series of prints, aside from a group of several etchings with aquatint most reminiscent of the of the work of Fanz Kline and Willem de Kooning that he made in 1961 (Lewison 5-8). One particularly appealing aspect of the current lithographs is they show Marsden's movement from abstraction to the more stylized look of Minimalism that is a hallmark of his work from the mid-1970s onward. Printed at a press on a property adjacent to Robert Rauschenberg's Captiva Island, Florida, home, the Untitled Press Series is, according to Lewison, "much freer than anything Marden had previously produced." Lewison 21 (#1, #2, #4 and #5).
