Provenance

Private collection
This work is registered with the Archivio Marca-Relli, Parma, under the number MARE-9488 and SEA-9488.
The work is accompanied by a photo certificate issued by the Marca-Relli Archive, Parma.

Exhibitions
Darmstadt, Institut Mathildenhöhe, Conrad Marca-Relli: Works 1945-1996, 2000.
Koln, Ludwig Museum Koln; Rome, Scuderie del Quirinale, Burri. The artists and the subject 1945-2004, 2005, p. 83, illustrated.
Literature
Klaus Wolbert, Conrad Marca-Relli: Works 1945-1996, Darmstadt 2000, p. 11 and cover, illustrated.
Marco Vallora, Marca-Relli the American friend. Tunes and dissonances with Afro and Burri, Parma 2002, p. 261, illustrated.
David Anfam, Magdalena Dabrowski, Conrad Marca-Relli - Protagonist of American Abstract Expressionism, Milan 2008, ill. p. 184, 301, illustrated.
Description
Conrad Marca-Relli, a member of the New York School’s first generation was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism celebrated for his large-scale collages, composed of pieces of canvas or natural linen over painted 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)
“Passion J-L-1-18-59/89,” 1959-1989 can be considered the culmination of Marca-Relli’s work in collage during the 1950s. Working with pieces of cut canvas, he created layered, jigsaw like compositions, with oil paint and sometimes black tar, used to reinforce, highlight and offset his forms. The works of the early 1950s utilized a muted palette of browns, grays, and whites, but by 1957 he began incorporating more vivid colors such as periwinkle blue, red, and marigold. As Anja Hespelt noted his “expressive style reached a climax in the picture ‘Passion,’ which stands out due to its intensive, extraordinary color; framed by deep red and green, individual, bright spots of color are featured on a white background, black tar erupts in sweepingly executed, gestural lines which explode abruptly, like flashes of lightening; energies released in the in the conflict of the passions.” (2) Passion, in which bright hues of red, evergreen, and lemon yellow surround a central formation of white shapes, is exceptional within the artist’s oeuvre for in its incorporation of vibrant color into his collage process.
Though not always apparent, Marca-Relli never fully abandoned figuration in his work. Many of his collages contain seated or reclining figures that subtly emerge from his otherwise abstract compositions. While no figures appears in Passion, the arrangement white forms are clustered to create something of a horizon line. When read this way, the foregrounded collage elements take on the character of a figures in a landscape; abstract elements not floating but rather grounded in a defined, if imaginary, space. This too has precedent in the artist’s early works, in which fantastical scenes occupied barren Surrealist-inspired landscapes. This continuity speaks to Marca-Relli’s incredible vision, which elevated his chosen medium to meet his own aesthetic demands.
Born 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, and after finishing high school in 1930; he studied at 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. Initially, he depicted cityscapes and carnival scenes in a Surrealist style, influenced by the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Henri Rousseau, and Juan Miro, 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, his own account states that he turned to this pictorial technique to solve a variety of technical problems related to his interest in capturing the effects of sunlight on adobe buildings in Mexico. The juxtaposition of light- colored canvas pieces allowed him to demarcate the edges of his forms and give a sense of depth in a largely white-on-white picture, and 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. He 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, while retaining his interest in abstract forms, he began to work 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 that of Jackson Pollock in The 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, and he lived and worked in various places, including London; Sarasota, Florida; Wayne, New Jersey; Ibiza, Spain; Paris; and Rome. Throughout his life, he maintained a strong 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 the final years of his life, he lived in Parma with his wife, Anita Gibson, whom he married in 1951. He 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.
2. Klaus Wolbert, Conrad Marca-Relli: Works 1945-1996 ( Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, 2002), 51-52.