Marden not simply a painter but the leader of an entire school. Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of his work in The New York Times in 1975, called Mr. Marden to art-world stardom while he was still in his 20s. The critical response was overwhelming, propelling Mr. “Each layer was a color, was a feeling, a feeling that related to the feeling, the color, the layer beneath it. “It seems as though, because the early paintings were just one color, one could say one color, no feelings - but instead of no feelings they were all this feeling,” Mr. On closer inspection, the matte surfaces, achieved through a mixture of oil paint and liquefied beeswax, opened up to reveal intricate textural layerings, applied with brush and spatula, that reflected his preoccupation with masters like Zurbarán, Goya and Cézanne and his total rejection of the impersonal aesthetic of conceptualism and minimalism. His paintings, first exhibited in New York at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, seemed irreducibly minimalist at first glance - a solid field of color for each canvas, in ambiguous gray and green tones, with an unpainted one-inch strip at the bottom where drips of paint ran over. Marden issued a powerful counterstatement. In the mid-1960s, when conceptual art, Pop Art and minimalist sculpture were in the ascendancy and painting was declared dead by many critics and artists, Mr.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Helen Marden, said in a statement. Brice Marden, whose elegant fusion of minimalism and Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s revivified painting and established him as one of the most admired and influential artists of his generation, died on Thursday at his home in Tivoli, N.Y., in Dutchess County.

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