Provincetown, that euphoric seaside escape at the tip of Cape Cod, has inspired some of America’s greatest post-war artists: Pollock, Frankenthaler, Motherwell. This summer, the case is made that any such list should include Marcia Marcus—a darling of the New York art world of the 1950s and ’60s whose work has received some much-deserved shine lately after decades out of the spotlight.
Marcus, who died last year at the age of 97, spent many summers in one of Provincetown’s famed dune shacks making her strikingly modern portraits and collages. While there, she hung out with artist friends like Lucas Samaras (whom she painted) and Alex Katz (who painted her). Even when she wasn’t physically in Provincetown, she was painting its clarity of light, its azure sky, its eccentric spirit.
“There is something so very distinctive about her visual language,” says Debra Lennard, lead curator of “Marcia Marcus: Strange and Clear,” which opens at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum on June 26. The first time Lennard saw a painting by Marcus—1966’s Art and the Family, which fuses collage, portraiture, and drawings by her young daughters—she was struck by how unusual it was. “The more you know about 20th-century American art, you’re like, What is that? It stopped me in my tracks.”
Marcus’s paintings still have that effect. Her style was wholly her own, with a delightfully strange mix of off-kilter compositions, deadpan facial expressions, and historical references. She painted in flat, vivid hues—presaging the work of contemporary painters like Amy Sherald. She was ahead of her time in so many ways; in 1960 she became the first woman to stage a Happening, and she painted herself as a mother when few others would dare to.
“She didn’t question herself,” says her daughter Jane Barrell Yadav, who, along with her sister, Kate Prendergast, has dedicated the past decade to stewarding their mother’s legacy.
The PAAM survey—Marcus’s first solo museum exhibition in 42 years—aims to showcase that unwavering commitment. It will bring together more than 30 objects, mostly paintings from the 1950s through the 1980s but also archival materials like sketchbooks and photographs. But the showstoppers are her self-portraits, brimming, as she did, with confidence and panache.
“Strange and Clear” follows a string of recent presentations that have pulled Marcus back into the zeitgeist. Earlier this year the New York gallery Olney Gleason, which now represents Marcus’s estate, staged a solo exhibition of her paintings, drawing new fans and old friends alike. “As soon as we opened, the legion of painters coming in to genuflect and appreciate the work was immediate,” says the gallery’s cofounder Eric Gleason. Last year the curator Saara Pritchard placed Marcus in conversation with Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh in a well-reviewed show at Lévy Gorvy Dayan. And in 2017, which marked the start of Marcus’s so-called rediscovery, she was the subject of a solo presentation at Eric Firestone gallery and included in a group show at the Grey Art Museum at NYU.
The PAAM show (and an accompanying monograph, out in July from Rizzoli) will serve as an exclamation point on this momentum, its organizers hope. “Marcia, at one point, was one of the key players in the chaotic, messy history of New York art, and she deserves to have that place again,” says Lennard.
Marcia Marcus, circa 1954, in Coney Island, New York. Photographer unknown.Photo: Courtesy ARS/Marcia Marcus Media, Inc.
