After Botticelli 1-5,

1992–93

Brice Marden emerged as a significant American minimalist painter in the 1960s, but after a series of voyages to Asia and Greece in the 1980s his work began to feature calligraphic, gestural lines instead of monochromatic fields of muted color. In After Botticelli, Marden adapts the serpentine lines of the Florentine Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli is celebrated for his use of line both to ornament and to convey movement-particularly when representing wind, water, and billowing drapery or hair. Here that line is utilized in a series of abstract etchings, whose twisting, desultory compositions create a sense of kinesthetic energy.