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Martha Diamond, “John Street,” 1989. Oil on linen, 90 x 71 7/8 inches. Courtesy of the Martha Diamond Trust and David Kordansky Gallery Martha Diamond is hardly a household name, and “Martha Diamond: Deep Time” at Colby College (through Oct.
13) more than redresses this enormous oversight. How did this powerful, genre-defying painter escape our notice until now? WHAT: “Martha Diamond: Deep Time” WHERE: Colby College Museum of Art, 5600 Mayflower Hill, Waterville WHEN: Through Oct. 13 HOURS: 10 a.
m. to 5 p.m.
Tuesday through Saturday (Thursdays until 9 p.m.), noon to 5 p.
m. Sunday ADMISSION: Free INFO: 207-859-5600, colby.edu/museum Certainly, it was not for lack of eloquence about her work.
In a glass case near the end of the exhibition are her typed responses to questions posed by poet Bill Berkson, who was writing an article for Artforum magazine. “Do you consider your art expressionism?” he queried. Her answer: “On the surface, literally, my work resembles expressionist paintings: the emphasis on looking at the paint itself, the undisguised brushwork, to obviousness of apparent distortion, little regard for actual local color except as a moot point (and re abstract expressionism) suggestion of grandness and monumental scale or conspicuousness.
I’m more concerned with a vision than expressionism and try to paint that vision realistically. I try to paint my perceptions rather than through emotion.” More on that last statement in a moment.
Diamond, who died Dec. 30, was smart, articulate and even funny (“on the surface, literally”). Frank Rose, in his very personal essay in the exhibition catalog, lists the obvious chauvinism of the art world in the 1970s (and through the remainder of the millennia, really).
But he also cites a sense of wonder “that led other people to think of her as naïve.” He points out others: “Grit and determination. (She liked men, but she was very clear that as an artist, she could never be anyone’s wife.
) And unlike so many of her peers, a clear indifference to the market ...
She was an artist, not a careerist.” The felicitous occasion of this exhibit has largely to do with Alex Katz, a longtime friend and advocate of Diamond’s work, as well as Larry Aldrich, the founder of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where the show will travel from Nov. 17 through May 18.
Katz’s foundation has gifted Diamond paintings to many museums (including Colby), and Aldrich purchased Diamond’s first museum acquisition back in 1972. Diamond’s statement that “I try to paint my perceptions rather than through emotion,” to my mind, summarizes the pivotal success of her work. Emotion is something that is focused and intense to the exclusion of all else.
Perception is global. It includes emotion, but as part of the larger awareness of observation: of light, gravity, disorientation, magnitude, volume, dizziness, solidity and any number of other phenomena that impact us when we look at something. Many artists have painted New York City’s skyscrapers and, more generally, the built environment.
But few have actually used the process to reveal how they themselves were affected by it. Martha Diamond, “Center City,” 1982. Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 inches.
Martha Diamond Studio “Deep Time” shows us a painter fully engaged in how the built environment impacts us and alters nature, and the way we end up seeing both. Diamond was not a plein air painter of the landscape. Buildings would catch her eye and she would fully breathe them in, committing to memory the sensations she felt – how they disoriented her or the way they verticality obscured certain angles of a building or totally blocked views of their upper extremities, how the light bounced off the glass to create glare, or the way glass mirrored the sky.
The first impression I had as I descended the stairs into the Lower Jetté Gallery was of Monet’s serial paintings of haystacks or the Rouen Cathedral. That might seem odd, especially because no painting here repeats its subject. But in a way, we can see her like Monet, perceiving the myriad ways a building or object (it so happens that in her early days, she did, in fact, paint haystacks) affects what is around it – casting shadow, for instance – and the way the environment changes the countenance of that object or building.
I don’t expect Monet did this in any sort of cold scientific way. Nor was he merely a dispassionate observer. We can feel in his series the warmth of appreciation for and, yes, wonderment about what he is seeing.
In these regards, Diamond was a kindred spirit. A painting like “High-C,” demonstrates how Diamond actually felt the building she was painting from memory: its particular quality of blazing light on the side facing the sun, the cool darkness of the perpendicular façade that turns away from it, the building next door insisting on recognition with the silhouette it impresses upon the sun’s illumination. Most interestingly, we sense Diamond’s own experience of disorientation and dizziness in the way she tilts the building to one side.
Obviously, the structure itself is not tilting; it’s the painter who is reeling backward as she tries to absorb the enormity of it into her being. Further, the expressionistic affinities that, in her answer to Berkson, she characterized as superficial – materiality of paint, obvious brushstroke, monumental scale – help us perceive what she perceived and feel what she felt. Its tactility and size are like a vortex that pulls us helplessly into the scene.
(It’s not for nothing that Rose’s essay is titled “Ecstasy in Paint.”) As Levi Prombaum and Amy Smith-Stewart write in another of the essays, “Diamond’s painting not only records but also enacts sensory exploration.” The title of the show stems from the Enlightenment, during which, Prombaum and Smith-Stewart write, “scientists, poets, and theologians .
..traced symmetries and parallels across civilizations, seeking to understand the links between humanity and the Earth itself.
” Patterns that repeat themselves throughout the human endeavor, particularly geometries of architecture, take center stage, the universality of the square, the triangle, the rectangle, etc., replicating themselves throughout time and thus unifying ancestral and contemporary impulses. Martha Diamond, “Pylons,” c.
1978. Oil on aluminum, 24 x 24 inches. Collection of the Martha Diamond Trust Diamond also unified many genres of painting by hovering at the thresholds of multiple styles.
Her brushstrokes are unquestionably expressionistic, at times approaching pure gestural abstraction. Were it not for its title, a painting like “Pylons” would appear resolutely abstract and devoid of subject matter. And “Untitled” of 1973 is so wildly chaotic with brushstroke that we barely discern a built structure at all.
At other times, her gestures can be so minimal that they speak an expressionistic language that feels almost antithetical to the bombast of the Ab Ex genre. In “Center City (Detail),” Diamond records the moonlight on the ledges of a building’s windows with single daubs of light blue paint. The effect is so spot on, yet as dreamy and subtle as the moon’s glow itself.
Martha Diamond, “Cityscape No. 2,” 2000. Oil on linen 96 x 48 inches.
Courtesy of the Martha Diamond Trust and David Kordansky Gallery Like Franz Kline, whom she admitted to Berkson admiring, Diamond comes so close to her urban facades that they become almost completely abstracted (think of Kline’s description of one of his works as a “four by five black drawing of a rocking chair”). The proximity to the surface of her subject matter also aligns her in some ways with geometric abstraction. If you were to encounter “Cityscape No.
2” in isolation, with no knowledge of Diamond to inform you, you could easily mistake it for a completely abstract grid. And, of course, much of Diamond’s work resides squarely in the tradition of landscape painting, which she re-invents by intermingling it with all these other modern expressions. “Deep Time” is an opportunity to see a true revolutionary and idiosyncratic voice that was not sufficiently heard in its time.
These paintings speak now in booming tones that refuse to be ignored. We invite you to add your comments. We encourage a thoughtful exchange of ideas and information on this website.
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