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Brice Marden b. 1938 Diagrammed Couplet II signed, titled and dated 1988-89 on the reverse oil on linen 84 by 40 in. 213.4 by 101.6 cm. Provenance Mary Boone Gallery, New York Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1989 Exhibited New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial Exhibition, April - July 1989, p. 94, illustrated in color Bern, Kunsthalle; Vienna, Secession, Brice Marden: Paintings 1985-1993, October 1993 - March 1994, pl. 28, illustrated in color Literature Roberta Smith, "Review of the Biennial", New York Times, April 28, 1989, p. C32, illustrated Brice Marden's visual language changed significantly in 1985. Driven by an impulse to liberate his mark making from the rigors of geometry, he began to create paintings that synthesized a gestural spontaneity with the protocol of a discipline and tradition that he had both immersed himself in, and come to be considered as its chief protagonist. The strong, blocked forms of color now gave way to a more lyrical appreciation of the surface. The present work, a breathtaking example of Marden's Diagrammed Couplet series, is one that beautifully demonstrates the artist's ability to orchestrate the demands of the grid and the pictorial plane in a fashion that still afforded him the opportunity of reinventing his own vocabulary. Many influences may be considered when approaching Marden's Diagrammed Couplets. Firstly, these paintings share the same sinuous and elastic approach to abstraction that one finds in de Kooning's dynamic strokes of the 1970s. Both artists successfully marry the architecture of the support with the free-flowing liquidity of marks on the surface. Another, equally important influence, is that of Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. For Marden, oriental calligraphy possessed an innate sense of order, which one finds in the artist's structures. As Klaus Kertess writes, "Even as calligraphy went on to gather sophisticated aesthetic and pictographic complexity and refinement, it retained