Marcia hafif a conversation with the artist at her soho studio in new york city may 2015
Life and career
After graduating from Pomona College in 1951, marrying Herbert Hafif, doing graduate work in Italian Renaissance and Far Eastern Art, she planned a year-long trip to Florence in 1961. Hafif settled; however, in Rome, where she remained for almost eight years, painting and exhibiting work she has called “Pop-Minimal” in retrospect. Returning to California in 1969, and leaving painting for a time to experiment with film, photography and sound installation, she completed an MFA degree at the University of California at Irvine.
In 1971, Hafif moved to New York City to search out a return to painting at a time when the validity of painting was in doubt; not finding a satisfactory path, she woke on the morning of January 1, 1972, to make her first Pencil on Paper drawing, using short vertical marks covering from top to bottom a 24 x 18 inch sheet of drawing paper. This method was used in the development of her one-color or “color study” paintings. In An Extended Gray Scale, 1972–73, a work that occupied her for nearly a year, she used standard cotton canvases to represent Painting: 106 pieces, each 22 x 22 inches, and each painted in a different gradation (as many as she could distinguish) from black to white.
Exhibiting for more than eight years with Sonnabend Gallery in Soho and Paris, she developed series of paintings that would become the basis of what came to be called The Inventory: 1974, Mass Tone Paintings; 1975, Wall Paintings;1976, Pencil Drawings; 1978, Neutral Mix Paintings; 1979, Broken Color Paintings at The Clocktower with Alanna Heiss; 1981, Black Paintings. During this time she also published articles on painting in Artforum: “Beginning Again” in 1978, and in Art in America: “Getting on With Painting,” 1981, and “True Colors,” in 1989.
In the 1980s and 1990s she developed new series, along with relationships with galleries in Europe, first in Munich, then Düsseldorf, and eventually Vienna, London, Paris, and elsewhere. Living part-time in California after 1999 still other series of paintings have appeared, most recently the Shade Paintings.
Exhibitions
2010 - "From the Inventory: Black Paintings, 1979-1980", Newman Popiashvili Gallery
2012 - "Marcia Hafif: From the Inventory – Late Roman Paintings", Larry Becker Contemporary Art, May 5 - July 7, 2012
2015 - "Marcia Hafif: From the Inventory", Laguna Art Museum, June 28-September 27, 2015
Tony "Michael" A. Vaccaro, LOOK, LIFE magazine photographer, was freelance for many other magazines too. There seems to be no clear shot of her, and my father has sat with her in Rome when he got back from photographing George O'Keeffe, who was discovered by Stieglitz an early photographer done in Black and White a hundred years ago. Hafif was inspired by the first one woman show in New York, after seeing her charcoal work. I have a work of art of hers on my wall appraised at 500,000,000 dollars. I think a woman that met me as a little boy forty years ago needs representation of a portrait done by my father, he is in the process of scanning all of his work near the Secret Theater on 21st Street, near Max Ginsburg studio in Long Island City. Max Ginsburg is also a famous artist, a painter too, I met him at Manducati's Rustica restaurant where my father goes every day, except when it is closed on Mondays. There, you talk to Mamma Gianna, who will show you the celebrities on the wall that he photographed in black and white and in color, like Picasso, Pollock, Appel, Frank Lloyd Wright, Nixon, Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson and Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst her husband, Charlie Chaplin and please don't offer to do any more documentaries, he has survived WWII and photographed that as well, I am his youngest son David Marttyr Vaccaro, my sixth book on his days after the war, when discovered by LOOK Magazine publisher aristocrat Fleur Coles who took my father on replacing the great photographer Bob Frank and David Douglas Duncan over a hundred now and still cooking, as my father says, David Coles with the Donati ink separator device to print mags surpassed LIFE magazine. The book has been accepted by Library of Congress last week and is called Picture War part II "The Gravy Train" - I am not pushing my book, but it is available on Kindle. Any of these celebrities already mentioned as well as most of the real Kings and Queens even Arab ones or Greek Fluer Coles had taken him around, to sit with, as well as De Kooning, Marvin Newman 100,000 dollars a photo framed, New York Times photog Chester Higgins good shots of the first Imhotep Pyramids with a "soggy bottom" by Dynamite, because they said there was something valuable in the top, which used to have gold leaf on the tippy top pf the pyramid there was the "all seeing eye" found on the back of dollar bill (which is the New World Order that Tolstoy wrote about when he in Anna Karinina got into the Free Masons before he died when Mc Kinley was shot as the sitting President) which they are gonna decommission with the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin soon. Honestly I forgot what her contribution was, but hopefully someone has other photos of Marcia Hafif, how can a visual artist has no image of her. AKG Germany you might try and thanks for Getty images coming back, but there is a steep price for people who have made this spot of ground terra firms. Great Thanks, Ciao...