This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Following is a copy of the obituary of Conrad Marca-Relli from The New York Times:
"Conrad Marca-Relli, Collagist and Painter, Dies at 87"
August 31, 2000
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Conrad Marca-Relli, an American artist linked to Abstract Expressionism and known for making large patchwork collages of cut pieces of canvas, died Tuesday at his home in Parma, Italy. He was 87.
In 1967, when the Whitney Museum of American Art organized a retrospective of Mr. Marca-Relli's work, the show's curator, William Agee, said, "Marca-Relli's achievement has been to raise collage to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting."
John Canaday, reviewing the show in The New York Times, described the artist's "success in bringing restlessly energetic forms into static position without deadening them, his strong echoes of classical architecture as filtered through the Italian Renaissance, and his increasing interest in high polish."
Born in Boston in 1913, Mr. Marca-Relli was the son of a journalist whose assignments abroad allowed the family to spend years in Europe. Mr. Marca-Relli had his first art lessons as a boy in Italy. In the United States, he attended Cooper Union briefly and then, at 18, struck out on his own. He taught art, worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines and joined the Federal Art Project of the W.P.A., through which he met Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and John Graham. His acquaintance with them helped familiarize him with modernism.
After serving in the Army, he had his first solo show in New York in 1947: surreal dreamscapes with circus themes and allusions to Italian Renaissance buildings, influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico. He then switched to thickly painted, agitated abstractions, affected by an exhibition he had seen of the painter Arshile Gorky. But he was dissatisfied.
He had a breakthrough in Mexico during the summer of 1953, when, having run out of paint, he started making collages from what was at hand. Returning to the United States and inspired by de Kooning's Women, Mr. Marca-Relli began a series of abstract collages based on human figures. These jigsaw collages consisted of raw canvas or linen stuck like shingles to a larger canvas and then painted.
He described his goal as bringing accident and gesture, qualities of Abstract Expressionism, to the usually methodical medium of collage. He cut shapes quickly, intuitively. The idea was not "speed for its own sake, but to create through free, automatic action, before conscious thought can censor out creativity," he said.
During the 1960's he applied the technique to metal and vinyl, creating works alluding to wings, fuselages and airplanes, and this activity led him to make sculptures before returning to canvas and paint. Painting, he said, is "a continuous attempt at solving insoluble problems."
"You just keep working and you never get it clear to yourself," he added.
Mr. Marca-Relli made intense small-scale abstractions and bigger figurative collages in the 70's . . . His palette, typically somber, broadened, and for a while he even experimented with spray paint, but without undoing his essential European-inflected elegance, which was a virtue to supporters, a weakness to detractors, who complained occasionally about what one critic called "secondhand sumptuousness."
He was elegant in person, known among friends as a restless, charming hypochondriac. Writers stressed his fondness for fast cars. In 1951 he married Anita Gibson, a Peruvian and the daughter of Percy Gibson, the poet. Over the years they lived in East Hampton, N.Y., where he became a close friend and neighbor of Jackson Pollock; and also in Wayne, N.J.; Ibiza, Spain; Sarasota, Fla.; Rome; Paris; and London. The couple moved to Parma four years ago.
Mr. Marca-Relli's work was frequently shown and collected. Among recent exhibitions were a survey last year at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and another this year in Darmstadt, Germany. Last year he was made an honorary citizen of Italy.
He is survived by his wife.
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Known for his collage-making abilities in Cubist and Abstract
Expressionist style as well as paintings, Conrad Marca-Relli spent most
of his professional career in New York City. He was born in Boston,
Massachusetts, and during his childhood and youth in Europe, he received
his first art lessons in Italy.
In 1926, he settled in New York
City where he studied at various schools including Cooper Union. From
1935 to 1938, he was a WPA artist with the Federal Art Project, and
this job was his first opportunity to devote himself exclusively to his
art work. It also brought him into contact with other New York
modernists such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.
From
1948 to 1949, he was again in Europe and turned to Surrealist circus
and architectural themes influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Henri
Rousseau. In Rome, he completed his first body of important works,
based on Italian Renaissance architectural themes and circus motifs.
These paintings were later exhibited in New York City at the Niveau
Gallery.
Returning to New York, he pursued a style of
controlled, sharp edged, biomorphic shapes with urban themes. Only by
chance did he turn to collage because of a trip to Mexico in 1953 where
he was impressed by the contrasts between flat white adobe buildings
and the black shadows on them from the brilliant sun. To achieve a
similar look, he developed a collage method of sketching forms on bare
canvas, cutting them out with razor blades, coating them with layers of
paint, and attaching them to a supporting canvas in a rearranged
juxtaposition. Between the attachments, he began adding paint and
strips of canvas, which suggested abstract figures and anatomical
fragments.
By 1960, his collages were totally nonobjective. On
flat surfaces and in sculpture, he experimented with metal and vinyl
sheets, which gave his work an industrial and simplified appearance.
