Biography

Born in Mobile, Alabama on July 20, 1894, Joseph De Martini grew up in New York City and vicinity. He studied at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League from 1912 to 1917, and was a guest at the Yaddo artists’ colony in 1933 and 1934. In 1933, De Martini began spending his summers on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and worked on the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in New York City’s easel division from 1935 to 1941. In 1940, he joined the Macbeth Gallery where he exhibited with Marsden Hartley and Andrew Wyeth until it closed in 1953. During the 1940s, De Martini was recognized as one of America’s foremost seascape painters, exhibiting in over a hundred one-man and museum shows across the country and abroad. In 1945, he spent his first summer on Monhegan, Maine, where he returned every year for the rest of his life, becoming one of the island’s most important modernists. De Martini was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951, traveling to Europe for the first time. Simultaneously, a seismic shift was taking place within the art world with the rise of non-objective art. As Abstract Expressionism flourished, De Martini’s work steadily lost critical favor. Thirty years after being a student, he returned to the National Academy of Design as a member; he was elected an Academician in 1953 and occasionally participated in their Annual Exhibition throughout the rest of his career. De Martini’s last one-man show was in 1964, by which time his subject matter had changed to figures and interiors. In his final decades, De Martini painted actively but exhibited sparingly. Obscurity afforded him total freedom to evolve his work, which he did into his late eighties. Joseph De Martini died on July 5, 1984.

Today, Joseph De Martini’s work can be found in nearly fifty public collections in North America.