Marcus Marcus, a painter rediscovered in his last decade, dies at 97

Marcus Marcus, a figurative and conceptual artist with a steel will and a contemporary bold style that found fame in the 1960s and then was widely neglected until he was almost 90 years old, although he continued to work, with confidence, decade after decade, on March 27 in Manhattan. He was 97 years old.

His death, in a nursing structure, was announced by his daughters, Kate Sethergast and Jane Barrell Yadav.

Mrs. Marcus was everywhere who counted for a young, determined and talented artist in the late 1950s and 60s. To Provincetown, in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod every summer, painting from a shack between the dunes. At Cedar Tavern in the Greenwich Village, holding it. (Willem de Kooning He was a lover.)

He showed the 10th street galleries in the East Village, the scrappy spaces managed by artists who were ignored by Uptown’s establishment and at the short duration of Delancey Street Museum, managed by his friends the NATO Tennessee Red spouses AND Bob ThompsonThe black figurative painter who died young, both who enrolled to dance and interpret the Bongos in an event that staged. (He read a poem.)

The Whitney Museum included it in its collection “Young America 1960: thirty American painters under thirty -six”. And again, two years later, as part of his exhibition “Forty artists under forty”.

The art critic Brian O’Doherty, Review of his solo show In a Uptown gallery in 1961 for the New York Times, Mrs. Marcus in Milton Avery, Jean-Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard compared.

He was a virtuosistic figurative painter – a reviewer described his painting technique as a “more superficial branched of a razor” – with a flat and almost impassive style that recalls that of his contemporary Alex KatzA comparison that annoyed him. He made portraits of his circle: Lucas SamarasMr. Gangoms and Mr. Thompson. Jack Kerouac, Leroi Jones and Jill Johnston, the lesbian feminist and dance critic at The Village Voice, painted Jack Kerouac. He also painted the strangers – anyone who found compelling.

But his favorite subject was herself. He painted himself more and more times, in a variety of costumes and settings, his souty and stimulating gaze. He was an Athena helmet, Akimbo arms, who wore a foamy pink chiffon dress of the 1930s; He painted himself as a jellyfish and as a reclining nude. In pearls and a red sheath, he put himself in front of Masada, the Israeli fortress where the legend, the Jewish soldiers died of suicide rather than surrender to the Roman forces.

Not that he would have joined them, if he had been there, he told Amii Wallach, the director and critic, who reviewed a show by Ms. Marcus A Newsday in 1979: “I would be damn if I had taken someone’s orders to kill me”.

“Marce the difficult”, Mr. Samaras jokingly called her in a letter in 1965.

Ms Marcus era difficult. O harsh, as the painter Mimi Gross said recently: “And this is an understatement”.

He had to be. Like its biggest peers, Alice Neel AND Slitta di SylviaMrs. Marcus was doubly limping, as a woman and as a figurative painter who worked in a very male environment, through periods of art history – abstract expressionism, minimalism – when her type of work was mostly out of fashion. Seen today, it is modern amazing. Watch Amy Sherald’s jobwho painted the portrait of Michelle Obama.

“Alice Neel, Sylvia Sleigh and Marcus Marcus are all very different,” said Saara Pritchard, the curator who put together A show by the three artists of the Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery In Manhattan which opens on April 10th. “Neel is interested in the formal aspects of painting, studies on the characters; the sled is very political”, as we undermine the male gaze, etc. “Marcus is more conceptual.

The next week’s exhibition is the last showcase for Mrs. Marcus, who was re-emerged as an unknown but strangely familiar star in 2017. That year, in “Invento Downtown: galleries managed by artists in New York City, 1952-1965”, a show in New York University Gray of a New York Gray Gray of Onces of the East Village-Ms. Marcus’s scenes-apparently Gray of the University of New York Grey Art Art Art Art Art by the gray of the University of New York. his self -portraits. In large -scale painting, the poker face rises, dressed only in tights, heels and a bolero jacket. Who was this surprisingly modern painter that apparently no one had ever heard or that he had forgotten for some time?

Holland Cotter, In his review of the New York Timescalled the painting “A way-ahead-of-the authoritratit” and Mrs. Marcus “Hour dark”.

Melissa Rachleff, the curator who organized “Inventing in the center”, was not familiar with Mrs. Marcus before starting to put the show together. But when he saw that Mrs. Marcus had been part of Mr. Gangoms gallery, Mrs. Rachleff sought her.

“It was completely incentive, an artist to the end,” said Mrs. Rachleff, who met Mrs. Marcus in her Tribeca apartment in 2013 and was affected by the Autudia and innovation of her work and her brazen stoicism.

“He had lived with financial uncertainty and with the uncertainty of never having happened. He was absolutely uncompromising, even over the years to barely sell something. If he hadn’t taken seriously, no one would have done it.”

Marcia Helene Feitetelson was born on January 11, 1928, in Manhattan, the largest of two daughters of Frieda (Gelband) Feitelson, who worked as an accountant, and Irving Feitelson, a change of windows for the department stores. Marcia grew up in the Inwood section of Manhattan and wanted to be a designer. But his mother was adamant who attended college instead of studying in a commercial school and perhaps becomes a teacher.

He was only 15 when he entered the College of Arts and Science in New York University, where she graduated in art, graduating in 1947. That same year, he married Harry Gutman, who worked for his father, mainly as a way to leave the house.

A year later, the marriage was finished and march was determined to change his surname. He had been called for his maternal grandfather, so he chose his name.

“If I called me march Marcus”, He said in an oral story Interview conducted in 1975 for the archives of American art at Smithsonian, “then I was like me in both ways, in a sense, and I had no connections with anything, but also had a sort of meaning”.

He had designed all the college and now had started taking lessons at Cooper Union and, later, at the League of Arts of the Arts.

Mrs. Marcus met her second husband, Terence Barrell, at a province of Provincetown. They married in 1959 and moved to his Loft in New York, to Alphabet City. Mr. Barrell supported his wife to a certain unusual extent at the moment. He worked as a cook and teacher, but mostly they took care of their two daughters, especially in 1962, when Mrs. Marcus won a Fulbright subsidy to study in France and the family moved to Paris. For a few years after having divorced in 1972, he continued to build the barelle for his canvases.

Despite the commissions for his portraiture, the money was always tight. Mrs. Marcus worked as a professor visiting a series of college, including Vassar – a fragmentary work that left her more time to paint, even if this meant that she was financially insecuous. In the 90s, with great reluctance, he hired a job as a replacement teacher in the public school system of New York City.

In addition to her daughters, she survived her sister, Barbara Rose and four grandchildren. Mrs. Marcus’ work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Smithsonian.

Ten months after the opening of the Gray Art Gallery was opened in 2017, the Eric Firestone Gallery in Noho Put a solo exhibition of his work. (Mr. Firestone also thought that his self -portrait to gray was an extraordinary one.) After that, Mrs. Marcus appeared in some other exhibitions before the pandemic had come out, including one in the Manhattan Community College district that coupled her with Mrs. Gross, the painter.

The critic John Yau, In his review of the show For hyperallergic, he observed that both women used painting as “a vehicle of imagination”.

“It is a position that runs in contrast with other best -known figurative artists, such as Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz and Fairfield Porter,” he wrote. “I would say that what Marcus and Gross have reached is the same as their male counterparts, and in this sense it is an integral part of the history of art.”