Martha Nilsson Edelheit (born September 3, 1931, in New York City),[1] also known as Martha Ross Edelheit, is an American-born artist living in Sweden. She is known for her feminist art of the 1960s and 1970s, which focuses on erotic nudes.[2][3]
Edelheit was born September 3, 1931, in New York City.[1] She always painted, starting in early childhood, and was initially trained to play the piano. Her grandparents were immigrants from Romania. Her mother's parents kept a kosher home and spoke Yiddish. She first lived in Sunny Side, Queens, and at the age of 10, moved to The Amalgamated in the Bronx with her parents, who were secular. She attended the High School of Music and Art as a music student. Edelheit subsequently studied at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1951, at New York University in 1954, and at Columbia University in 1955 and 1956. She received a BS in Early Childhood Education from the later institution in 1956, and also audited classes with Meyer Schapiro.[4][5]She took a studio class with Michael Loew at his studio in NYC in 1957 and 1958. In 1951 she married Henry Edelheit, who was a medical student at the University of Chicago and subsequently became a psychoanalyst in New York.[5]
Career
Known for her early works of erotic art, Edelheit was an early pioneer in the feminist art movement.[6] She started painting nudes—male and female in the early 1960s, and was in the vanguard of figurative work that would gain attention in following decades.[7]
Edelheit's career and array of works are diverse and impressive. She works in series in which her styles would change. The earliest works are the Abstract and Extension Paintings from 1958–1961. This is followed by her Children's Game series from 1960–1962. Starting in 1961, she began working on her erotic watercolors. She later returned to this series 55 years later, in 2015. Her watercolor series overlapped with her Flesh Wall series between 1960 and 1966. She has an exhibition with a wide variety of themes, from human bodies to interiors, at the Byron Gallery in 1966. This art exhibition validated her success and impact, making even seasoned art viewers such as Leo Castelli blush. During 1962, she began to paint tattoos, dreams, and fantasies on her figures. She used the nudes in the canvas as a second canvas. During the 1960s as well, she began to work three-dimensionally, using mannequin body parts and found objects. Between 1972 and 1975 she produced her Back Painting series. In 1975, near the end of her Back Painting series, she began experimenting with self portraits. She remarked that the first nude she ever painted with the intent to show anyone else was one of herself. In 1978, she created a group of graphite drawings on rag paper titled Flesh and Stone. In 1981, her husband died—an event that, together with other major losses in her life, gave rise to many of her subsequent grief series. Between 1980 and 1985, she worked with wood cutouts painted on both sides. This period also saw the creation of her Paper Doll Book (1984), a free-standing 6 × 4 ft plywood book with movable cutout body parts. Throughout the 1980s, she explored monoprints, oil pastels, colored pencils, ink, and graphite. In 1988, she produced a small group of bronze sculptures and began a series of works on paper that used string as the drawing medium. In 1989 the Bateaux des Revés, a dance production by Suzanne Gregoire in Central Park, asked Edelheit to make the sets. In 1993 she moved to Sweden, 32 km outside of Stockholm. Living in the countryside, far from public transportation, made it difficult for her to have human models. She started working with her neighbors which were farm animals. In parallel, she worked with figure skating imagery from the Olympics, giving birth to the Ice Dancers series of 1998. In 2016, with the elections in the United States, she made USA November 8, a series of gutted, flayed, and slaughtered sheep.
Womanhero (1977), Edelheit's painting for The Sister Chapel, is a monumental female transmutation of Michelangelo'sDavid, tattooed with images of Nut, Kali, Athena, Diana, and Guanyin to symbolize women's shared power over the course of many centuries.[8][9]
Edelheit has also done production design for smaller theaters in New York from 1971 to 1974. She made four short experimental films in the 1970s, that were shown in film venues in the U.S. and Europe. Among them are: Hats, Bottles & Bones: A Portrait of Sari Dienes (1977)[10][11] an artist portrait on Sari Dienes, shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and part of her film collection at the Anthology Film Archives. Edelheit taught filmmaking between 1976 to 1980. She was a visiting artist at CalArts, Valencia, California in 1973; and an artist-in-residence at the Wilson College, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 1975; the University of Cincinnati in 1975; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois in 1976.[citation needed] She was a guest lecturer at Montclair State College, Montclair, New Jersey in 1980; and the New School, New York, New York in 1977.
Edelheit was a member of Fight Censorship (est. 1973), founded by Anita Steckel.[13] Fight Censorship was composed of several women artists whose work focused on eroticism, including Joan Semmel, Judith Bernstein, Hannah Wilke, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Eunice Golden, Carolee Schneemann, and Joan Glueckman.[13] They lectured and educated the public about erotic art and the negative effects of censorship.[13][14]
Edelheit was a member of Women in the Arts, Women/Artist/Filmmakers Inc, the Women's Caucus for Art (WCA) and an associate member of Soho20 Chelsea Gallery.[2]
Martha Edelheit lived on a ten and a half acres of land in Svartsjölandet in Sweden, with her partner Sam Nilsson, from 1993 to 2024.[17] Her partner died in 2020 and she moved back to NYC in 2024.
Theatre sets
The Wonderful Adventures of Tyl, Jonathan Levy] Triangle Theatre, 1971
Message from Garcia + Was I Good?, two-act play by Rosalyn Drexler, New Dramatists Workshop, 1971
The Whore and the Poet, by Sandra Hochman + Break A Leg, by Ira Levin, Urgent Theater, 1974
References
1 2 Burt, Eugene C. (2010). Dictionary of Erotic Art. London: McFarland and Company, Inc. p.97. ISBN978078644874-6.
↑ Middleman, Rachel (3 April 2014). "A Feminist Avant-Garde: Martha Edelheit's 'Erotic Art' in the 1960s". Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History. 83 (2): 129–147. doi:10.1080/00233609.2014.901413. S2CID191577484.
↑ Hottle, Andrew D. (2014). The Art of the Sister Chapel: Exemplary Women, Visionary Creators, and Feminist Collaboration. Farnham, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. pp.229–242.
↑ Hats, Bottles and Bones: A Portrait of Sari Dienes Movie Review, date: 1977, collection: Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) circulating film & video library
1 2 3 Richard Meyer, "Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art, and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s," in WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 362–383.
↑ Carol Jacobsen, "Redefining Censorship: A Feminist View," Art Journal 50, no.4 (Winter 1991): 42–55.
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