Martha Diamond, painter who captured the vistas of New York, dies at the age of 79

Martha Diamond, a painter who captured the endlessly changing face of New York’s buildings, streets and light-filled vistas with deceptively simple planes of color, died Saturday after a long illness. She was 79.

Her death was confirmed by the Martha Diamond Trust.

Ms. Diamond’s work was at a unique point at the intersection of different approaches. She treated paint with the gestural verve of a material-oriented abstract expressionist. Her stark yet vivid depictions of her hometown, in which an eight or ten-story building on a busy street can be reduced to a liquid gray rectangle against an undifferentiated orange skyMondriaan recalled halfway through the period, before that Dutch pioneer completely abandoned representational painting.

To never do anything by heart, she painted with her non-dominant left hand. And in her deep engagement with the particulars of her own environment—she often painted the view from her light-filled Bowery attic—she resembled Jane Freilicher and other mentors and friends of the New York School.

Personally, she was also a crossroads and maintained long-lasting friendships with poets, gallerists and painters; teaching generations of students; and maintain with unwavering dedication its small but crucial place in the development of American painting.

But while her artistic life was marked by the proliferation of influences and interests, her art itself was largely defined by what she excluded.

In her 1988 painting “World Trade,” one of three works included in the 1989 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, two thick, sooty rods hang in the center of a seven-foot canvas. Their color, which hovers somewhere between brown and pink, is denser at the top and bottom. The striking, woodgrain-like texture of long, visible brushstrokes immediately captures the buildings’ famous vertical lines and, by exposing bits of undyed white linen, suggests a dazzling brilliance. And apart from a few smudged red and blue lines behind the buildings, and some diagonal lines in the front that can look like clouds, that’s it.

“People who look at the painting have an idea of ​​what the World Trade Center is, and here is a painting called ‘World Trade Center,’” Ms. Diamond explained in a video interview posted by Magenta Plains Gallery, who briefly represented her. “The interesting thing is how much is left out even though you know exactly what it is.”

What she left out, paradoxically, made what remained unspeakably richer. Viewers could immediately understand the essence of the subject without getting lost in extraneous details.

“Recognizability or familiarity makes the viewer look for expected details,” she told poet Bill Berkson in 1990. Artforum article. “For the most part, the details are not there, so you look more closely at the paint and the painting. You begin to distinguish between paint, performance, image, idea, expectation and you.”

Martha Bonnie Diamond was born in Manhattan on May 1, 1944, the son of Norman Diamond, an internist, and Lillian (Levine) Diamond, a homemaker. She grew up in Hollis Hills, Queens, and in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. She is survived by her sisters Miriam Diamond-Barber and Elaine Diamond Ford, and a brother, Michael Diamond.

Ms. Diamond began drawing as a child and often accompanied her father to hospital rounds near the Central Park Conservatory Garden, where many decades later she remained awed by the looming Manhattan skyline that appeared as they drove over the Queensboro Bridge.

She received a BA in art and art history from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in 1964. There she became friends with the artist Donna Dennis and the poet and art critic Peter Schjeldahl.

After a post-graduation trip to Paris with Ms. Dennis, Ms. Diamond returned to New York, where she went to the movies with the poet Ted Berrigan, spent time with the poet Ron Padgett and explored the city’s neighborhoods with Mr. Schjeldahl.

The poet Anne Waldman, another friend, recalled the “passion to become artists together.”

“If you feel it in people who already have this belief,” she said in an interview, “it is very much in them, and I felt that at a young age with Peter, and with Donna and with Martha.”

In 1966, Ms. Diamond got a job in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art. “I learned a lot there by helping with various vacancies,” she told Artforum in 2021. “I ate in the gardens and a poet brought drugs, and that was great.”

Mrs. Diamond found her loft in the Bowery, below Houston Street, in 1969 and remained there for the rest of her life. In 1970, the painter Joan Mitchell visited her there and encouraged her to move her paintings, which she had done flat on the floor, to a wall.

In the years that followed, Ms. Diamond led printmaking workshops in New York City public schools as part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Learning Through Art program and taught at Harvard, Yale, the Goddard Riverside Community Center in New York and the Skowhegan School. of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, Maine, on whose board of directors she also served for 36 years.

Her first solo exhibition was at Brooke Alexander Gallery in 1976, and there, in 1982, she debuted her cityscapes. She later joined the Robert Miller Gallery.

Ms. Diamond had her successes, appearing in Whitney’s influential 1984 “MetaManhattan” show and at the 1989 Biennial, winning a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1980 and an Academy Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1980. 2001. Her work has been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and others.

But her recognition was never entirely proportionate to the significance of her work.

“There was such an early experience that we didn’t feel the same interest in our work as we did in the male artists in the circle,” Ms. Dennis said in an interview. “In her last years she received deserved attention, but her work could have received it earlier. It was just as strong thirty years ago as it was forty years ago.”

The David Kordansky Gallery, who recently began representing Ms. Diamond, will present her work in a solo exhibition in Los Angeles next year. A traveling retrospective exhibition, to be published in the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Aldrich in Connecticut, is also scheduled to open in 2024. And she’s been championed by leading painters like Alex Katz, who said her work “represents the spirit of optimism of the 1960s,” and David Salle, who curated her work in group exhibitions in Skarstedt Gallery and the Hill Foundationboth in New York.

“Martha Diamond was a great painter who did not fit the fashion of the time,” Mr. Salle said in a statement. ‘She didn’t seem to have a big ego, so people felt justified in thinking she was underage. The neglect didn’t make her happy, but it didn’t hold her back either. Posthumous fame will now be hers. I hope she enjoys it.”