Eugene James Martin at beta pictoris/Maus Contemporary

eugene-james-martin-early-bird-catches-the-worm

5 September-31 October 2014

“Favorite Blues”: Eugene James Martin

Eugene James Martin (Washington, DC, 1938 – Lafayette, Louisiana, 2005) is known for his often gently humorous works that may incorporate whimsical allusions to animal, machine and structural imagery among areas of “pure”, constructed, biomorphic, or disciplined lyrical abstraction. Martin was influenced by Cubism, including its spatial density and collage technique.

African-American artists have been as central to the space between abstraction and representation as Hale Woodruff or Beauford Delaney. They have been as central to the full recognition of women artists as Howardena Pindell or Alma Thomas, and they are central to art today.

The distinction takes on special urgency for a black Southern artist only now gaining his due, Eugene James Martin. Martin almost fits the fashion for outsider art, and if that will help others discover him, terrific. Yet nothing is half as naïve as it may seem. Born in 1938, Martin studied at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C. While his knowledge of Cubism is plain to see, he also knew the bolder colours and outlines of postwar American art. His drawings, in overlapping curves of graphite or pen and ink, treat black and sepia as the rich colours they are for him as well. He started out playing jazz, and one could call that a key influence, too. He worked quickly in both acrylic and collage, like a born improviser bouncing off others in a band. Martin sometimes described his art as “satirical abstracts”, knowing full well that it is not at anyone’s expense. Yet the label does get at the seriousness, the comedy, and the eclecticism. For him, art cannot leave personal experience behind. That may be why a figure keeps making an appearance in Martin’s work, even at its most abstract, and to judge by early titles like Detective Jones or Food and Drugs, he could be on either side of the law. He could be wielding what looks like a hammer, in another work from 2000, before deciding whether abstraction can survive the blows.

Martin’s work is included in numerous museum collections, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisana; the Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, Louisiana; the Stowitts Museum and Library, Pacific Grove, California; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New Yor; the Paul R. Jones Collection of African American Art, University of Delaware, Newark; the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, Biloxi, Mississippi; the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, Louisiana; the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge; the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, Savannah, Georgia; and the Munich Museum of Modern Art in Germany.

(text adapted from materials provided by the gallery)


INFORMATION

beta pictoris gallery/Maus Contemporary Art
2411 Second Avenue North
Birmingham, Alabama 35203 USA
(205) 413-2999

Hours:
Wednesday-Friday, 1-4PM
Saturday, 11AM-3PM
or by appointment

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Image:
Early Bird Gets the Worm
by Eugene James Martin
ca. 13.25″x10.25″
pastel, graphite, coloured pencil, pen, and ink on paper
1988
Courtesy of beta pictoris gallery/Maus Contemporary Art, Birmingham, Alabama