Marcia Marcus - by Brandon Brame Fortune & Melissa Rachleff (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.

"Eye-poppingly modern" commented the New York Times of Marcia Marcus's art in her obituary, published in April 2025. Days later, a long-scheduled exhibition at New York's Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery presented Marcus's work alongside contemporaries Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh--a testament to her place among postwar American figurative painters. Over several decades, Marcus's fiercely original paintings challenged the common understanding of postwar American art. In the 1950s, she rejected abstraction in favor of poised figurative paintings of people, landscapes, and still lifes, suffused with her signature suspenseful quality. A vivid presence in Manhattan's downtown art scene and in Provincetown, she was one of the first women to stage a Happening. Prescient, she painted subjects that peers rarely explored--motherhood; male nudes; female role play--years before such topics gained wider currency. While her work later fell into obscurity, its recent reemergence has revealed Marcus to be an artist working way ahead of her time.

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

Review Quotes

"Someone should really do a book on her"--John Yau, Hyperallergic

"Screams for greater recognition"--Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Artforum

About the Author

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

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

Melissa Rachleff 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.