Saara Pritchard, an art adviser, was visiting a friend in Miami when a painting in the bedroom caught her eye. Bordered in silver leaf, it was a close-cropped, black-and-white image of John F. Kennedy, eyes skyward and mouth slightly agape. The haunting image resembled a death mask — as if made by the love child of Andy Warhol and the Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. Who, Pritchard wondered, had painted it?
The answer was Marcia Marcus, a popular artist in the downtown New York scene in the 1960s and ’70s who had since faded from view. Pritchard, 40, set out to learn everything she could about Marcus. Within a year she was standing in the home of one of the artist’s daughters, Jane Barrell Yadav, in Yonkers, N.Y., who had more than 200 of her mother’s canvases. The paintings were packed tightly in closets and makeshift storage racks in the living room.
Through June 21, many of those artworks are on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, a stately Upper East Side gallery, as part of “The Human Situation,” an exhibition conceived by Pritchard that put Marcus’s work in dialogue with two better-known female painters from the era, Alice Neel and Sylvia Sleigh. Over the past two and a half years, Pritchard has worked alongside Barrell Yadav and her sister Kate Prendergast to piece together Marcus’s story in the hope of turning her from an art-historical footnote into a blue-chip star.
Marcus is among a growing group of artists who have benefited from what could be called “the rediscovery industrial complex”: a cottage industry within the art market that looks to the past to find figures — often women and artists of color — neglected by the establishment. By repackaging them for a contemporary audience, savvy dealers hope to enrich the art-historical canon even as they make a healthy profit.
The upside can be considerable. Consider the case of the painter Lynne Drexler, who lived on a remote island in Maine. Before she died in 1999, she sold her work to tourists for as little as $50. In recent years, her lyrical landscapes have sold for more than $1 million at auction.
“It’s its own art form to bring this work to market correctly,” said Eric Firestone. His New York gallery specializes in art from the 1950s and ’60s and helped kick-start Marcus’s resurgence with a well-reviewed show in 2017.
For the artists and their families, such belated recognition can be bittersweet. Barrell Yadav, Marcus’s daughter, recalled offering up her piggy bank during a particularly brutal dry spell for her mother in 1971. At the Lévy Gorvy Dayan show, Marcus’s paintings are priced from nearly $100,000 to $400,000. Marcus died a week and a half before the show opened, at 97.
When it comes to identifying an artist who is poised for a reboot, Pritchard — who also bought several works by Marcus while advising the family — looks for a combination of discovery and familiarity. Marcus’s portraits share the direct gaze and vivid backgrounds of the sought-after painters Amy Sherald and Barkley L. Hendricks. She also favored references to ancient mythology, and applied paint so thinly that one critic, Michael Benedikt, described her surfaces as “shallower than a razor.” It was a style all her own. “I look for something that l feel like I should know and I don’t,” Pritchard said.
How, exactly, is a rediscovered art star made? It requires savvy marketing, patience and luck. Here’s a guide, drawn from more than a dozen interviews with dealers, advocates and artists on the front lines.
Identify a promising artist who takes your breath away.
A rediscovery story often begins with a chance encounter. When Tim Blum, the founder of Blum gallery, visited Etsuko Nakatsuji, the 88-year-old widow of the prominent Japanese artist Sadamasa Motonaga, last summer, he was captivated by the madcap geometric compositions he saw on the walls.
He was surprised when she said, “They’re mine.” Although Nakatsuji, a graphic designer turned painter, has shown her art in her native Japan, she is largely unknown internationally. With a show next year in Los Angeles, Blum is out to change that. He has a wide network of collectors to tap, and recently he hired Mika Yoshitake, a Japanese art scholar, as the gallery’s curatorial director.
“There’s this desperate mad rush to dig back and find stuff,” Blum said. But he added, “whether they are living or dead, it’s got to be great art — otherwise, it is just marketing.”
In a similar coup de foudre, the art dealer Ales Ortuzar spotted a book about the professional football player and artist Ernie Barnes during a visit to his friend Andrew Kreps’s gallery in 2020. “I didn’t know anything about who he was, but I loved the painting,” Ortuzar said. Two years later, the dealers quietly helped orchestrate the auction of the artist’s best-known work, “The Sugar Shack,” from 1976, at Christie’s. The kinetic scene of Black dancers in a boisterous music hall sold for $15.3 million — more than seven times its high estimate. Kreps and Ortuzar now share representation of the Barnes estate.
Other dealers approach rediscovery work methodically. In the early days of New York’s Berry Campbell Gallery in 2013, the founders, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, visited the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington to pore over the historical records and photographs of dealers, including Betty Parsons, who popularized Abstract Expressionism. They circled the names of artists they did not know and went on to show several. Since then, figures like Alice Baber, a postwar painter of biomorphic
watercolors, and Bernice Bing, an Asian American artist from the Bay Area, have seen their auction prices grow by leaps and bounds.
Do a deep dive on their legacy.
The first question a dealer often asks is: Where is all the art and archival material? And who has the right to sell it?
“There have been really sad situations where artists left their works to an individual who might not have known what to do with the legacy — they sold the works or gave them away,” Ortuzar said.
Thinking ahead can make a big difference. As Marcia Marcus prepared to move into an assisted living facility in 2016, she transferred ownership of her archive and art not in museums or private collections — about 400 works — to a corporation owned by her daughters and their children. (Marcus stopped making new work in 1999, when her health began to decline.)
“It’s always the best-case scenario where the artist or the family — someone who really cares — sets up a framework and pursues it diligently as opposed to a lawyer or some hired executor,” Pritchard said.
