Marcia Marcus: I Paint What I Like

Published on the occasion of a major new career retrospective, Marcia Marcus: I Paint What I Like provides a much-needed, extensive monographic exploration of a strikingly original artist.

Headstrong and wry, Marcia Marcus (1928–2025) was a fiercely original artist whose work challenges typical understanding of post-war American art. Rejecting mainstream abstraction, Marcus spent five decades painting what compelled her: languorous male nudes, parenthood, great style—subjects her peers rarely explored—all rendered in her distinctive cool and poised hand. Undaunted by New York’s male-dominated art world, she was a vivid presence in downtown Manhattan and Provincetown, pioneering as one of the first women to stage a Happening. Through decades of self-portraiture, she boldly affirmed her own creative voice and upended narrow expectations of gender with wit and defiance.

This volume illuminates Marcus’s multifaceted significance: innovative artist of post-war New York, creator of radically assertive self-portraiture, and essential forerunner of figurative painting today.

Brandon Brame Fortune is chief curator emerita, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Debra Lennard is an independent scholar and associate curator, Hayward Gallery Touring, London.

Melissa Rachleff is clinical professor in the Visual Arts Administration Program at NYU Steinhardt, and curator of Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965, Grey Art Museum, NYU, 2017.