The Brooklyn Rail

Art historian and critic Martica Sawin—who died in Portland, Maine, on June 8, 2024 at the age of 95—worked tirelessly for decades behind the scenes to promote the work of artists she felt were talented but overlooked. She was born Martica Ruhm in Manhattan and began her career in the art world while still a teenager; attending Chatham Hall boarding school in Virginia, she spotted a drawing by the noted African American artist John T. Biggers and bought it for $15. She went on to study art history at Stanford University for her freshman year and then transferred to Smith. During her senior year she studied in Paris, where she met David Sawin, who was studying painting in the studio of Fernand Léger. They married in 1949 and, upon returning to the United States, they both enrolled in art classes at the University of Iowa (where she earned a B.A. degree in 1950). When the couple returned to New York, Martica cold-called the Human Resources Department at the Museum of Modern Art seeking employment. Upon discovery of her forty-words-per-minute typing skills, she was quickly hired, and soon made Executive Secretary of the Junior Council. Among other responsibilities, she was entrusted to start MoMA’s Art Lending Service, where works of art consigned to the museum by various dealers in New York City could be lent and eventually bought by nascent collectors. She also oversaw public programs in the museum’s auditorium, such as the symposium called “What Abstract Art Means to Me” held at the museum on February 5, 1951, which included artists like Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and others. She later recalled a memorable meeting at the museum with Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she found very unpleasant, and another evening spent in the company of Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner, where Pollock sat broodingly in a corner of the room as his erudite well-informed wife did all the talking.

It was through her work at the Museum of Modern Art that Sawin befriended many dealers in New York City and, when family responsibilities prevented from working full-time, she began writing reviews of various art exhibitions in New York, articles that appear in countless journals in the 1950s and 1960s. Her contacts with dealers throughout the city proved an invaluable asset, as it was through them that she met many of the artists who showed in their galleries, which gave her the opportunity to visit their studios and discuss their work. She kept detailed notes from these studio visits which formed the basis of her reviews, valuable documents that she planned to organize for donation to the Archives of American Art. She never found the time to do that, but her heirs are determined to follow through with her wishes.

From 1971 through 1994, Sawin served as Chairman of the Art History Department at Parsons School of Design. There, in 1977, she founded the summer school program “Parsons in Paris,” which continues to this day. In this period, she continued to write exhibition reviews for various art magazines, but in the 1980s, the distinguished art historian Meyer Schapiro (with whom her husband studied at Columbia University) asked her to help Arlette Seligmann, widow of the Swiss Surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann. In the Seligmann barn in Sugar Loaf, New York, she discovered a trove of “mildewed and mouse-eaten papers,” as she herself described them, which formed the impetus for a book she would write called Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, published by MIT Press in 1997. To this day that book remains the definitive account of how the European Surrealists sought refuge in New York during the years of World War II and, through their sojourn, irrevocably changed the course of American Art, helping to establish it as the preeminent form of visual expression for several subsequent decades. Detailed accounts of interactions between artists like Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Max Ernst, André Masson, André Breton and Kurt Seligmann with Americans like Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock are ingeniously interwoven into a narrative that is so compelling and well written that readers have trouble putting it down. The book has influenced the writings of a whole new generation of art historians—both in the United States and Europe—who have delved into this same subject.

While still teaching at Parsons and long after her retirement, Sawin continued to write on the artists she felt were neglected, including catalogues and full-scale monographs on Wolf Kahn (1981), Thomas Cornell (1990), Anne Tabachnick (1996), Roberto Matta (1997), Nell Blaine (1998), Rosemarie Beck (2001), Stephen Pace (2004), Gerome Kamrowski (2005), Brian Rutenberg (2008), Alan Gussow (2009), Leon Kelly (2009), Gordon Onslow-Ford (2010), Richard Pousette-Dart (2016), Wolfgang Paalen (2013) and many others. Her marriage to David Sawin ended in divorce in 1968 and, in 1997, she married the architect and preservationist James Marston Fitch. After his death in 2001, she edited a book of his writings for publication (2007).

When asked a few years ago to reflect upon her many accomplishments within the world of art, she responded with characteristic modesty: “It’s been fun.”