Marcia Hafif, a Laguna Beach painter whose pop art and Minimalist works have recently gained renewed prominence with a flurry of exhibitions, died on April 17 at 88.
A celebration of her life will be held at the Laguna Art Museum, Sunday, June 17, at 5:30 p.m.
Born Marcia Jean Woods in Pomona, Calif., in 1929, she lived in Laguna Beach as a young girl. She graduated from Pomona College in Claremont in 1951 and married Herbert Hafif.
After college, Hafif immersed herself in the Los Angeles art scene. She worked as an occasional assistant for Ferus Gallery, the space founded by Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz, which was the nucleus for some of California’s avant-garde artists. Before finding her direction as an artist, she briefly considered becoming an art historian.
Along the way, she divorced her husband, moved to Italy and remained eight years in Rome. During this time, she had her first solo show at Galleria La Salita in 1964, birthed a son and made some of her most memorable, brightly colored Pop-Minimal paintings. These were recently exhibited at the New York gallery Fergus McCaffrey in the show “Italian Paintings, 1961-69.”
“As is common with so many of the great American artists of her generation, Marcia’s work found favor first in Europe,” says Fergus McCaffrey, who represented the artist.
In 1969, Hafif returned to California to be a part of the inaugural UC Irvine art department. She set aside painting for several years, focusing on film, photography and sound art. She then moved to New York, where she delved first into drawing, with her “Pencil on Paper (1972-1976)” series, and then returned to painting, moving into the monochromatic works that defined many of her most mature series.
She was overlooked by many art institutions for much of her career, only to be recently rediscovered and hailed as one of the essential painters working during a time when her chosen medium was considered unfashionable.
She returned to her beloved Laguna Beach in 1999. Her paintings were included in the 2014 edition of the Hammer Museum’s “Made in Los Angeles” biennial, and in the past few years, she had major solo exhibitions at the Kunsthaus Baselland and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland, and at the Laguna Art Museum.
A 100-work survey of her work is planned to open in September at her alma mater’s Museum of Art in Claremont, Calif.
She worked across mediums, including performance, for the rest of her six-decade-long career.
A contemporary of more well-known male artists such as Robert Irwin, Robert Ryman and Gerhard Richter, Hafif, like many other female artists of her generation, was overlooked by most of the art world until recently. Connie Butler, the chief curator at the Hammer Museum, credits “a younger generation of artists in New York and Los Angeles, including R.H. Quaytman, Laura Owens and many others” for bringing Hafif’s work back into prominence. “Marcia Hafif was an extraordinary artist who was finally getting her due… the rigors of her painting practice are now widely recognized.”
Christian Bernard, the former director of the Musée d’art Moderne and Contemporain in Genèva, said: “May the painting she deployed since the 1970s find the place it deserves in history.”
Jane McFadden, chair of the Art Center College of Design humanities and sciences department in Pasadena, said: “She had a meticulous eye. She had a gift for making friends, and a lovely family. She had the ability to laugh. She wrote to me this past winter to chat about playing with my children in the warm sun on the beach, where I last saw her. I will remember her there, bathed by the light and color that deeply informed her life’s work and infused with the vitality that fueled it.”
