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The scheme of his recent work sounds simple: arrays of long, narrow panels, as in Green (Earth), 1983-84, locked together in silent T formations with infills. They suggest the absolute forms of classic architecture -- columns and lintels bathed in Aegean light. The extreme subtlety of Marden's color speaks of nature. It is mixed and layered, skin upon slow skin of pigment and oil, bearing a history of growth, submergence and mellowing, containing light the way a sheet of marble stores the heat of afternoon. Paintings like this are ideal landscapes, and their august stasis recalls Byron's line: "When elements to elements conform,/ And dust is as it should be."
Marden's work reminds one how silly was the death-of-abstract-art talk heard so much at the start of the '80s, as foolish as the death-of-painting cant in the '70s. Much of the work of younger American artists remains abstract, whether "decorative" (Alan Shields, Valerie Jaudon or the exuberant Judy Pfaff, whose manic, space-consuming constructions are hybrids of painting and sculpture) or more ostensibly rigorous in its aims, like that of Gary Stephan, 42. His paintings are like massive and vivid reflections on late cubism, especially the utopian "cubifying" abstraction of the 1920s, as practiced by such artists as Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky and Prampolini. They have the visionary character of ideal forms -- ovals, cones, circles, cubes -- moving in deep space, its depth contradicted by puzzling abutment and reflections that block the view, break the recession and direct the eye back to the richly painted surface. Another highly gifted artist in the area where abstraction hovers on the edge of figuration is Chicago-born Elizabeth Murray, 44. Since Frank Stella, American painting has been littered with shaped canvases, but Murray has brought a wonderful energy and flair to her use of this quintessentially late-modernist device. Her shaped panels are folded, superimposed, somewhere between collage, sculpture and origami. She wants them, as she says, "to feel as though I threw them against the wall and they came together with a purpose not that consciously controlled." The air of improvisation is deceptive. Murray has an exacting sense of the relations between internal drawing and silhouette. Sometimes, for this reason, a panel may look like an enlarged detail from a Juan Gris, and the near erotic friction of turning and rubbing shapes, rhythmically drawn, recalls early De Koonings like Pink Angels. Her work is continually enriched by allusions to the human body.