In 1966, the artist Brice Marden, who has died of cancer aged 84, exhibited a canvas called The Dylan Painting in his first solo show, at the Bykert Gallery in New York. Six years earlier, Marden had married Pauline Baez, older sister of the singer Joan. Through his sister-in-law, he met a young Greenwich Village folk musician called Bob Zimmerman, and found him “a fantastic guy”.
It was 1962. “I had wanted to make a painting for him, to put out into the world to help his career,” Marden recalled in an interview for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2015. “By the time I got this painting finished, Bob [Dylan] was, like, very, very famous. He didn’t need my help.”
