Libbie Mark: Collage Paintings (1950s-1960s)

Excerpt from Libbie Mark: Collage Paintings (1950s-1960s)

By Jennifer Uhrhane

Mark’s early painting style varied before and during the beginnings of her formal training, but by the mid-1950s, she began a move towards Abstract Expressionism. This roughly coincided with changes in her personal and artistic life. After her youngest child graduated from high school in 1956, Mark and her husband lived between Long Island and New York City for two years. Mark was enrolled at the Art Students League between 1956 and 1958, taking courses from Vytlacil, Hofmann’s former student and William Zorach, and others on staff at that time.Mark attended Vytlacil’s “Life Drawing, Painting and Composition” classes from December 1956 to May 1957 and from September 1957 to March 1958. A number of Mark’s pieces from this time show her increasing interest and skill in abstraction. She worked in oil on canvas, as well as ink and watercolor on paper, experimenting with different methods and styles, likely having absorbed other artists’ and her teachers’ work, which she could now more easily study in the city. 

Mark’s connections and courses at the Art Students League led her to the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. Hofmann briefly taught at the League before establishing his own school, first located in New York, then very soon after also in Provincetown, the oldest continuous artist colony in the United States. On Vytlacil’s recommendation, in 1957 at the age of 51, Mark applied for Hofmann’s summer school session. In between her courses with Vytlacil, in July and August 1957, Mark attended Hofmann’s final Provincetown summer course before he retired from teaching.  Mark’s classmates included Red Grooms and Helen Levitt. Many other artists such as Milton Avery, Sally Michel (Avery), Janice Biala, Adolph Gottlieb, Allan Kaprow, Lillian Orlowsky, and Mark Rothko also worked in Provincetown that summer. A few of Mark’s largest paintings are from this Hofmann/League period, some dated with an “-HH” or an “-L” suffix on verso. 

Following that first summer in Provincetown, in 1958 the Marks rented an apartment at 35 East 85th Street, fully transitioning to the city from Great Neck. In about 1962, the Marks moved to a new building at 176 East 71st Street, renting a separate painting studio nearby. Later, a second unit at East 71st served as her workspace; they also installed metal screens on their living room wall to easily rotate displays of her paintings. Dinah Rubinstein, professionally known as Dena, photographed Mark likely in her East 71st studio. She also took portraits of numerous other artists, including Dorothy Dehner, Willem De Kooning, Edwin Dickinson, Red Grooms, Chaim Gross, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, George Segal, Raphael Soyer, Jack Tworkov, and Andy Warhol.