Source:
Matthew Baigell, "Dictionary of American Art"
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Biography from Karlie Corporation:
|  Conrad
Marca-Relli, the son of Italian parents, was born in Boston on June 5,
1913. His childhood was spent partly in Italy and partly in America
until he reached thirteen when his family permanently settled in New
York. He began to draw at an early age and said that he had been
painting as long as he can remember. In his last year of high school, he
studied art at night. Later he spent a year at Cooper Union. By this
time, in the early 1930's, the Depression was making it difficult for
artists to make a living. Marca-Relli supported himself doing
occasional drawings and covers for newspapers and magazines, and with a
teaching job.
The creation of the WPA, in 1935, was vitally
important to Marca-Relli as it was with so many artists. Here,
Marca-Relli was employed as a teacher and then with the easel and mural
divisions of the Federal Art Project. For the first time, he earned a
living as an artist. Perhaps more important however, was that
Marca-Relli came into contact with artists who helped him alter his
entire view of painting.
Although he spent his last years
settled in Italy, during much of his career he'd been an inveterate and
restless traveler absorbing the expression and vibrancy of all the
cultures he'd visited. He was primarily self-taught and although de
Kooning, Franz Kline, Pollock, Kline and Rothko were among his friends,
Marca-Relli had followed an independent, even isolated course. He began
as a painter but ultimately turned to collage.
Marca-Relli began
his public career as a surrealist painter influenced by de Chirico,
Rousseau and Miro. Nevertheless, while traveling in Italy, Marca-Relli
became absorbed in texture and solidity. The theme of his work during
this time was basic horizontal and vertical elements. During a trip to
Mexico, however, Marca-Relli made a discovery that was to transform the
course of his development as an artist. There he was deeply impressed
by the tactile qualities of the sunlit surfaces of adobe buildings.
Confronted with a light and structural system he first discovered in
Italy he sought the most suitable medium for expressing the environment
in which he found himself.
According to the mythology
surrounding Marca-Relli, he ran out of paint and, following the course
of his work, he began gluing material and paper in order to achieve a
greater incisiveness of the borders. He immediately found that collage
provided the density and texture he sought. Initially, Marca-Relli
applied collage to a series of single figure studies. The anatomy of
the body and the spaces around it merge and become the "architecture"
of space. The individual figures are sometimes lying down, sleeping or
seated. These early collages were created from segments of either raw
canvas or natural linen that were pinned to the supporting canvas after
they had been coated with a mixture of black paint and glue. Later, he
introduced two figures to increase the complexity and expressiveness of
his work. Most of these works are large, accentuating the structural
quality of the human form. Soon after he introduced volumes of color to
his work.
In 1958, Marca-Relli spent a few months in the south of
France. While there, his work embodied the sharp contrasts and greater
translucence of the Mediterranean light. He also reduced the number of
colors to concentrate on the contrast between one dominant hue with
strong blacks and whites.
In his work about Marca-Relli, William
C. Agee, one-time Assistant Curator of the Whitney Museum of American
Art, wrote, "Canvas had become almost too pliable, and Marca-Relli now
searched for materials which would offer a greater resiliency to the
hand. In 1961 he used thin sheets of metal in several small collages,
but metal at that time proved too awkward and inflexible. The next year
he discovered in sheets of vinyl plastic the right combination of
resistance and flexibility. Works in 1962...use vinyl sheets nailed
directly to a wooden support. Following his innate tendency to formal
reduction and simplicity, the shapes gradually cast off traces of
biomorphism and became progressively fewer in number, larger and more
open.
Cristobal and other later works in this series assumed a
planar arrangement of horizontal and vertical shapes . . . Volumes of
color were added as contrasts to the more neutral and open areas of the
natural shades of vinyl. These color volumes also provided a weight,
which nudges against and displaces other shapes, creating a slow
internal rhythm. That rhythm is irregular and off-beat, caused in art
by a deliberate awkwardness in cutting and attaching the plastic."
Marca-Relli
expanded his use of industrial material to aluminum. Ultimately, he
began to work in three-dimensional space creating reliefs and
freestanding sculptures. After exploring the possibilities of plastics
and aluminum, Marca-Relli returned to paint and canvas as the materials
of his collages.
The body of Marca-Relli's work is evidence of
his inward and outward journeys. Marca-Relli did not see himself as a
maker of pictures, but as a seeker, an experimenter, a problem-solver.
And although he has friends and affiliations, he listened to only one
voice in his creative process, his own. He said: "I think painters
should be free to experiment. And that during their experimenting they
should be alone, without any interference . . . in order to see whether
what they are doing is good or not."
