Photo: Artwork © Helen Marden. Photo: Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian. Helen Marden spent the pandemic year painting and with family, her life slowed down but not in every way a bad way. “I felt lucky,” she says, “but extremely sad.” Despite her privilege, it’s not as though she wasn’t in the viral crosshairs: She’s almost 80, and her husband of over 50 years, Brice Marden , has been stalked by cancer. A number of her friends died of COVID, including one of her closest, the architect Edward Tuttle , whom she remembers meeting on the Greek island of Hydra back in the 1970s as if it were yesterday. “He was like 27, and I knew I was going to love him” — Helen is confident in her first impressions, as she seems at first to be in most things. “He had an Enter the Dragon T-shirt on and, I think, pearls,” she says. We’re sitting together, masked up and vaxxed up, at Gagosian’s first-floor gallery on Madison (the floors polished black, her hair Warhol white), surrounded by the lacquered tropicality of her paintings, eddies of plume-y pink, yellow, blue, and gleaming white, many shining with seashells, for an exhibition she has called “ Bitter Light a Year. ” Helen Marden and Brice Marden. Photo: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images There is a hard-candy determination in the work and, one suspects, in her. Helen is a fierce and imperious globe-trotting grande dame who has known several generations of pretty much all the accomplished and interesting people worth knowing. They flock to the Mardens’ many homes: the eclectic Greenwich Village townhouse, the place on Nevis in the Caribbean, the one in Marrakech, the mini family compound upstate in Tivoli, the place they’ve had for decades on Hydra. Actually, the two, since they gave the one at the top of the hill (at some point, it was just too many stairs) to their daughters: Melia , the chef, known for the Smile , and Mirabelle, who co-owned for a time the gallery Rivington Arms, where both … [Read more...] about Helen Marden’s Bitter, Lucky Light