The next challenge is building a team that shares a philosophy for how to reintroduce an artist. Marcus’s daughters said they disagreed with Eric Firestone’s strategy to focus on their mother’s early work, feeling it gave short shrift to more experimental material. They parted ways with the gallery soon after the 2017 show. (Firestone declined to comment about the relationship.)
Track down what’s missing.
Learning the whereabouts of all the work that has sold is more challenging when the artist has not had a steady relationship with a gallery.
Barrell Yadav emailed about 500 registrars at museums across the country, messaged collectors’ children on Facebook and consulted local newspaper archives. “I became a little investigator,” she said. Of the 1,000 works Marcus made, 132 are still missing, though her daughters remain determined to find them.
Find champions.
It takes a village to bring an artist to the forefront of the cultural conversation. Kate Prendergast, in managing Marcus’s estate with her sister, gave herself a crash course in artist legacy management, learning that “for an artist to be successful,” she said, “you need academic, commercial and institutional interest in balance.”
In 2023, Pritchard, the art adviser, hosted a lunch with curators and writers who had independently found their way to Marcus’s work, including Brandon Fortune, the former chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery, and Debra Lennard, an assistant curator at the Hayward Gallery. Pritchard commissioned Lennard, who is organizing a Marcus retrospective at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum that will open in 2026, to write a biography of the artist.
When Cristin Tierney, an art dealer, set out to reintroduce the influential but little-known video artist Peter Campus to the market after a long hiatus, she invited the curator John Hanhardt, who had written about the 87-year-old artist, to attend his inaugural show. Next spring, Hanhardt will organize an exhibition of Campus’s work at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
Tell the right story at the right time.
Timing is everything. “I’ve shown a lot of artists that were overlooked,” said Tim Blum of Blum gallery, adding that in some cases “nobody else cared to look at it again.” While he remains a fan of Quentin Morris, a 79-year-old painter of all-black compositions, he has determined the work is still “way too difficult for people.”
Experts say collectors often look to the past after a boom-and-bust cycle like the one that has defined the ultracontemporary art market since 2020. (A similar phenomenon took hold in the market about 10 years ago, after another young-art bubble burst.) “A lot of established collectors are feeling alienated in this market where a brand-new artist is six figures immediately,” Pritchard said. “So they are focused on filling gaps in their collections.”
That’s partly why Pritchard and several other art advisers are betting on female figurative painters of the ’60s and ’70s, who were committed to the form before it became all the rage. Earlier this spring, Ortuzar Gallery presented the first New York solo exhibition in 15 years of Sylvia Sleigh, now showing alongside Marcus at Lévy Gorvy Dayan. (After visiting Ortuzar, Scott Rothkopf, the director of the Whitney Museum, ruefully posted on Instagram, “Why didn’t I do this show?”)
It doesn’t hurt that Sleigh and Marcus’s work costs a fraction of paintings by a postwar master like Alice Neel or a younger star like Amy Sherald, to whom Marcus has sometimes been compared. To underscore this intergenerational connection, Amalia Dayan, a founder of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, suggested installing one work by a contemporary painter in each room of their current show.
Stage-manage a killer auction price.
Dealers recognize that a big auction tally is a bat signal, alerting buyers that a rediscovery has finally arrived. Sometimes, they help make it happen. In 2022, bidders chased Lynne Drexler’s dappled 1962 landscape “Flowered Hundred” at Christie’s to nearly $1.2 million, almost 20 times its high estimate. The buyer, market experts say, was the art dealer Robert Mnuchin, whose Manhattan gallery went on to present a solo exhibition of Drexler’s work in collaboration with Berry Campbell Gallery. (Mnuchin declined to comment.)
But copycat sales of subpar work that flood the zone can drag prices down. Drexler’s total auction sales dropped last year by more than 50 percent from 2023, according to the Artnet Price Database. “There’s a feeding frenzy and that’s not good,” said Campbell, whose gallery co-represents Drexler’s archive with White Cube.
To avoid a deluge, some dealers reach out to collectors who may have bought an artwork cheap to arrange private sales, quietly. Pritchard, an early collector of Drexler’s work, said that after connecting sellers to potential buyers, she was told, “‘You paid for my divorce,’ or ‘I can send my son to college.’”
Ride the wave.
Artists who benefit long-term from late-in-life treatment are those who enjoyed sustained popularity earlier, before the big-city art establishment pushed their contributions to the margins. Of the video artist Peter Campus, Tierney, the dealer, said: “They talk about him like he went underground and was part of a secret society for 30 years. He wasn’t.”
Some art historians, including Carmen Hermo, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are ambivalent about the “rediscovery” label. “I understand the allure,” she said, adding, “it’s the same old colonial impulse to ‘discover’ something that has always been there and that has a long history.”
Many artists do not live long enough to see themselves celebrated by the art world. For others, gaining recognition late in life can be confounding — and motivating. The Lehmann Maupin gallery just closed the first New York solo show of Kim Yun Shin, a 90-year-old Korean artist: a mix of brightly colored, swirling abstractions and sculptures she makes by slicing chunks of wood with a chain saw.
“I now feel the responsibility to make better work and leave a greater legacy for my art,” Shin said, through an interpreter, on a recent afternoon in Chelsea.
Shin’s road to global renown began in 2023 with a WhatsApp message from the curator Adriano Pedrosa, who saw her work at a Korean museum and included her in the 2024 Venice Biennale, one of the art world’s most prestigious exhibitions. Suddenly, everything changed. “From that moment on, I realized this is destiny,” Shin said, adding, “and a lot of luck as well.”
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