Marcia Marcus - by Melissa Rachleff Burtt & Debra Lennard & Brandon Brame Fortune (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Published on the occasion of a major new career retrospective, Marcia Marcus: I Paint What I Like, provides a much-needed, extensive monographic exploration of the art of Marcia Marcus (1928-2025), a strikingly original artist whose contributions have been overlooked.

Marcia Marcus was described as "...eye-poppingly modern" by Penelope Green in her New York Times' obituary published in March 2025 following Marcus's death just weeks before the opening of a group show featuring her work alongside that of her contemporaries Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh at the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery. Marcus was always most interested in the conceptual aspects of portraiture. She rejected abstraction in favor of producing precise figurative paintings of people, landscapes, and still lifes, suffused with her signature suspenseful quality. And although Marcus's work largely fell into obscurity--unlike the work of her male contemporaries Alex Katz and Philip Perlstein--the recent Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery group show revealed Marcus to be an artist working way ahead of her time.

This new volume establishes her multifaceted significance: innovative "downtown" artist, creator of unapologetic portraits of self-possessed women, and essential forerunner of figurative painting today.

About the Author

Melissa Rachleff Burtt is clinical professor in the Visual Arts Administration Program at NYU Steinhardt, and curator of Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965, Grey Art Museum, NYU, 2017.

Debra Lennard is an independent scholar and assistant curator, Hayward Gallery Touring, London.

Brandon Brame Fortune is chief curator emerita, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.