An artist hidden in plain sight
Painter Marcia Hafif has a solo museum show in her native Southland for the first time in 40 years.
Throughout her life, it seems that painter Marcia Hafif has had an almost-prescient knack for appearing in the most interesting places at the most interesting times.
In the late 1950s, she lived around the corner from the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, where she pitched in to help and once requested a work of art by Ken Price in lieu of payment. In the early 1960s, she went to Rome, where she plunged into a scene of artistic experimentation. By the late ’60s, she was back in Southern California, where she became part of the historic first MFA class at UC Irvine.
And in the 1970s, she moved to New York, where a generation of boundary-pushing artists were at work, such as video art pioneer Joan Jonas and sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark. “There were so many incredible artists there,” she recalls. “It was so exciting.”
Over the course of her career, Hafif has steadily produced a body of work that touches on a wide range of ideas and media, from text-based wall installations that wrestle with sexuality and womanhood, to her paintings, for which she is best known: meditative abstractions that ruminate on the nature of color.
The artist’s pieces were part of the first exhibition at the experimental PS1 space in Queens (now operated by the Museum of Modern Art). Since then, the works have been shown in solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in New York; Cologne, Germany; Geneva; Rome; and Paris.
Yet Hafif has remained largely overlooked in the place where she was born and raised: Southern California. The last time she had a solo museum show in the area was in 1975, when she exhibited her early paintings at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego).
Her new one-woman show at the Laguna Art Museum, however, has changed all that. “Marcia Hafif: From the Inventory,” as the exhibition is called, brings together several series of painted works from the 1990s to last year — some inspired by Laguna, where she maintains a home and studio. (Since 1999, she has divided her time between Southern California and New York.)
“Marcia is so well known on the East Coast and in Europe, and yet she has remained relatively unfamiliar in her own backyard,” says Malcolm Warner, executive director at the Laguna Art Museum. “So for the museum, it was a plum project to bring her to the attention of Laguna Beach and Southern California generally.”
The exhibition features a small selection of black-and-white photographs that Hafif took of Laguna in the early 1970s. But the stars of the show are her paintings: brilliantly illuminated installations of individually colored canvases that come together to tell stories about hue and tone.
One series, the Pacific Ocean Paintings, from 2000, was inspired by her walks on the beach, from the colors she saw ref lected on the sand when a wave retreats. These challenge a viewer’s preconceived notions of what the colors of the coast might be since the canvases feature unlikely shades of garnet, gray-green and pink.
“Each of these, they all happen differently,” says Hafif of her series. “The Double Glaze Paintings [also on view at the museum], those are about layering one color over another. It might be yellow over green and observing how that changes the color.”
Look at one of her installations from afar and you might see simple cubes of black, gray and blue. Come closer and the surface of the canvas reveals another reality: thousands of deliberately applied, overlapping brushstrokes that ref lect light in unexpected ways. (The photographs don’t capture the half of it.)
The artist, 86, still paints regularly. On a cloudy morning, she leads me around her minimally decorated two-story home in Laguna, where she keeps an equally minimal ground-floor studio. She is at work on a series based on the colors used in Roman architecture.
Lithe, with short gray hair, Hafif cuts an elegant figure. She speaks softly and moves gracefully. But the unassuming manner belies a bold adventurousness. A discussion about painting might segue nonchalantly to talk about “a little affair” in Mexico, her journeys through Iran or her larger-than-life Circassian great-grandfather, who fought against the French in Mexico in the late 19th century.
“He was a template for me,” she says. “He traveled. He spoke seven languages. He wrote this very large autobiography.”
Hafif was born Marcia Jean Woods in Pomona in 1929 and grew up in several Southern California locales: Pomona, Laguna Beach, Claremont and Idyllwild. She at- tended Pomona College with every intention of becoming a writer. But once in college, the enjoyment she got from her art classes led her to switch her major to studio art.
After graduation she got married (that’s where she picked up the name Hafif) and taught elementary school. But she also pursued graduate studies in art history at Claremont — studying the art of the Renaissance and East Asia. It was a path from which she quickly retreated, she explains: “I realized I wasn’t an art historian but an artist.”
She divorced and eventually found her way to Los Angeles.
It was at this point that she began working at the Ferus Gallery as an occasional assistant, staffing the front desk when founders Irving Blum or Walter Hopps weren’t around. An exhibition of paintings by Giorgio Morandi, the early 20th century Italian painter known for creating subdued still lifes of jars and jugs, proved particularly transformative.
“When I first saw them, I thought, ‘ Why do these simple paintings command such a big price?’” she recalls. “But then I saw that there was this rigor to his repetition. There were these surprising differences in shadow, volumes that disappeared. There was a movement to them.”
In the early ’60s, employing the small monthly allowance she received as part of her divorce settlement, she moved to Rome — a decision that was partly inspired by the time she spent studying Renaissance art at Claremont.
There she started painting as soon as she landed — playing with various facets of abstraction — and she soon began to get traction in galleries and museums. She also met the man who would become the father of her son, with whom she would remain for seven years.
But by 1969, Hafif was ready to return to the U.S. “I missed my language,” she says. “I wanted to paint in American context.” So she returned to Southern California and immediately applied to the new MFA program at UC Irvine, where she would become classmates with now-renowned figures such as Chris Burden.
On New Year’s Day 1972, shortly after settling in New York, she created a drawing that would serve as the basis for a painting practice she continues to this day. On a piece of paper, she made a series of short vertical marks that started in the upper left corner and then filled the page like a rippling graphite wave.
“I then took those same strokes and applied them to brushstrokes,” she says. These small, repeating strokes are what make Hafif ’s paintings feel as if they are vibrating.
“People ask me how long it takes,” she says. “I don’t care how long it takes. It takes as long as it takes.” The process for her is a meditative one — and, ultimately, a foundation upon which she has built a lifetime of work: a grayscale made out of 106 individual panels, a rainbow of colors all tinted with black, experiments with natural pigments as well as with watercolors. In recent years, her work has begun to pop out with more regularity in Los Angeles.
I ask Hafif if she is being reclaimed as a California artist.
“All those labels are so difficult,” she says. “You say, ‘I’m a European artist. I’m an American artist.’ But I don’t want to label it.”
She adds: “Really, I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world.”
‘People ask me how long it takes. I don’t care how long it takes. It takes as long as it takes.’
Marcia Hafif, abstract painter on her process