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Biography from Hollis Taggart Galleries (Artists, M-Q):
|  Conrad Marca-Relli (1912–2000)
Conrad Marca-Relli, a member of the New York School’s first generation, was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism. He is most celebrated for his large-scale collages, composed of pieces of canvas or natural linen overpainted with gestural brushstrokes. In 1967, William Agee, then curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, praised Marca-Relli’s work, claiming that his “achievement has been to raise collage to a scale and complexity equal to that of monumental painting.” (1)
Born in Boston on June 5, 1913, to Italian immigrant parents, Marca-Relli was a primarily self-taught artist and an inveterate traveler who bridged the American and European art worlds. He spent much of his childhood moving back and forth between the United States and Europe; his father was a news commentator and a journalist whose assignments required frequent travel. When he was thirteen, Marca-Relli and his parents permanently settled in New York, where he began his first formal artistic training. With the encouragement of his father, he took night classes at a private art school. After finishing high school in 1930, he studied at the Cooper Union for a year before establishing his own studio in Greenwich Village. During the Depression, Marca-Relli, like many American artists, supported himself by working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), first as a teacher and then with the easel and mural painting divisions of the Federal Art Project. At this time, he came into contact with progressive artists, including Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and John Graham, who exposed him to modernist artistic trends.
After serving in the army during World War II, Marca-Relli returned to New York and to painting. He initially depicted cityscapes and carnival scenes in a Surrealist style, influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, and Joan Miró, before turning to a more abstract style in the early 1950s.
On a trip to Mexico in 1952, Marca-Relli radically altered his artistic practice in response to his surroundings. A probably apocryphal story claims that a lack of paint stimulated his initial experimentation with collage at this time; however, the artist’s account states that he turned to this pictorial technique to solve technical problems related to his interest in capturing the effects of sunlight on adobe buildings. Juxtaposing pieces of light-colored canvas allowed him to define the edges of his forms and establish a sense of depth in largely white-on-white pictures. Furthermore, the collage process enabled him to work quickly and change his creation constantly since he did not have to wait for the paint to dry.
Marca-Relli initially used collage for both architectural themes and a series of single figure images inspired by de Kooning’s depictions of women. As he mastered this technique, he made more complex and dynamic pictures with multiple figures and abstract works with veiled references to architectural and landscape elements. In the early 1960s he continued to explore his interest in abstract forms and began experimenting with new materials, including metals and synthetic plastics.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Marca-Relli was actively involved in the avant-garde art world in Greenwich Village. He helped to found the “Eighth Street Club,” an artists’ group whose members included de Kooning, Kline, and Jack Tworkov, and he assisted the art dealer Leo Castelli in the organization of the first “Ninth Street Show,” arguably the first comprehensive display of Abstract Expressionist work. At this time, he achieved much success, and his paintings entered the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1953, he purchased a house near Jackson Pollock’s home in Springs, East Hampton, an area that was developing into an artists’ colony. Three years later, Marca-Relli identified Pollock’s body for the police after his fatal car accident. This experience moved him to paint The Death of Jackson Pollock in that same year.
As his career progressed, Marca-Relli increasingly distanced himself from the New York School. He lived and worked in London; Sarasota, Florida; Wayne, New Jersey; Ibiza, Spain; Paris; and Rome. He maintained a close, lifelong connection to Italy and its art world. Early in his career, he arranged contacts for de Kooning, Castelli, and the art critic Thomas B. Hess in Rome, and in his final years, he lived in Parma with his wife, Anita Gibson, whom he married in 1951. Marca-Relli became an honorary Italian citizen the year before his death in 2000.
1) William C. Agee, Marca-Relli (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1967), 9.
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Biography from Rogallery.com:
| Although Conrad Marca-Relli began his artistic career as a painter, he
is recognized as one of the American masters of collage and part of the
first generation of abstract expressionism. Self-taught, except
for a brief stint at Cooper Union in New York City, he has exhibited
often in New York City, Europe and Latin America.
Marca-Relli
was born in Boston of Italian parents. From 1935 to 1938, he worked for
the WPA Federal Art Project. He spent four years in the army before
settling in New York City. Although he traveled in Europe, the United
States and Mexico, his frequent trips to Italy had the greatest effect
on his early paintings.
Marca-Relli's early cityscapes, still
lifes, circus themes and architectural motifs are reminiscent of
Italian surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. The subdued palette and
architectural starkness of these paintings create a sense of loneliness
and emptiness typical of the surrealists.
Marca-Relli's
monumental-scale collage works combine oil painting and collage, with
materials sometimes consisting of vinyl plastics and cut-out aluminum.
His
collage paintings of the early 1950s are characterized by abstract or
suggested figures, reclining or seated. These early works of canvas and
pigment were created by first sketching forms onto bare canvas; they
were then cut out and pinned to a supporting canvas. The pinning
allowed the positioning of the cut-outs, so that accident and chance
mingled with the artist's initial ideas. Carefully structuring the
collage elements, Marca-Relli employed intense colors, broken surfaces
and expressionistic spattering.
In the 1960s, he experimented
with metal and vinyl sheets for an industrial effect. Shapes were
outlined with painted or actual nail holes, stressing their
three-dimensional plasticity.
Over the years the collages
developed an abstract simplicity, evidenced by black or somber colors
and rectangular shapes isolated against a neutral backdrop.
Marca-Relli
has taught at Yale University (from 1954 to 1955 and from 1959 to 1960)
and at the University of California at Berkeley (1958). His first
one-man show was in New York City in 1948, and in 1967 the Whitney
Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective show. |
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