1950s FRANK MARTIN ORIGINAL DRAWING, RARE NUDE

“Naked girls were undoubtedly his favorite subjects, and he drew, painted, etched and engraved them repeatedly. He was a confident draughtsman, using strong shapes and swaggering lines full of movement. His images are straightforward, clear and affectionate?”

Frank Martin, English, (1921-2005)

This is a rare and beautiful find for collectors of Frank Martin and nudes. The Tate Collection has only prints of his nudes. If you are fortunate, you may find an original engraving of a nude by Frank Martin. However, you are not likely to find many of his original charcoal nude drawings available on the secondary art market. At the time of my research, there have been no original nude drawings by Frank Martin at a major auction since 2002. It may be that collectors love their originals and are not interested in selling his work. The artist passed away in 2005 and his original work, (especially his nudes), are of investment quality.

This drawing is a particularly beautiful respresentation of a Frank Martin nude from the fifties era when he drew a lot of movie and stage stars. The woman in this drawing bears a striking resemblance to a young Ava Gardner. 

About this drawing:

This museum qualified original charcoal drawing by British illustrator and artist, Frank Martin, (1921-2005), is on fine thin paper laid to illustrator board for reinforcement. It is in excellent condition. Size of sheet is approximately 16 x 12 inches.  Guaranteed authenticity with gallery COA included.

The following information on the artist is from London Arts Group:

Frank Martin

Birthplace: London, England
Born: 1921
Died: July 29, 2005

Most of Frank Martin's output was commercial in a purposeful way. At a time when illustrative and decorative art in Britain flourished in publishing, journalism and advertising, he proudly called himself a jobbing artist and no one could deny the technical range of his accomplishments. It is a measure of his success that in the 1970s he held no fewer than 11 one-man shows. He was also one of the longest-serving illustrators for the Folio Society.

Martin's work often had a playful quality. The sidelong glances, ripped bodices and cartoonish features (sometimes practically asking for speech bubbles) were all indications that he did not want to be taken solemnly. Even his titles could be flirtatiously playful: The Charms of Music, for instance, shows a voluptuous girl on a chaise longue, flower in hand and a large gramophone horn behind. Naked girls were undoubtedly his favorite subjects, and he drew, painted, etched and engraved them repeatedly. He was a confident draughtsman, using strong shapes and swaggering lines full of movement. His images are straightforward, clear and affectionate - and this goes also for his ruffians, buildings and scenery, and the many period illustrations he produced in a very long career. He found the fun in top hats and palfreys, in tall ships and minarets, but also in different artistic conventions: the cartouche, the engraved title-page, the bookplate, the zodiac.

Biography

Frank Vernon Martin was born in Dulwich in 1921. His mother was an actress, and his father, a scientist, was secretary of the Royal Institution and the biographer of Faraday. Martin went to Uppingham, from where he won a history scholarship Page 1 Untitled to Hertford College, Oxford, in 1939. After a short wartime degree at Oxford, he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1941. He married Peg the following year. After the war he went to St Martins School of Art, where he studied with Gertrude Hermes and Clifford Webb. His first commercial work was drawing fashion for The Sunday Times in 1949-50, after which he began his career as a book-illustrator. Though new to printmaking, he soon found himself secretary to the Society of Wood Engravers, through which he met the artist John Buckland-Wright, who found him a post at Camberwell School of Art, where he was to teach for 27 years. He was promoted to senior lecturer in 1965, and was head of graphic design from 1976 through the four years to his retirement. In 1964 Martin was asked by Evelyn Waugh to design a letterhead for his new home. The following year he cut roundels of Tennyson and Browning for the covers of the volumes in the Oxford Standard Authors series. Through Buckland-Wright, Martin met the founder of the Folio Society, Charles Ede, who commissioned 11 two-color wood-engravings for an edition of Thornton Wilders The Bridge of St Luis Rey (1956). There were seven more major Folio Society commissions in the succeeding ten years, as well as books for Readers Digest and smaller imprints. In 1961 his work was shown in an exhibition at the Folio Society, but from 1966 Martin took a 15-year break from book-illustration, beginning instead a long series of prints of Hollywood actresses of the silent movie era, which were sold in London and the US. In 1964 he had made a large two-color woodcut of five Ziegfeld Follies girls, and images of stars such as Jean Harlow and Norma Talmadge were to follow. The series appealed to latter day celebrities, and Elton John and Michael Caine were among those who bought prints.

