Marcia Marcus

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 favour 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.