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Marvin Harden at Armory Center for the arts
Art in America, Nov, 2006 by Michael Duncan
Spanning four decades, this retrospective, curated by the Armory's director, Jay Belloli, surveyed more than 100 drawings, paintings and prints by the under-recognized California artist Marvin Harden. A student of William Brice and Jan Stussy at UCLA, Harden showed at the plucky Ceeje Gallery in Los Angeles in the 1960s and taught for 30 years at California State University, Northridge. Although featured in a 1971 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York, Harden has had a relatively low profile, with few exhibitions of his serene, finely textured paintings and drawings in recent years. Living and working for most of his career in isolated rural communities several hours outside of Los Angeles, Harden has created a lyrical body of work that offers a haven of well-tuned natural beauty and hard-won contemplative order.
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As an African-American, Harden has chosen an esthetic path far from the didactic politics and tense issues of many of his peers. His most characteristic works are subtly rendered drawings of animals isolated on delicately textured monochromatic fields. Although somewhat in the spirit of Morris Graves--especially in a series of ethereal flower paintings (2000)--Harden's works are more matter-of-fact and plainspoken.
Their poetic nature is expanded on in titles such as there were trees here before,/now horses,/but trees not the less,/yet horses still (1970), a pencil rendering of a horse in the center of a blank field within a neat hand-drawn border of meticulously patterned tilelike shapes resembling parquet flooring. The border's precise marks seem to contain the horse like a fence and somehow to reflect Harden's long-time contemplation of his animal companion. In this and other drawings with geometric borders, Harden's attentiveness to process recalls qualities of the works of Agnes Martin.
In the series "songs sung/(with grace)/of an inwardness place,/in a stillness--sweet./in morning, mourning--/in evening, even" (1991-98), drawings of single birds are isolated on mottled tan or light snowy fields, with the birds presented as exemplary spirits. A recent series of oil paintings of horses in glowing unworldly fields, collectively titled "tail aloft,/all sass and dare..." (2004), depicts independent creatures who may be Harden's alter egos, proud beings who, although isolated in a somewhat vague realm, seem fully at home in their skins.
The exhibition, titled "Interior Nature," evidenced the organic development of Harden's ideas and stylistic gambits. The meditative grappling with images from nature is a timeless theme in art history, and Harden is a worthy inheritor of that tradition, transcending particulars of time or place.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
