In this three-panel painting, Brice Marden creates an abstract portrait of his wife, Helen Harrington Marden, herself an artist. Her height and shoulder width determine each panel's dimensions, and the title of the work—Blonde—references her hair color.

Throughout his career, Marden has demonstrated the importance of pure painting. In the late 1960s, he established his signature monochromatic style, bridging the painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism with the pared-down sensibility of Minimalism.

In Blonde, Marden eliminated any linear or drawing elements from the monochromatic composition; by joining three panels, however, the space between the components comes to function as drawing. Silently luminous, Blonde balances a dense surface, ripe with pictorial incident, with formal simplicity. Having reduced the composition to blocks of uninflected color, Marden makes each panel mutely its own.