Fletcher Martin

Fletcher Martin was a painter, printmaker and muralist who explored life in the rural West through inventive compositions drawn from his own memories. He was known for his images of sports, soldiers, laborers and brawls.

Martin was born in the small town of Palisade, Colorado, in 1904. His father was a newspaperman who bought failing newspapers, then grew the business with the help of his wife and seven children. This experience shaped Martin's first encounters with art, giving him a way to tell stories and conjure dreams.

His experience also gave him in-depth printing skills, and at age twelve, he dropped out of high school to work in a print shop. At age eighteen, he joined the Navy and served for four years. Then, in 1926, he settled in Los Angeles, California, and began his career as a professional printer and artist.

Fletcher Martin first worked for a printer named Earl Hays, whose company created printed materials for Hollywood movies. He also assisted David Alfaro Siqueiros, a Mexican muralist, who led the young artist to explore his own memories working as a boxer, lumberjack and farmer. Martin would go on to paint murals for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1945 in California, Texas and Idaho, on the themes of labor and western life.

During the 1930s, Fletcher Martin began to paint seriously, studying Renaissance masters and attending night lectures at the Stickney Memorial Art School in Pasadena, California. In 1932, he mounted his first solo exhibition, and by 1938, Martin's painting Trouble In Frisco was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For the next three decades he continued to mount solo exhibitions and participate in juried group shows.

Fletcher Martin began his teaching career during the 1940s. As a self-taught artist, he believed his role as a professor was not to impart a systemic approach to painting, but to encourage each student's innate excitement and intuition about creating art. He taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, University of Iowa, Mills College in Oakland, California, and the Otis College of Art in Los Angeles, among others.

During World War II, Fletcher Martin was hired as a LIFE magazine artist-correspondent in North Africa, creating paintings of soldiers, battlefields and military life. After returning from the war, Martin settled in New York.

Over the following three decades, Martin explored color, pattern and line, moving away from the realistic representations of his early career. Martin died on May 30, 1979, leaving a prolific body of work that is preserved in prestigious collections nationwide.