JOSEPH MARIONI (1943–2024)
IN THE SPRING OF 1998, Carl Belz (1937–2016) mounted his valedictory exhibition at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University as its director: a selection of thirty-nine works by the American painter Joseph Marioni, then fifty-five years old. I had never heard of Marioni (hereafter Joseph), but I knew Carl—we had been undergraduates together at Princeton during the late 1950s and remained loosely in touch over the years. Fortunately for me, Carl was determined that I come to Waltham, Massachusetts, to see Joseph’s exhibition. But he also knew that I was likely to be reluctant to drop everything and fly out from Baltimore, so he made an offer he knew I would find difficult to refuse: He told me I could give a poetry reading in the museum. I acknowledged the brilliance of this and agreed to the arrangement. And as Carl thought would happen, I was swept away by the paintings, which he and Joseph had hung with great effectiveness.
Joseph was there and we quickly hit it off, and when I returned to Baltimore, I wrote a short feature about the exhibition for Artforum. I explained that I had never before been attracted to monochromes, but that the coloristic richness of Joseph’s canvases made that designation more or less irrelevant. In fact, as I went on to note, no doubt channeling Joseph, the paintings were made by the artist wielding with two hands a roller impregnated with colored acrylic paint so that it could be applied to the stretched vertical canvas in a sequence of layers, each a different hue and degree of translucence. The finished work would bear a simple title: Red Painting or Blue Painting or White Painting or Yellow Painting—green, however, would be of particular interest to Joseph later on. A further subtlety was that the canvases themselves, by which I mean their supports, departed almost imperceptibly from strict rectangularity so that the (not quite) vertical side framing edges would match the tendency of the liquid paint to draw slightly inward as it descended. A similar refinement involved rounding off the bottom framing edge in order to minimize any buildup of paint in its vicinity. The surfaces of the works, at once impersonal and sensuous, were like nothing else I had ever seen—not that this would have mattered if the paintings had not been ravishing, which indeed they were.
The surfaces of Joseph’s works, at once impersonal and sensuous, were like nothing else I had ever seen.
Joseph was pleased with my text, and in the course of the twenty-five years that followed, he and I saw each other often, usually in New York to look at paintings as well as photographs (he especially loved the Metropolitan Museum of Art), sometimes in Baltimore or Washington (most recently to see Rothko’s works on paper at the National Gallery of Art), and once in Toronto, where we immersed ourselves in David Mirvish’s astonishing collection of Color Field paintings, about which there will be more to say. Every summer for the past ten or so years he would stay several nights with my wife and me in our place in the New York State countryside, which always meant visiting the Clark Art Institute in Williams-town, Massachusetts, where we could count on finding a range of works to excite our interest. (The George Inness room in particular was a frequent draw.) Joseph’s most recent stay with us took place in late July; Ruth and I returned to Baltimore on September 1; and we learned of his death the morning of the sixth. For both of us—as for other of Joseph’s friends in the United States and abroad—the news was devastating.
A few basic facts: Joseph was born in Cincinnati on June 6, 1943; he studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York City in 1972. As is stated on his personal website, he felt strongly connected to certain masters of the Italian Renaissance virtually by birthright. Bellini and Botticelli are the names he mentions, though from the first I was also struck by an affinity with a non-Italian, Vermeer, a supreme master of glazes. Nearer to home he acknowledges being strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism, in particular the art of Pollock, Still, and Newman, all of whom he credited with introducing a large-scale format keyed to the painter’s (and the viewer’s) body. But he also understood himself as grounded in the concrete painting tradition of European modernity, with its emphasis on the painting as a literal object—indeed, Joseph’s art often found a warmer reception in Europe, especially in Germany and Switzerland, than in the US. As for related figures in this country, Joseph’s work, when I met him, felt closer to that of Ryman and Marden than to Color Field as such, though it’s also true that when, in 2008, he and I went through Mirvish’s fabulous storehouse of works by Louis, Frankenthaler, Noland, Olitski, Poons, and Bush, Joseph had no difficulty in recognizing his solidarity with their coloristic accomplishments. I would go further and say that whereas Color Field reached a climax with Olitski and Poons that it has not been able to exceed (Poons of course is still producing remarkable pictures), Joseph’s work, precisely by virtue of its deep internal relation to the concrete tradition, found a way forward in the realm of color—or “liquid light,” as he put it—like no one else’s.
On his studio wall in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, is a large green painting. Green, being the last of the “archetypal” colors, presented a special challenge to his strategic ambitions. I think of it as his final gift to his many friends and admirers. What is needed now is a major exhibition to confirm his immense and singular achievement.
Michael Fried is the J. R. Herbert Boone Emeritus Professor of Humanities and the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.
