B. NEW YORK, NEW YORK, 1928
Marcia Marcus made figurative paintings, which were revolutionary in both style and subject matter. She studied at the Cooper Union and the Art Students League in the 1950s. At the Art Students League, she studied with Edwin Dickinson, a teacher she adored, and whose influence can be felt in the refinement of Marcus’s figures, her draughtsmanship, and her tonal subtlety. At Cooper Union, she was a contemporary of Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, with whom her work shares other aesthetic qualities – namely, the flattening of forms and painterly shorthand to articulate figures and patterns, a bravura compositional organization, and an attention to fashion. Marcus was a central figure in the avant-garde art world of downtown New York. By 1954, she was a friend and collaborator of Allan Kaprow. The younger artist Red Grooms invited her to be part of the artist cooperative, the Delancey Street Museum, along with founding members Jay Milder and Bob Thompson. There, she performed a “Happening” and showed her painting in the late 1950s. In addition to her intimate involvement with this venue, Marcus showed her work throughout the 1950s and 60s at other now fabled galleries such as the Stable Gallery and March Gallery. Through the 1960s and 70s she had solo exhibitions at Graham Gallery, ACA, Zabriskie, and Terry Dintenfass Gallery.
For over 25 years, from 1952-78, Marcus spent summers living and working in one of the legendary Provincetown dune shacks. She enjoyed the relative isolation and time this granted her to further develop her work, but also thrived on the lively social and intellectual interchange with artists there. She was a member of the influential cooperative, the Sun Gallery, where she had a solo exhibition in 1958. Marcus painted from life, but continued to work on paintings after the models’ sittings, thriving on the interplay between life, fiction, and embellishment. She utilized collage and gold and silver leaf, in addition to oil painting. Widely celebrated for her self-portraits, Marcus also made group portraits, and complicated her presentation through innovative costuming, posing, and storytelling. Her aesthetic is distinguished by the use of silhouetted figures on open grounds – highlighting a relationship to photography, identity politics, the style of the time, and the performative nature of portraiture. Marcus’s works are in several public collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Marcia Marcus
Joe Gifford, 1967
oil on canvas in artist frame
75h x 32w in
190.50h x 81.28w cm
Titled “Double Portrait,” this electrifying exhibition unites Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus, who began making figurative paintings in the 1950s. Born 12 years apart, Ms. Marcus and Ms. Gross crossed paths in downtown New York, as well as on sojourns to Italy and Provincetown. Both were putting paint to canvas at a time when Minimalism and Conceptualism reigned supreme, and both were interested in representations of their gender.
Body Language: Picturing People
July 18, 2019 —June 2020
This exhibition considers how the pose, the gesture and the body in motion are used by artists to convey meaning. Figural artworks from the CU Art Museum’s collection are brought into conversation across cultural geographies and historical eras. Whether in presenting portraits of individuals or fictional personages, or in picturing religious icons, artistic depictions of the body speak volumes about personality, character and the values of a time or place.
Exhibition curated by Hope Saska.
Figurative paintings by three Americans reflect the shifting social and sexual mores of the nineteen-sixties and seventies in this wonderful show, whose title is borrowed from a 1962 essay by Dore Ashton.
Painting and fiber art—artwork made with woven or nonwoven natural or synthetic fibers—have traditionally been viewed as distinct genres. This installation questions that division. It includes works by fiber artists whose formal art studies first centered on painting. There are also works by painters, some who have influenced fabric design, and others who have paid close attention to textile patterns and the relationship of clothing to the female body. Featuring many new additions to Mia’s collection, this display illustrates how artists often think and create outside the categories of art that museums generally like to employ. Among the thirteen artists included are Sheila Hicks, Yayoi Kusama, Marcia Marcus, Elizabeth Osborne, Christina Ramberg, and Shinique Smith.
Iconic Figurative Artists Featured in Exhibition at Shirley Fiterman Art Center
On May 23 in the Shirley Fiterman Art Center, a reception will celebrate the opening of Double Portrait: Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus. Gross and Marcus are innovative figurative painters whose work from 1958 to 2012 will be on display
I was reminded of the phrase, Other Traditions (2001), the collective title John Ashbery gave to the publication of his six Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, when I was looking at Marcia Marcus’s grisaille portrait of “Edwin Dickinson” (1972) in the timely exhibition, Double Portrait: Mimi Gross and Marcia Marcus, at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (May 23–July 27, 2019), curated by Lisa Panzera.
New York artist Marcia Marcus (b. 1928) emerged mid-century as a promising painter of portraits and figurative tableaux, depicting herself, friends, and acquaintances in scenes that often have a mythological or theatrical feel. In the early 1950s, she studied painting at Cooper Union, where her peers included Alex Katz and Lois Dodd, and shortly thereafter attended the Art Students League, where she absorbed the lessons of Edwin Dickinson. She collaborated on Happenings with Allan Kaprow and, in 1960, showed a series of self-portraits at the Delancey Street Museum, an alternative space run by Red Grooms. Despite an impressive exhibition record and a peer group of downtown luminaries, Marcus eventually fell into obscurity. The recent show at Eric Firestone included twenty-four paintings she made between 1958 and 1973, amounting to a small-scale retrospective for this audacious and fascinating artist.
A line of gold runs through the paintings of Marcia Marcus, an elegantly decorative stream one can follow all the way through her exhibition of portraits, Role Play: Paintings 1958–1973 at Eric Firestone Gallery. The gold leaf that Marcus had sometimes combined with her oil or acrylic paint appears most often as a line describing an object or separating out a figure from the space around it.
Marcia Marcus Through Dec. 2. Eric Firestone Gallery, 4 Great Jones Street. Art history is in constant flux, as you can see by the recent rise of artists who were left out of earlier narratives. This year, the exhibition “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965,” at the Grey Art Gallery, featured many overlooked artists whose contributions to mid-20th-century art are noteworthy. One of them is the painter Marcia Marcus, whose work is currently on view in “Role Play: Paintings 1958-1973” at Eric Firestone Gallery.
The reverberations of curator Melissa Rachleff ’s exhibition, Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University (January 10–April 1, 2017), continue to be felt. In that eye-opening exhibition, which contained work by many women artists (Lois Dodd, Rosalyn Drexler, and Jean Follet) and artists of color (Ed Clark, Tadaaki Kuwayama, and Norman Lewis), Marcia Marcus’s painting “Self-Portrait in Fur Jacket” (1959) was one of the standouts.
The twenty-three paintings by Marcia Marcushere deliver one knockout after another. In the oval portrait Nude with Mirror, 1965, a woman languorously appraises her own reflection. In Florentine Landscape, 1961, three ghostly, pale figures and a pumpkin patch appear like holograms beamed into an ancient garden. In Frieze: The Porch, 1964, three distinctly different pictures—a double portrait of the critic Jill Johnston and the painter Barbara Forst, a self-portrait of the artist in a billowing floral robe, and a picture of her as a child with her father—are all crammed together in a way that feels weirdly spacious.
Between the apex of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Pop Art and Minimalism, the New York art scene was transformed by artist-run galleries. Inventing Downtown presents works from fourteen of these crucibles of experimentation, highlighting artists’ efforts to create new exhibition venues for innovative works of art—ranging from abstract and figurative painting, assemblage, sculpture, and works on paper to groundbreaking installations and performances.
