Brice Marden: Muses Drawing 5 (Mnemosyne), 1989-91

by Christine Mehring , 1997

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According to ancient myth, the Muses, goddesses of creative inspiration, blinded many singers. If we share the fate of these singers, we also experience their subsequent sharpening of memory. As Marden reminds us in the title of this drawing, the Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Unable to see the drawing as a whole, we are left to perceive it sequentially, to piece it together in recollection.

Notes:

  1. Yve-Alain Bois, “Marden’s Doubt,” in Brice Marden: Paintings 1985-1993, ed. Ulrich Loock, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Bern (Bern, 1993), 12-67.
  2. Ibid., 51.
  3. Bois on Marden’s Kalo Keri of 1990. Ibid., 47.

Citation:
Text by Christine Mehring, from "Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection (Harvard University Art Museums, in association with Daco-Verlag Gunter Bläse, 1997; reprinted 1998). ©1997 President and Fellows of Harvard College.