TRUE COLORS.

"It's hard to look at paintings," Brice Marden once said. "You have to be able to bring all sorts of things together in your mind, your imagination, in your whole body." Good paintings make the exercise worth the trouble. Great paintings make it seem valuable in itself, as one of the more rewarding things that having minds, imaginations, and bodies lets us do. Marden's current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art confirms him, at the age of sixty-eight, as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades. There are fifty-six paintings in the show, dating from broody monochromes made in 1964-66, when Marden was fresh out of art school at Yale, to new, clamorous, six-panelled compositions, twenty-four feet long, of overlaid loopy bands in six colors. (His several styles of laconic form and smoldering emotion might be termed "passive-expressive.") As selected and installed by Gary Garrels, the senior curator at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, the ensemble affords an adventure in aesthetic experience--and, tacitly, in ethical, and even spiritual experience. There are also some fifty drawings: too few. Marden's drawings (and etchings, which are entirely absent) constitute an immense achievement in their own right, and their resourcefulness and grace are best perceived in quantity.

Marden was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was a mortgage servicer. Inspired by a sophisticated neighbor who painted, Marden grew up avid for art. He underwent classical academic training at the Boston University of Fine and Applied Arts, from 1958 to 1961. Manet transfixed him; he imitated Cezanne and early Matisse. He discovered Old Masters, chiefly Zurbaran, who would give him lasting sustenance. Marden belongs to a generation of tough-minded American painters who arose in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism and during the onsets of Pop and minimalism. His Yale classmates included Chuck Close and Robert Mangold, as well as Richard Serra. He is not a minimalist--a label often lazily affixed to him, as to other artists of the era whose deliberate styles register the historical logic of minimalism (a debunking of pictorial rhetoric and illusion) while resisting its impersonality. He took practical guidance from the work of Jasper Johns and, in his early paintings, adopted Johns's matte, fleshy medium of oils mixed with beeswax--brushing it on, then smoothing it with a kitchen spatula. Marden may usefully be considered a late-entry Abstract Expressionist: a conservative original, the last valedictorian of the New York School. His early enthusiasms included Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and thoughts of Jackson Pollock irradiate his career. Barnett Newman looms behind some of his less successful experiments. But the painter who mattered most to the precocious Marden's maturation was Mark Rothko.

When viewing the apparently all-gray or all-beige canvases in the show's first room, try this: approach them slowly from a distance, attempting to keep the surface in focus. At a certain point, your eyes will give up. The surface eludes them. Sombre color seems at once to engulf you, with a sort of oceanic tenderness, and infinitely to recede. This effect distills that of the furry-edged, drifting masses of ineffable color with which Rothko aimed, he said, to evoke a mood of "the single human figure, alone in a moment of utter immobility." The young Marden's version is cooler and more calculated. He employed the Rothkovian tactics of hanging paintings unframed, with paint running around the edges, low on the wall--commonly centered at about the height of your solar plexus--to address the viewer body-to-body. Further emphasizing the painting as a physical object, a narrow margin of bare canvas along the bottom displays runs and drips of the work's several layers of paint. The device is a mite gimmicky, and Marden soon discontinued it. When using more than one color, he applied each to a separate, abutted panel, in diptychs and triptychs, to literalize their division.

All of this might be deemed mainly clever, in a standard key of sixties avant-gardism. Certain titles ("The Dylan Painting," "Nico") declare citizenship in the decade's rock-and-roll, stoned ...