Marcia Marcus, who gained fame in the 1960s and was overlooked until nearly 90 years later, continued to work with confidence, but died in Manhattan on March 27th, 10 years later, Marcia Marcus is a figly and conceptual artist with a bold, contemporary style. She was 97 years old.
Her death at the nursing facility was announced by her daughters Kate Prendagast and Jane Burrel Yadav.
Marcus was everywhere important to young, determined, and extremely talented artists in the late 1950s and '60s. In Provincetown, Massachusetts, it is painted from a dune shed every summer in Cape Cod. She has herself at Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. (Willem de Kooning was Paramar.)
She was in the gallery on 10th Avenue in East Village, a crude space run by an artist neglected by an Uptown facility, and the short-lived Derranth Street Museum run by Tennessee-born red groom and Bob Thompson, a young, late black figurative painter, where she dances there and performs bongos. (She read the poem.)
The Whitney Museum included her in Young America 1960:30 American Painter Under 36. And again, two years later, as part of the “40 Artists at 40 Years Old” exhibition.
Art critic Brian O'Doherty reviewed her solo show at the 1961 New York Times Uptown Gallery, comparing it to Ms. Marcus and Milton Avery, Jean-Aided Ard Villard and Pierre Bonnard.
She was a rude painter of the Meikai, and one reviewer described her painting techniques as “shallower than a razor” – a flat, almost deadpan style that resembles that of her modern-day Alex Katz. She created portraits of her circle: Lucas Samaras, Mr. Grooms, Mr. Thompson. She portrayed lesbian feminist writers and Village Voice dance critics Jack Kerouac, Leroy Jones and Jill Johnston. She also portrayed strangers – anyone who found her attractive.
But her favourite subject was herself. She painted her pictures over and over again in a variety of outfits and settings. She wore a foamy pink chiffon dress from the 1930s, with her helmet Athena, Arms Akinbo. She portrayed herself as a medusa and as a reclining nude. Within her pearls and red sheaths, she placed herself in front of Masada, an Israeli fortress. There, legend tells us that Jewish soldiers died by suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.
It's not that she joined them, and if she was there, she told film director and critic Amey Wallach, who reviewed Marcus's show on Newsday in 1979.
“Marcia the Dugg,” Samaras teased her in a 1965 letter.
Marcus was difficult. Or, as painter Mimi Gross recently said, “And that's an understatement.”
She had to be. Like her older companions, Alice Neil and Sylvia Slay, Marcus stepped in double footing as a woman and a parochial painter working in a highly male environment throughout the age of art history, abstract expressionism and minimalism. Looking at it today, it is eye-openingly modern. Take a look at Amy Sherald's work, portraying Michelle Obama's portrait.
“Alice Neal, Sylvia Solei and Marcia Marcus are all very different,” said Sarah Pritchard, the curator who put together the shows of three artists from the Levy Golby Dayan Gallery in Manhattan, which will open on April 10th. Marcus was more conceptual, but they were all working at the same time.
Next week's exhibit is Marcus' latest showcase, who reappeared in 2017 as an unknown but oddly familiar star. of her self-portrait. In the large painting, she stands up a poker face and is covered in only tights, heels and bolero jacket. Who was this amazing modern painter who no one ever heard of or seems to have forgotten for a long time?
In his New York Times review, Holland Cotter called the painting “a path past the road,” while Marcus was “a bit vague now.”
Melissa LaCleff, the curator who organized “Invention of Downtown,” was not familiar with Marcus before putting together the show. However, when she saw that Marcus was part of Mr. Grooms' gallery, LaClef looked for her.
LaClef, who met Marcus in a Tribeca apartment in 2013 and was struck by the boldness and innovation of her work, as well as her cheeky stoicism, said:
“She lived with financial uncertainty and uncertainty of not being successful, and she never compromised on that.
Marcia Helen Feitelson was born on January 11, 1928 in Manhattan, the eldest son of Frida (Gelband) Feitelson, who worked as an accountant, and Irving Feitelson, the office store window dresser. Marcia grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan and wanted to be a fashion designer. However, her mother declared that she would attend university instead of studying at a trade school, and perhaps became a teacher.
She was 15 when she enrolled at the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University. There he graduated in 1947 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Arts. That same year she married Harry Gutman, who worked for her father.
A year later, the marriage is over and Mercia decides to change her last name. She was named after her maternal grandfather, so she chose his name.
“If I'm called Marcia Marcus,” she said in an oral history interview held in 1975 for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
She drew throughout college, but now she began taking classes in Cooper Union and later in the Arts Student League.
Marcus met her second husband, Terrence Burrell, at a Provincetown party. They married in 1959 and he moved to New York Croft in Alphabet City. Mr. Burrell supported his wife to a rare degree at the time. He worked as a chef and teacher, but in 1962, when Marcus received a Fulbright grant to study in France, the family moved to Paris. For the years they divorced in 1972, he continued to build stretchers for her canvas.
Despite the fees for her portrait, the money was always tough. Marcus worked as a visiting professor at a series of universities, including Vassar. The fragmented employment meant she was financially unsettled, but she left time to draw. In the 1990s, she sparked a job as an alternative teacher in the New York City public school system.
In addition to her daughter, she was survived by her sister, Barbara Rose and four grandchildren. Marcus's work is found in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Whitney Museum's Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian.
Ten months after the opening of the Gray Art Gallery Show in 2017, Noho's Eric Firestone Gallery held a solo show of her work. (Firestone also thought her self-portrait in Gray was outstanding.) Marcus then appeared at several more exhibitions before the pandemic dawned.
Critic John Yau pointed out in his review of the show for hyper-allergy, that both women used painting as a “means of imagination.”
“It's a stance that goes against other well-known, parochial artists, such as Philippe Perlstein, Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter,” he writes. “I argue that what Marcus and Gross accomplished is comparable to their male counterparts and is an integral part of art history in that respect.”
