Between two continents

Who was Conrad Marca-Relli? Figureheads of the so-called New York School such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have long since become art world icons — with attention-grabbing auction prices, fat biographies and plays or films about them to match. By comparison, few people in this country are likely to have heard of Marca-Relli. Tate Modern owns not a single work by him, nor has he ever had a solo exhibition in Britain. Yet Marca-Relli made a unique contribution to art at mid-century and was often at the heart of its action. He deserves a better fate.

Born to a family of Italian immigrants in Boston in 1913, Corrado di Marcarelli (he changed his name in the 1950s) moved to New York in 1926. Like many of the future abstract expressionists, during the Great Depression Marca-Relli worked for the New Deal’s WPA agency — a federal campaign to sponsor public artworks — where he met Franz Kline. Subsequently, in 1949 Marca-Relli played a key role in organising the ‘Eighth Street Club’, a lively discussion group that encompassed a broad swathe of New York artists and intellectuals, as well as the legendary ‘Ninth Street Show’ featuring not just the first comprehensive presentation of abstract expressionism, but also such rising stars as Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Rauschenberg. Perhaps most dramatically, it was Marca-Relli who was the first person to identify Pollock’s body at the scene of his car crash on 11 August 1956. But ultimately Marca-Relli bucked too many trends to fit the right niche in the historical record.

One reason why Marca-Relli has been written out of the picture is that, literally and imaginatively, he migrated between two continents. During the Cold War it helped the establishment if American artists were rubber-stamped with gung-ho nationalist credentials.