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 post-war American figurative painters. Marcus was a fiercely original painter whose work enlarges our understanding of post-war American art. 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 downtown Manhattan’s art scene and in Provincetown, she was one of the first women to stage a Happening. Over many decades, she painted subjects that peers rarely explored—motherhood; male nudes; female role play—years before such topics gained wider currency. Although her work largely fell into obscurity, its recent re-emergence 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.