1999.249: Red Painting

Identification and Creation

Object Number

1999.249

People

Joseph Marioni, American (Cincinnati, OH born 1943)

Title

Red Painting

Classification

Paintings

Work Type

painting

Date

1999

Places

Creation Place: North America, United States, New York State, New York City

Culture

American

Persistent Link

https://hvrd.art/o/167925

Physical Descriptions

Medium

Acrylic and linen on stretcher

Dimensions

243.2 x 180.7 cm (95 3/4 x 71 1/8 in.)

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History

Joseph Marioni, New York, New York; to [Howard Yezerski, Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts], sold; to Martin and Deborah Hale, Boston, Massachusetts, gift; to Harvard University Art Museum, 1999.

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Deborah and Martin Hale in honor of Michael Fried

Copyright

© Joseph Marioni

Accession Year

1999

Object Number

1999.249

Division

Modern and Contemporary Art

Contact

am_moderncontemporary@harvard.edu

Permissions

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Descriptions

Description

The painting is a large, vertical plane of deep mahogany red-brown acrylic, painted in two distinct layers of thick and thinly applied acrylic, beginning with a stain of dark, "Benzimidazo" brown, which acts as a primer. Its outer surface of "Azoic plum brown" appears tactile and shiny, almost sticky. The layers vary visibly in tonality and density and the plum brown surface begins to gather into extended drips that coalesce in a series of parallel rivulets about halfway down the picture plane; towards the bottom center, it pools into a series of more marked gullies and ridges, pulling apart like a painterly fjord, and lifting, like a skirt, to reveal the stain below. The acrylic also shrinks in along some of the edges, gaining thickness as it does so, and these effects, along with the implied flow of the medium , the "breathing room" between the layers, and its orientation and scale, serve to give the painting an anthropomorphic, object quality. The painting entreats one to interact with it as a whole object/image, and not as a picture of assorted forms or things or parts; it also gains considerably when viewed in daylight. The title, "Red Painting 1999 No. 4", 1999, refers to the fact that this is the fourthpainting executed by Marioni in 1999. It is part of a set of four paintings executed in anticipation of the Fogg’s selection of one, and intended to "show the range of Marioni’s approaches to his monochromes."

Commentary

As a monochrome painting by an artist who has consciously predicated his painterly project in response to Michael Fried’s "Footnote #6," in his celebrated essay, "Art and Objecthood -- "[T]he task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions that, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing his work’s identity as painting" -- "Red Painting 1999 No. 4", 1999 adds both to the Fogg Art Museum's collection and to the particular formalist gauntlet laid down by Michael Fried during his years as a graduate student at Harvard. This connection is underscored by the donors’ decision to dedicate the painting to Fried. Marioni self-consciously responds to the painting of a number of artists in our collections, especially to Pollock; Rothko; Noland; Louis; Stella and Marden; even more specifically to Robert Ryman. During the 1980’s, Marioni also instigated a series of dialogues and exhibition projects with the German painter Gunter Umberg, around the European concept of "concrete" painting. Like Ryman, who, in his mostly white paintings, has extracted seemingly unlimited outcomes by varying the organization and manner of his strokes; the type and density of his pigments, and the nature of his support surface and attachments of support to wall, Marioni has adapted a Minimalist reliance on permutations of a set of pre-determined variables, in his case, sticking to monochrome acrylic on canvas, but introducing a broad range of color. Marioni, however, paints with a roller, eliminating the constructive element of the stroke. In this, his project is at once more phenomenological, more iconic, and more anthropomorphic than his Abstract Expressionist or Minimalist predecessors. Marioni’s preference for an unmediated application of paint echoes Pollock, but toward different ends: he is interested in allowing the paint "to be what it naturally is, liquid color," and he aims to avoid any intimation of drawing. At the same time, his layered pigments incorporate stain, but are not about staining; he relishes the corporeal association of paint with skin. Marioni has referred repeatedly to his Catholic interest in the fundamentally iconic essence of painting, citing both Veronica’s veil – the painting as relic – and Malevich as inspiration, toward this end. His paintings alternate between square, or iconic, formats and more vertical, larger scale planes. In both cases, Marioni treats the entire painting as image and works to inspire a private dialogue between the painting and its viewer.

(Linda Norden)

Publication History

• James Cuno, ed., A Decade of Collecting: Recent Acquisitions by the Harvard University Art Museums, Harvard University Art Museums (Cambridge, Mass., Spring 2000), p. 104, ill. (color)

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