Marcia Marcus, a figurative and conceptual artist with a steely will and a daring modern type who discovered fame within the Nineteen Sixties after which was largely ignored till she was practically 90, although she saved working, confidently, decade after decade, died on March 27 in Manhattan. She was 97.
Her demise, in a nursing facility, was introduced by her daughters, Kate Prendergast and Jane Barrell Yadav.
Ms. Marcus was in all places that mattered to a younger, decided and really proficient artist within the late Fifties and ’60s. In Provincetown, Mass., on Cape Cod every summer season, portray out of a shack within the dunes. On the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, holding her personal. (Willem de Kooning was a paramour.)
She confirmed on the tenth Avenue galleries within the East Village, the scrappy areas run by artists who had been ignored by the uptown institution, and on the short-lived Delancey Avenue Museum, run by her associates the Tennessee-born Red Grooms and Bob Thompson, the Black figurative painter who died younger, each of whom she conscripted to bop and play the bongos at a Occurring she staged there. (She learn a poem.)
The Whitney Museum included her in its roundup “Younger America 1960: Thirty American Painters Below Thirty-Six.” And once more, two years later, as a part of its “Forty Artists Below Forty” exhibition.
The artwork critic Brian O’Doherty, reviewing her solo show at an uptown gallery in 1961 for The New York Occasions, in contrast Ms. Marcus to Milton Avery, Jean-Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard.
She was a virtuosic figurative painter — one reviewer described her portray approach as “thinned out shallower than a razor” — with a flat, nearly deadpan type resembling that of her modern Alex Katz, a comparability that irritated her. She made portraits of her circle: Lucas Samaras, Mr. Grooms and Mr. Thompson. She painted Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Jill Johnston, the lesbian feminist creator and dance critic at The Village Voice. She painted strangers, too — anybody whose presence she discovered compelling.
However her favourite topic was herself. She painted herself again and again, in a wide range of costumes and settings, her gaze stern and difficult. She was a helmeted Athena, arms akimbo, carrying a frothy pink chiffon gown from the Thirties; she painted herself as Medusa, and as a reclining nude. In pearls and a crimson sheath, she positioned herself in entrance of Masada, the Israeli fortress the place, legend has it, Jewish troopers died by suicide slightly than give up to Roman forces.
Not that she would have joined them, had she been there, she instructed Amei Wallach, the movie director and critic, who reviewed a present of Ms. Marcus’s in Newsday in 1979: “I’d be damned if I’d take somebody’s orders to kill myself.”
“Marcia the troublesome,” Mr. Samara referred to as her teasingly in a letter in 1965.
Ms. Marcus was troublesome. Or powerful, because the painter Mimi Gross mentioned just lately: “And that’s an understatement.”
She needed to be. Like her older friends, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh, Ms. Marcus was doubly hobbled, as a lady and as a figurative painter working in a really male milieu, by means of intervals of artwork historical past — Summary Expressionism, Minimalism — when her form of work was principally out of vogue. Seen right this moment, it’s eye-poppingly fashionable. Just look at the work of Amy Sherald, who painted Michelle Obama’s portrait.
“Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh and Marcia Marcus are all very completely different,” mentioned Saara Pritchard, the curator who put collectively a show of the three artists at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in Manhattan that opens April 10. “Neel is within the formal points of portray, in character research; Sleigh could be very political, ‘How will we subvert the male gaze, and so on.’ Marcus is extra conceptual. However they had been all working on the similar time, and so they had been free to do what they needed as a result of nobody was paying consideration.”
Subsequent week’s exhibit is the newest showcase for Ms. Marcus, who re-emerged as an unknown but oddly acquainted star in 2017. That yr, at “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York Metropolis, 1952-1965,” a present at New York College’s Gray Artwork Gallery about upstart artist co-ops within the East Village and on the Decrease East Facet — Ms. Marcus’s scene — many viewers had been apparently stopped of their tracks by one in all her self-portraits. Within the large-scale portray, she stands poker-faced, clad solely in tights, heels and a bolero jacket. Who was this startlingly fashionable painter that seemingly nobody had ever heard of, or had lengthy forgotten?
