Martyl Schweig Langsdorf

Martyl Schweig Langsdorf was born on March 16, 1917, in St. Louis, Missouri. Martyl’s art education began at an early age: her father, Martin Schweig Sr., was a portrait photographer, and her mother, Aimee Schweig, was a successful painter and one of the founders of the influential Ste. Genevieve Art Colony, which featured artists like Fred Conway, E. Oscar Thalinger, Joseph Paul Vorst, and Thomas Hart Benton.

As a child, Martyl attended classes with Mary Powell at the City Art Museum. With her mother, she studied under Charles Hawthorne at the prestigious Provincetown Art Association on Cape Cod. Starting at the age of 17, Martyl participated in the summer art school at Ste. Genevieve from 1934 until the colony disbanded in 1940.

Martyl graduated from the Mary Institute in St. Louis, before attending Washington University, where she graduated in 1938. In the summers of 1940 and 1941, she studied with Arnold Blanch at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. She was also taught by Boardman Robinson.

In 1942, she married Dr. Alexander Langsdorf, Jr., a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. Martyl served as the art editor for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists from 1945 to 1972. In June, 1972, she designed the iconic cover of the journal’s first issue. Langsdorf’s “doomsday clock,” in vibrant orange, black, and white, was set to seven minutes before midnight. Like the Bulletin, the clock conveyed the dangerous urgency of nuclear weapons. 

Martyl Langsdorf was a prolific and award-winning painter and lithographer who was exhibited over thirty times in her life, including the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1944), the Art Institute of Chicago, the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, the St. Louis Society of Independent Artists, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among many other places.

She worked in oils as well as large-scale murals. In 1940, she painted the mural Wheat Workers for the U.S. Post Office in Russell, Kansas. Two years later, she painted La Guignolee for the post office in Ste. Genevieve, followed by The Courageous Act of Cyrus Tiffany at the U.S. Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C. in 1943. From 1965 to 1970, she was an art instructor at the University of Chicago, and from 1970 to 1972, she served as president of the Renaissance Society.  

Langsdorf painted well into her nineties. When friends and acquaintances asked her if she was still painting, her response was, “Are you still breathing?” (_New York Times, _April 18, 2013) She died in 2013 in Schaumburg, Illinois, survived by a brother, two daughters, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.