Teacher's Show

Since last September the University of Iowa has had a new art instructor. He never took a lesson in art, himself. Says he: "I don't believe in teaching art. It isn't something you can teach. The only thing I can do is keep students in a state of excitement about their work, to keep telling them that the worst thing they can do is to study, in the formal sense." Successor to famed Artist Grant Wood, this anti-teaching teacher is husky, slow-spoken, 36-year-old Fletcher Martin, whose drooping red mustachios make him look glummer than he is. Last week Manhattanites had a chance to see some of the examples with which Painter Martin keeps his Iowa classes excited. The Midtown Galleries put on the first all-Martin show to be seen in the East.

Fletcher Martin was born in Colorado, son of an ambulant small-town newspaper man who made him a journeyman printer at 12. At 15, Fletcher Martin ran away, has been on the loose ever since. As a lumberman, harvester and sailor, he discovered art by drawing dirty pictures for his pals. He joined the Navy to get three squares a day, became a top-notch boxer, began painting seriously when he got out in 1926. Settling in California, he rapidly won museum awards, Federal mural jobs; had one-man shows in Los Angeles and in San Diego.

In his Manhattan show, Artist Martin had a slick portrait, some moody nudes, done in cool tones which nevertheless pulsed with life. In Tomorrow and Tomorrow, a big-thighed prostitute stood in her doorway, looking dejectedly out at the future. Temptation in Tonopah showed a tough-looking croupier, a composite of all the gambling-house characters in the capacious memory of Painter Martin, who is good at crap shooting. Out at Home, a baseball scene, one of the best in the show, was an adroit pattern of such vitality that it seemed to arrest action better than a 1,000th-of-a-second camera shutter could have done.

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