By 1970 Martin had enough Hollywood subjects for an exhibition at the Roundhouse marking the 75th anniversary of cinema. Although he disliked the pretention of some stars, he was delighted when Harold Lloyd opened the show and visited his Chiswick studio with his granddaughters, who sat on the edge of a plan chest swinging their brown Californian legs and smiling their wide and generous American smiles. The Folio Society tempted Martin back to illustration in 1982, asking for 15 engravings for The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion, after which the resurgent private press movement provided a number of other commissions. Notable among these were the illustrations for The Pleasant History of Lazarillo de Tormes, published by David Esslemont at Gwasg Gregynog in Wales in 1991, and Martins own Newhaven-Dieppe, published by the Previous Parrot Press in 1996. Most important of all, though, was the first proper survey of Martin's output, the Previous Parrots elegant folio edition of his wood-engravings along with some woodcuts, linocuts and vinyl engravings in 1998. This included not only a list of all of the known relief prints and books, but also a knowledgeable and comprehensive biographical introduction by the art historian Hal Bishop. The following year Martin's own choice of 28 engravings and woodcuts appeared in the Primrose Academy's series The Engravers Cut, printed by Sebastian Carter at the Rampant Lions Press. An exhibition of his other work was held at the National Film Theatre. Martin, who continued working into his eighties, was an honorary academian of the Royal Academy and a member of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence. Frank Martin, artist, was born on January 14, 1921. He died on July 29, 2005, aged 84.

Curriculum Vitae

Work in collections...

Victoria & Albert Museum London

Represented in both public and private collections of fine prints throughout England and the United States.

The Tate Collection

Frank Martin is an honorary member of the Florence Academy L’Accademia Delle art del disegno

Statement

"For many years I made illustrations for books, mostly in the medium of wood engraving; now I make the illustrations on a larger scale, without the books."

"It doesn’t bother me to be called a ‘literary’ artist; illustration, of one kind or another, is the thing that suits me best. I was formed in the disciplines of engraving and printing; painting never concerned me very much. The subject of whatever I am drawing holds me very tightly—I never use it as a point of departure, preferring to stay with it and describe it as faithfully as possible."

"My recent preoccupation has been with the images of, approximately, the 1920’s and particularly the silent movies. Why this should be so I’m not quite sure; perhaps it to do with very early memories or it may be because there is something especially fascinating in things which are at the same time near us and far away."

"Trivialities of the day before yesterday, photographically recorded, take on a certain poignancy if they are ‘fixed’, as it were, in another medium. Woodcuts made on old and grainy pieces of pinewood interpret in a special way the contrast and enigmatic images of the silent films. The early screen seems to take on more and more the quality of a popular mythology with legendary heroes and heroines of gigantic stature — Chaplin, Swanson, Mack Sennett, von Stroheim... Woodcut has always been a medium for the imagery of popular devotion so when, one day in a rather sentimental mood, I felt the need to pay a tribute to the greatest of all motion picture actresses, it seemed natural enough to carve the gentle and long-suffering features of Lillian Gish on the surface of an old drawing board that I found in a corner of the studio."

"From the technical point of view woodcuts are indeed very simple, even primitive, things. At any rate, that is the way I see them. Just rubbings from carved wooden boards. The cutting of the image reminds me of the way a schoolboy carves his initials with a penknife on a wooden desk; the printing may be merely the rubbing of a spoon — or even of the palm of the hand — over the back of the paper laid upon the inked block. Many of my prints are made this way. The medium is both simple and subtle; the simplicity comes from the cutting, as broad and direct as possible: the varied surface of the wood itself provides the subtlety."

"Being a natural conservative I like to make my prints by some traditional method or other that involves drawing as directly as possible, though I admire adventurousness and technical sophistication in the work of other artists. A man’s work method seems to be governed partly by the limitations of his own temperament and partly by the physical circumstances of his professional life. In my own case, studio conditions and the demands of teaching make complicated etching difficult, so when I wish to work on copper I turn as often as not to drypoint, a simple method so far as apparatus is concerned, though, goodness knows, difficult enough to do properly."

Frank Martin