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Martyl

Paintings
January 09 – January 31, 1944

 
The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago announces two exhibitions: Paintings by Martyl and Textiles by Marli Ehrman. Period of exhibition January 10 to 31, daily except Sunday from 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., Saturdays 9:00 A.M. to 12:00 M.

The coming exhibition in the galleries of the Renaissance Society will be the first Chicago showing of the work of Martyl, who, according to an article in News Week December 31, 1942, is "St. Louis' favorite artist." She comes by her talent naturally from her photographer father and artist mother, Aimee Schweig and although she is only twenty-five years old, has already fifteen years of lively painting experience to her credit. Her work first attracted attention when at the age of eleven, and still in grade school, she won a prize for drawing the City Art Museum, St, Louis. At thirteen she went with her mother to study color under Charles Hawthorne at Provincetown, Massachusetts. Later her mother with several other artists founded their own summer art colony in the picturesque village of St. Genevieve, sixty-eight miles south of St. Louis, where Martyl received encouragement from Joe Jones, Thomas Benton and other visiting artists.

Following this she majored History of Art at Washington University and spent four summers at Colorado Springs with Arnold Blanch, who taught her the mixed tempera technique. Meanwhile her work was receiving enthusiastic attention in St. Louis. In both the Missouri Annual and the Midwest Exhibit of the Kansas City Art Institute she won first prize of $200.00. She has had five one-man shows in St. Louis since 1936 and when she had her first New York exhibition, which was held at the American Contemporary Arts Gallery last year, she was subject of an editorial in the Post- Dispatch headed "Painter with Honor," which said in part: "she is an exception to the old saw that painters, like prophets, are without honor in their own country. She has now won the recognition of Fifty-seventh Street but she had the acclaim of St. Louis long ago." Martyl is the wife of Alexander Langsdorf, Jr., a physicist who helped build the atom-smashing cyclotron at Mallincrodt Institute of Radiology. He is now with the University of Chicago and the Langsdorfs are living on Kimbark Avenue. Martyl's new Chicago work will be included in the Renaissance Society Exhibition as well as Freight Yards, loaned by the City Art Museum, St. Louis, a detail of the mural she is completing for the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C., Comrades, First Snow, a qouache lent by her mother, Aimee Schweig.

Editorial St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 19, 1942
Art News, January 1-14, 1943
Art News, December 1-14, 1943
Art Digest, December 15, 1942

This text was taken from the exhibition release.

 

   
   
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