Martha Alf

Martha Joanne Alf (August 13, 1930 - September 13, 2019[1]) was an American artist. Her work consists of paintings, drawings and photographs of everyday objects, including pears[2][3] and rolls of toilet paper.[4]

Martha Joanne Alf
Born(1930-08-13)August 13, 1930
Berkeley, California, United States
DiedSeptember 13, 2019(2019-09-13) (aged 89)
Santa Monica, California, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
EducationBachelor of Arts in psychology from San Diego State University 1952. Master of Arts in art from San Diego State University in 1963. Master of Fine Arts in painting from University of California at Los Angeles 1970
Known forpainting, drawing, photography, writing

Personal life

Alf was born August 13, 1930 in Berkeley California.[5] She is the only child of Foster Wise Powell and Julia Vivian Kane. Her father was an attorney and her mother worked as a legal secretary often for her husband. When Martha was 2 years old her family moved to Winterset, Iowa to live with her grandparents. In 1938 the family moved to San Diego, California, where her father started work at a law firm. Martha grew up in La Mesa, California, where she attended Grossmont High School, where she studied art. At San Diego State University she met her future husband, Edward Franklin Alf Jr. In 1951, they wed, before Edward was drafted for service in Korea. The couple had one child.[6]

Education

At San Diego State University Alf studied painting with Everett Gee Jackson. She then studied painting at the University of California at Los Angeles under Richard Diebenkorn.[5][7]

Paintings and drawings

Alf first became recognized as a nationally significant artist for her 1970s "cylinder paintings," each of which depicts a toilet paper roll positioned like a monument on an empty stage. Three of these paintings were selected by curator Marcia Tucker for the "1975 Biennial of Contemporary Art" at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Alf painted many of the cylinder paintings in unorthodox colors that express a range of emotions. She approached the series as Josef Albers had in his "Homage to the Square" series, by repeating a constant image from painting to painting, but varying the colors. [8]

In the late 1970s Alf turned to making graphite drawings of fruits and vegetables which she arranged like actors on a stage, acting out psychodramas. The most frequent subject of choice was the pear which, when shown alone, was at times considered by the artist to be a self-portrait. In 1978, Alf earned national recognition for her unique drawing technique. In a review for Arts Magazine, art critic David S. Rubin wrote that Alf's "still life arrangements rendered mostly by soft, delicate, diagonally hatched pencil strokes, sparkled with radiant light while also saturating us with a gripping textural sensuality. Alf draws with a controlled and steady hand. She has been keenly attentive to every nuance of surface and value and shows enormous reverence for the integrity and expressive potential of the drawing medium".[9]

Alf shifted from black and white to color in her pastel drawings of the early 1980s. Continuing to draw staged fruits, with the pear being the dominant subject, Alf exaggerated color and light to the point that the drawings assumed a spiritual dimension. In "Pear #1 (For Andy Wilf)," 1982, a solitary pear serves as a surrogate for a young artist friend who had recently died an untimely drug-related death. The stem of the pear in the drawing is shown as if reaching towards golden light, suggesting that Alf's tormented friend had at last found peace with the universe at large.[10]

Alf returned to painting in the late 1980s, producing a series of painted depictions of pears rendered in colors so bright and intense that an art critic referred to them as "psychedelic pears" Three of them are included in the book Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art since the 1960s by David S. Rubin. As in her earlier cylinder paintings, the imagery remains constant from painting to painting, while colors vary.[11] In the 1990s, Alf focused on a single color in a series of monochromatic red paintings with subtle patterning and variations in texture.[12]

Photography

In the 21st century, Alf has concentrated almost exclusively on photography, which she practiced for many years alongside painting and drawing. Concurrent with the 1970s cylinder paintings, Alf made photographs of toilet paper rolls as a means of studying color. Before photographing an unused roll, the artist dyed it using colored markers. She subsequently made photos of other subjects, including her familiar fruits and vegetables. In 1998, Alf began making photographs of pigeons roosting on a window sill opposite her home. She fed them to keep them coming, named each pigeon, created narratives for them, and produced a video featuring the pigeons, entitled "Birdland".[13]

Around the same time, Alf began photographing still life arrangements of unusual objects that she had collected over the years. In "New Glass City." 2002, Alf responded to the events of September 11, 2001 by creating a visual metaphor for a new metropolis, which she did by photographing an arrangement of several glass objects that glisten as they reflect sunlight.[14]

Awards
  • 1979 Kay Nielsen Memorial Purchase Award, Graphic Arts Council, County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.
  • 1979 National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant.
  • 1989 National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant.
  • 1996 Richard Florsheim Art Fund Award

Selected solo exhibitions
  • 2012 – Martha Alf Retrospective Exhibit – Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center – October 30 – December 1, 2012[15]

Notable collections

References
  1. "Alf, Martha, 1930-". Library of Congress. Library of Congress. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
  2. Kapitanoff, Nancy (April 11, 1993). "Alf's Work Bears Fruit, and It's Not Just Pears". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
  3. Pagel, David (March 14, 1996). "Pears Are Centerpiece of Martha Alf's Show". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
  4. "Martha Joanne Alf obituary". LATimes. Retrieved February 29, 2020.
  5. "Alf, Martha Joanne". Union List of Artist Names Online. Getty. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
  6. Muchnik, Suzanne (1984). Martha Alf -- Retrospective. Los Angeles: Felicie Inc. ISBN 978-0911291094.
  7. "Artist Biography for Martha Alf". Ask Art. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
  8. Suzanne Muchnic, Martha Alf Retrospective, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1984.
  9. David S. Rubin, "Martha Alf," Arts Magazine, LVIII/1, September 1978, p. 12.
  10. "Visual Art Source". www.visualartsource.com.
  11. David S. Rubin, Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960s, San Antonio Museum of Art and the MIT Press, 2010, p. 24.
  12. "Alf's Work Bears Fruit, and It's Not Just Pears". Los Angeles Times. April 11, 1993.
  13. David S. Rubin, Birdspace: A Post-Audubon Artists Aviary, Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, 2004, p. 14.
  14. "Margo Leavin Gallery Archive (Getty Research Institute)". www.getty.edu.
  15. "Martha Alf Retrospective Exhibit at SMC Oct. 27-Dec. 1". www.smc.edu. Retrieved 2018-03-16.
  16. Landauer, Susan (10 November 2003). The Not-so-still Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture. ISBN 9780520239388. Retrieved March 18, 2018.
  17. "Martha Alf - Two Bosque Pears". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, i.e. The Met Museum. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
  18. "Martha Alf". Online Collections. Portland Art Museum. Retrieved December 2, 2017.
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