Joseph De Martini

Joseph De Martini was born in Mobile, Alabama, but spent most of his childhood in Hoboken, New Jersey. The son of a fisherman, De Martini was educated only as far as grammar school, but he showed an interest in art at an early age. He moved to New York City, where he took classes at the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design with Leon Kroll and Ivan Olinsky. Giving equal attention to interiors (like darkened theaters) and coastal scenes of New England (including shipwrecks), De Martini created romantic interpretations of everyday life. He was in his prime as an artist when Abstraction became a popular style. A writer for Art Digest wrote of De Martini in 1942, “With painting-shadows and strong dark lines, he can create a pattern of great strength without declaring for abstraction and without losing the romance of place which gives his paintings their greatest appeal.” Self-reflection occupied his visual interest over the entirety of his life ranging from a youthful 1930 image to that of his later years in his striped bathrobe, standing stalwartly like a classical column. The three themes in De Martini’s art were the sea, the studio, the man. De Martini was an associate member of the National Academy of Design and a member of the Audubon Artists and American Artists’ Congress. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951 and taught at the University of Georgia from 1952–53. Towards the end of his career, he stopped showing his work to devote his time completely to painting. His works are in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Butler Institute of American Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, IBM Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, Phillips Memorial Gallery, San Diego Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the State Department, Washington D.C., Tucson Museum of Art and Walker Art Center.