Artist Birthday: Martha Edelheit

Martha Edelheit was active in the Women’s Art Movement of the late 1960s into the 1970s. She is known for her provocative, allegorical paintings of male and female figures, as well as for her incisive portraiture style.

Artist Birthday for 3 September: Martha Edelheit (born 1931, United States)

Martha Edelheit, Portrait of Mel Bochner, 1966–1967. Acrylic and motorcycle paint on canvas, 214 x 173 cm. Image courtesy of the Artist. © 2025 Martha Edelheit / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (8S-17284edars)

Edelheit once stated that she was not a realist, but rather that she used real people as models. This statement probably related to her many paintings of male and female figures during the 1970s which were identified by metaphorical or allegorical titles. Her numerous realistic portraits of fellow-artists certainly contain passages of photo realism, but the strictly descriptive titles are combined with Edelheit's signature mystical spaces as backgrounds. In the 1970s, Edelheit began to work both from memory, and photographs (especially in her portraits), combining figures and elements that she did not necessarily paint at the same time. She also explored contrasts in featureless surface with impasto. In Portrait of Mel Bochner, she used shiny motorcycle paint to build up the forms of the chair to three-dimensional illusion. Featuring a chair may relate to her early works of the 1960s called extension paintings where she broke the frames of her paintings with utilitarian objects. Mel Bochner (1940–2025) was an American Conceptual artist.

The 1970s marked the beginning of the Women's Art Movement. The questioning of the status quo in American society led women in increasing numbers to express opposition to gender inequality. Several books, including The Feminine Mystique (1963) helped raise women’s awareness. Women artists, art historians and critics began to organize and protest the bias against women artists in the official art and museum world. Women artists formed cooperative galleries, university women's art programs and coalitions that published art journals and reviews of women’s art. These efforts were complimented by a widespread public desire to see more open, pluralistic and humanistic art. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art landmark exhibition "Women Artists 1550-1950" was a major steppingstone towards equality of representation of women artists, although it would take into the 1980s for that to become fact.

One result of the Women's Art Movement of the 1970s was the movement by some women artists to try to identify the formal qualities found universally in women’s art, that have been suppressed in the male dominated art schools and by male art critics. Some of these qualities, set forth by a woman art critic, were obsessive detail and sensuous surfaces and forms. Such tendencies may have been integral in the fact that many women artists turned to realism starting in the early 1970s in order to get their message across. Realism was one of the many styles used by Pop artists to parody American society. In the hands of woman artist it could make powerful social inferences.

Martha Edelheit was born in New York, where she lived until she moved to Sweden in 1993. She studied at the University of Chicago, New York University and Columbia University in the 1950s. She became part of the avant-garde art scene in Soho, New York, a member of the Reuben Gallery, an artist-run space. The artists of Reuben, like Edelheit, were pushing the boundaries and definition of painting and sculpture. In the 1960s, Edelheit explored subjects that addressed women's issues which continued into the 1970s with her frank images of men and women in quasi-poetic settings. Edeleheit became heavily involved in the Women's Art Movement. Her work became an essential voice of work that explicitly challenged social expectations of women, as well as the traditional notions of painting of unclothed male figures.