Marcia Hafif – Italian Paintings, 1961-1969

Born in 1929, Marcia Hafif left her native California in 1961 to undertake her « Grand Tour » of Italy and eventually settled down in Rome for close to ten years. The body of works she created in this span of time consists of some 210 paintings and 255 drawings, collages, serigraphies, the major part of which she left behind in Europe on returning to the United States. This output did not resurface until the end of the nineties, an ensemble of striking relevance and quality (Mamco, 1999). In a jubilant prologue to the monochromes – she describes them as «onefigure paintings» – she began to produce in 1972 in New York, Hafif's Roman period explores the potentials offered by non-figurative painting, finding patterns in the factual (preceding «néo-géo» by twenty years), then by the resources of post-Matisse abstraction, brushing at times the limits of an image, influenced by pop aesthetic and fashioned around biomorphic curbs. A privileged decade that sees Hafif invent with maestria the woman painter figure, emblematic of the era's mutations.
An indispensable tool for anyone who, today, wishes to understand the evolution of occidental abstraction, this catalogue raisonné includes a significant narrative by the artist. It describes the many intrusions that interfere daily in the creative processus, and allows the reader to apprehend the development of osmosis between acquired influences from the West Coast abstract expressionists familiar with the mythical Los Angeles Ferus Gallery, and the range of colours and forms she witnessed in Rome, in its architecture, pavement mosaïcs, street signs, movies, etc. In his essay, Eric de Chassey comments on the issues of geometrical abstraction of the decade and sets the Roman paintings in historical perspective.