Marcia Marcus, Painter Who Gained Late-Career Raves for Her Portraits, Dies at 97

Marcia Marcus, a painter who spent decades making off-kilter portraits of herself and others in relative obscurity, only to gain positive notice during her final years, died at 97 on Thursday. Her passing was confirmed by her daughter, Kate Prendergast, who said she died of age-related complications.

Until very recently, Marcus was a little-known figure, even though her work was featured in group exhibitions by closely watched galleries such Stable and Dwan during the 1950s and ’60s. But recent shows have brought her art to a new audience, generating a small but growing following.

She was known for painting portraits of people ranging from the artist Red Grooms to the critic Jill Johnston, both of whom she knew personally. These are no traditional portraits: the Grooms one, a 1961 painting called Florentine Landscape, features the semi-nude artist sprawled out on a blanket in a park-like setting. He adopts the guise of an odalisque, a female archetype that routinely has shown up in paintings by men. Many later works would also subvert traditional notions about gender and representation.

Florentine Landscape appeared in a show about artist-run galleries in Downtown New York at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery in 2017, preceding a solo show by Marcus later that year at Eric Firestone Gallery. That show led critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie to write, “Maybe this show, museum-like in quality and covering fifteen key years, will at least shift the question from a why to a what-if.”

Born in 1928 in New York, Marcus received her BA in art from NYU in 1947, then took classes at Cooper Union and the Art Students League during the ’50s. She became friends with Allan Kaprow, collaborating with him on his Happenings, and showed in 1960 at Delancey Street Museum, an alternative space run by Grooms.

She became known early on for works with sharply delineated people that she thinly painted. “Hers is a most controlled and sublimated sensibility, which tends to reduce the solidity of natural things to an echo of their presence,” wrote critic Brian O’Doherty in a 1961 review for the New York Times.

In a series of paintings from the ’60s, she returned to her own image, representing herself variously as Medusa, Athena, a bourgeois tourist, a stately matron, and more. In depicting herself as so many different female types, she suggested that women like her were constantly shifting their appearance, depending on where they chose to present themselves.

Critic John Yau twice noted that her work preceded that of Cindy Sherman, whose famed photographs during the 1970s and ’80s explored that same theme. In his review of the Eric Firestone show, Yau wrote that it was “unaccountable” that she had not been canonized, noting that the “art world was not ready to accept” her during the ’60s.

He also praised Marcus’s portraits of Black men, women, and children from the ’60s and ’70s, which he said could be seen as “a forerunner to the work of Kerry James Marshall and Barkley L. Hendricks.”

Marcus, who had stopped working by the time of her Eric Firestone show, is still not widely known, though there are signs that this is changing. One such sign is a forthcoming show at New York’s Lévy Gorvy Dayan that pairs Marcus’s work with paintings by Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh, two well-known artists that Marcus showed alongside during the ’70s. (Among the places they showed together was the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, now known as MoMA PS1, where the trio featured in a feminist art installation known as the Sister Chapel in 1978.)

Although Marcus tends to be talked about in relation to gender, she had a funny way of resisting her work being pigeonholed.

The curator Dorothy Seckler once pointed out to Marcus that she seemed particularly focused on the female figure, especially at a time when figurative painting wasn’t so widely accepted. Marcus responded: “No, I like to do men. They seem to be less available very often, although I have done, actually, quite a lot of figures. I think all you need is someone who is very patient and somewhat vain.”