Fletcher Martin’s evocative and powerful painting of contemporary life during the 1930s and 1940s later gave way to more abstract and decorative works. He was the son of a newspaper editor. In 1910 he moved with his family to Idaho and during World War I spent time in Washington State. He worked at a range of jobs before a tour of duty in the navy from 1922 to 1926. Beginning in 1927 he worked for a printer in Los Angeles, also teaching himself what he could about art through associations with artists, including David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). In 1931 he began painting in oil, and the following year he assisted Siqueiros with a mural for the estate of movie director Dudley Murphy. Martin was active in the Los Angeles chapter of the socially concerned American Artists Congress, serving as president in 1939. In 1932 Martin had his first solo exhibition of prints at the Dalzell Hatfield Galleries in Los Angeles; he spent that summer in Woodstock, New York, and New York City, meeting many artists. He attracted attention in solo and group painting exhibitions in Southern California, having his first museum exhibition at the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery in 1934 and one the following year at the Los Angeles Museum. From 1936 to 1945 he executed mural commissions for the Works Progress Administration and the Treasury Section. In 1938 he began his teaching career.
That year Trouble in Frisco became the first of Martin’s paintings to be purchased by a museum (Museum of Modern Art, New York), and in 1940 he had his first exhibition in New York, at the Midtown Gallery. The same year he succeeded Grant Wood (1892-1942) as artist-in-residence at the State University of Iowa, Iowa City, and in 1941 succeeded THOMAS HART BENTON as head of the Department of Painting at Kansas City Art Institute, where he remained until 1943. In 1942 he was one of eighteen artists represented in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition Americans 1942: Eighteen Artists from Nine States. After wide-ranging service as a war correspondent, he settled in New York City in 1945 and then in Woodstock, although he traveled widely as a teacher and illustrator.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Peyton Boswell, Jr., "Fletcher Martin: Painter of Memories," Parnassus 12 (October 1940): 6-13 § New York, Museum of Modern Art, Americans 1942: Eighteen Artists from Nine States, exh. cat., 1942, ed. Dorothy Miller, pp. 97-98, statement by the artist, biographical note § Barbara Ebersole, Fletcher Martin, with foreword by William Saroyan (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1954) § Binghamton, N.Y., Roberson Center for the Arts and Sciences, Fletcher Martin: A Thirty-Year Retrospective, exh. cat., 1968, with essays by Keith Martin, Peter Pollack, and the artist, chronology § H. Lester Cooke, Jr., Fletcher Martin (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), with chronology, bibliography.