Holland Cotter, in his New York Times review, referred to as the portray “a way-ahead-of-its-time self-portrait” and Ms. Marcus “now obscure.”
Melissa Rachleff, the curator who organized “Inventing Downtown,” was not acquainted with Ms. Marcus earlier than she started placing the present collectively. However when she noticed that Ms. Marcus had been a part of Mr. Grooms’s gallery, Ms. Rachleff sought her out.
“She was wholly unsentimental, an artist by means of and thru,” mentioned Ms. Rachleff, who met Ms. Marcus in her TriBeCa residence in 2013 and was struck by her work’s boldness and innovation, and by her sassy stoicism.
“She had lived with monetary uncertainty and with the uncertainty of by no means being profitable. She was completely uncompromising about it, even by means of the years of barely promoting something. If she didn’t take herself severely, nobody else would.”
Marcia Helene Feitelson was born on Jan. 11, 1928, in Manhattan, the eldest of two daughters of Frieda (Gelband) Feitelson, who labored as an accountant, and Irving Feitelson, a window dresser for shops. Marcia grew up within the Inwood part of Manhattan and needed to be dressmaker. However her mom was adamant that she attend faculty as an alternative of learning at a commerce faculty, and maybe turn out to be a trainer.
She was solely 15 when she entered New York College’s Faculty of Arts and Science, the place she earned a bachelor’s diploma in artwork, graduating in 1947. That very same yr, she married Harry Gutman, who labored for her father, principally as a approach to go away house.
A yr later, the wedding was over, and Marcia was decided to vary her surname. She had been named for her maternal grandfather, so she selected his first title.
“If I referred to as myself Marcia Marcus,” she said in an oral history interview carried out in 1975 for the Archives of American Artwork on the Smithsonian, “then I used to be like myself each methods, in a means, and I had no connections with something, but it surely additionally had some sort of significance.”
She had been drawing all by means of faculty, and now started to take courses on the Cooper Union and, later, on the Arts College students League.
Ms. Marcus met her second husband, Terence Barrell, at a celebration in Provincetown. They married in 1959, and he moved into her New York loft, in Alphabet Metropolis. Mr. Barrell was supportive of his spouse to an extent that was uncommon on the time. He labored as a prepare dinner and a trainer, however principally cared for his or her two daughters, particularly in 1962, when Ms. Marcus received a Fulbright grant to check in France, and the household moved to Paris. For just a few years after they divorced in 1972, he continued to construct the stretchers for her canvases.
Regardless of commissions for her portraiture, cash was at all times tight. Ms. Marcus labored as a visiting professor at a collection of schools, together with Vassar — piecemeal employment that left her extra time to color, though it meant she was financially insecure. Within the Nineties, with nice reluctance, she took a job as an alternative trainer in New York Metropolis’s public faculty system.
Along with her daughters, she is survived by her sister, Barbara Rose, and 4 grandchildren. Ms. Marcus’s work is within the everlasting collections of many establishments, together with the Whitney Museum of American Artwork and the Smithsonian.
Ten months after the Gray Artwork Gallery present opened in 2017, the Eric Firestone Gallery in NoHo put on a solo show of her work. (Mr. Firestone additionally thought her self-portrait on the Gray was a standout.) After that, Ms. Marcus appeared in just a few extra exhibitions earlier than the pandemic dawned, together with one on the Borough of Manhattan Neighborhood Faculty that paired her with Ms. Gross, the painter.
The critic John Yau, in his review of the show for Hyperallergic, famous that each girls used portray as “a automobile of the creativeness.”
“It’s a stance that runs counter to different, better-known figurative artists, corresponding to Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz, and Fairfield Porter,” he wrote. “I’d argue that what Marcus and Gross attained is the same as their male counterparts, and in that regard is an integral a part of artwork historical past.”
