Marie Menken

Marie Menken (1909-1970) was born Marie Menkevicius, in New York City, on May 25, 1909, the daughter of Catholic Lithuanian immigrants. She the unsung heroine of the American avant-garde cinema. A mentor, muse and major influence for such key experimental filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas. Trained as a painter, she was associated with the second generation of abstract artists of the New York School alongside Alfred Leslie, Franz Kline and Helen Frankenthaler. She began to show her work from the late 1940s at the legendary Betty Parsons and Tibor de Nagy galleries. At the same time, she and her husband Willard Maas co-founded the Gryphon Group, the first experimental film-production company, which brought together artists, film-makers, and intellectuals. In retrospect, Menken’s films, which reflected modernist theory, the neo-Dada spirit of Fluxus, and the Pop art of Andy Warhol with whom she often worked, serve as an ideal vantage point for assessing the evolution of artistic practices in New York at the end of the Second World War.