“Diamond romances the town in darting and slashing strokes. Her buildings, seen as if from the street, are as zestfully urbane as the perambulatory poems of Frank O’Hara. . . . Their dynamic is like a cross between John Marin’s watercolors of the city and Monet’s Rouen Cathedrals: giddily celebratory and drunk on daylight.”
—Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 2018
“Outer directed artists include Jeff Koons, Bacon and Warhol. She’s inner directed. The work relates to Forrest Bess, Charles Burchfield and Arthur Dove. The paintings are blunt. They will eat up almost anything you put near them. It’s painting that makes sense now.”
—Alex Katz, Martha Diamond: Recent Paintings, 2016
Alex Katz, Martha, 1981. Oil on linen. 60 x 48 in.
MARTHA DIAMOND (1944-2023) conveyed the romanticism and the spirituality of the New York cityscape in paintings that are at once hallucinatory and solidly, vibrantly tactile. Born in Manhattan, raised in Queens and educated at Carleton College (B.A., 1964), the Alliance Française de Paris (diploma with honors, 1965) and New York University (M.A., 1969), she moved into a Bowery loft in 1969 and became an active participant in the downtown scene. There she fell in with New York School poets like Bill Berkson, John Giorno and Peter Schjeldahl (with whom she had studied at Carleton) and took inspiration from such New York School artists as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, as well as Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz from its figurative wing.
Diamond exhibited with Brooke Alexander from 1976 until 1985 and at the legendary Robert Miller Gallery, home to Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Robert Mapplethorpe and Joan Mitchell, from 1985 until 1994. She is currently represented by the David Kordansky Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, which in March-April 2024 gave her her first West Coast solo show, Skin of the City. Later in 2024 she will be the subject of Martha Diamond: Deep Time, a survey organized by the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, where it will debut in July, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where it travels in November. A monograph will be published in connection with these shows by DelMonico Books.
Like many New York painters, Diamond developed a long association with Maine, summering on Deer Isle, teaching at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and serving for 36 years on its Board of Governors. In 1988 she had a mid-career survey at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, concurrent with a show of her prints at the nearby Portland Museum of Art. Her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1989 Biennial alongside that of Ross Bleckner, April Gornik, Brice Marden and Joel Shapiro; the exhibition catalogue noted that her “spectral abstractions of the city, looming in a charged atmosphere enlivened by her free color sense,” were now accompanied by “true abstractions [such as] the terse vector of color that comprises Red Light.” She received an Academy Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001, and in 2004 she was the subject of a three-decade survey at the New York Studio School.
Recent solo exhibitions in New York include Martha Diamond: 1980-1989 at Magenta Plains (2021) and Martha Diamond: Cityscapes at Galerie Eva Presenhuber (2018). She has also been featured in several recent group exhibitions in New York, among them Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained, curated by David Salle at the Hill Art Foundation (2023); Painting in New York: 1971–83, curated by Ivy Shapiro at Karma (2022); In Her Hands, curated by David Salle at Skarstedt (2020); and Downtown Painting, curated by Alex Katz at Peter Freeman (2019).
Her work is in the permanent collection of numerous institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas; and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
Work in Progress: The Catalogue Raisonné
The Martha Diamond Trust, established by the artist in 2020, maintains an archive of material related to the artist and her work and is planning a catalogue raisonné of all known paintings, prints and drawings. The Trust is gathering images and data on artworks by Martha Diamond in private and public collections. We invite owners of works by Martha Diamond, as well as anyone else who may have relevant information, to fill out this form. All information about ownership of artworks will be kept confidential unless you grant us permission to publish it. Requests for anonymity will be respected. For inquiries on this or other subjects, please visit our contact page.
This website is maintained by the Martha Diamond Trust, a private trust created by the artist and based in New York. We manage Martha Diamond’s archive and are dedicated to preserving her legacy and expanding knowledge of her work. Olivia Funk, director; Lesley Raeside and Frank Rose, trustees. All images copyright © the Martha Diamond Trust unless otherwise noted.