Martha Szabo Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration

Martha Szabo Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

ISBN: 978-1-955260-52-7 Front Cover: Martha Szabo, Untitled City Lights 1 (MS15), 1975, Oil on linen, 22 x 28” Title Page: Installation view: Martha Szabo Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration Back Cover: Installation view: Martha Szabo Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration Martha Szabo Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration October 17 - November 18, 2023 Published by: David Richard Gallery, LLC, 526 West 26th Street, Suite 311, New York, NY 10001 www.DavidRichardGallery.com 212-882-1705 | 505-983-9555 DavidRichardGalleries1 DavidRichardGallery Gallery Staff: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, Managers All rights reserved by David Richard Gallery, LLC. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in whole or part in digital or printed form of any kind whatsoever without the express written permission of David Richard Gallery, LLC. Catalogue: © 2023 David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Essay: Gwen F. Chanzit, Ph.D. Artworks: Copyright © Martha Szabo Catalogue Design: David Eichholtz and Richard Barger, David Richard Gallery, LLC, New York, NY Images by Yao Zu Lu

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

Martha Szabo Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY

Martha Szabo Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration

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David Richard Gallery is pleased to present, Martha Szabo, Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration, a presentation of 25 paintings spanning the early 1950s through early 1990s.

The artworks are all easel-sized, oil on canvas, with views of the New York City skyline and architecture as observed from the rooftop and windows of the artist’s mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings where she lived and worked in Manhattan throughout her career. Twenty of the paintings are installed in the gallery salon style, an intimate presentation of several thematic and aesthetic vignettes given the small size of the canvases, ranging from 6 x 4 inches up to 24 x 39 inches. A digital catalog will be published with an essay by Gwen F. Chanzit, Curator Emerita, Denver Art Museum.

With this debut solo painting survey, the David Richard Gallery heralds its exclusive representation of a landmark artist: NYC-based artist Martha Szabo. Featuring oil on canvas abstractions spanning four decades, several art historical –isms, and a lifetime of insatiable creativity, this exhibition marks an important chapter in the history of art and our city.

These deeply personal paintings—informed by Cubism, Constructivism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and Surrealism—invite comparisons with Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Malevich and Dali. Admirably productive during her extraordinary five-decade career, working with almost tireless initiative despite lack of consistent gallery representation or exhibition deadlines, Martha Szabo painted ode after profound ode to the metropolis she adored, her sanctuary city, her final home after years of hardship, — first Nazi persecution followed by Soviet control of Hungary. Immigration to the US in 1957 enabled Szabo to experience a creative rebirth.

From her point of view atop a mid-century apartment building, Szabo recorded the architectural drama unfolding as the NYC of John V. Lindsay embarked on its golden era of energetic planning, master building, and construction. Szabo’s vantage point on tall, and ever taller, modern structures, juxtaposed with the expressive rooftops of stalwart, older walk-up buildings that withstood the built environment’s sixties-seventies seismic shift. It was balm for the artist’s spirit to observe and chronicle how natural phenomena burnished the inspiring architectural energy of her adopted imperial city with spectacular cloud formations, sunrises, sunsets, and even rainbows.

“These windowed paintings… are primarily cityscapes of imagination, a masterful record of place in lively dialogue between the external world and inward expression in front of that glass divide,” writes Gwen F. Chanzit, Curator Emerita, Denver Art Museum, in her catalogue essay.

With half a century dedicated to her meditative, evocative practice of painting New York, Szabo produced literally hundreds of paintings, in which contemporary art audiences will recognize and share, in Steinbeck’s phrase, the indescribable joy of creation.

By: Julia Szabo and David Eichholtz New York, September 2023

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MARTHA SZABO: PAINTING THE SANCTUARY CITY, 1957-2007

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When you are housed high above the city, your world is at once spectacularly expansive and at the same time, closed and protected. No wonder these paintings by Martha Szabo carry us into a duality that also describes the painter, herself. The paintings executed from her safe, windowed view bring us a New York cityscape informed by a personal outlook.

The choice to show the world from afar, reveals much about the artist. As an immigrant from Hungary in 1957, Szabo delighted in her newfound freedom. Yet, difficult memories of wartime internment in Austria and repressive life in post-war Hungary never allowed the artist to feel comfortably free. And as a woman in nineteen fifties New York, she lacked the freedom her male contemporaries enjoyed. Her perch above the urban chaos gave her a quiet place to respond to what lay beyond and also to explore a variety of stylistic expressions within her self-imposed format. In this light, we might explore how over some 60 years—and while continuing to produce other painted subjects—Szabo consistently returned to the view outside her window, even to this day when the artist is in her nineties.

These paintings are of domestic scale—not only appropriate for the artist, but also for those who would share her world as if looking through their own window. Traditional landscape paintings are often framed by side trees or other pictorial devices that draw a viewer into the distance. Here, Szabo’s own window provides the framing. The traditional horizontal view into a distant landscape is transformed into a dynamic cityscape, with some elements far away and others almost reachable from her sill. The window itself also serves the artistic device of a painting within a painting.

Modernist precedents for painting from windows and for painted windows, themselves, are numerous. Matisse’s 1905 Open Window, Collioure; Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s images of windows leading from color studies to non-objectivity; and Fernand Léger’s city views from within and outside built environments, all come to mind. No doubt, the window provided Szabo a format for her own convenience and also a template for exploration within a consistent format.

Szabo was well educated and intentional about her training. In her native Hungary, she studied at the University of the Fine Arts, Budapest. Like many artists of her generation seeking the avant-garde, she planned to move to Paris. By the time she settled in New York at mid-century, it had supplanted Paris as the new center of modernism.

Her education continued in New York, in classes at the Art Students League. Her instructor, Hananiah Harari, was a prominent modernist who had studied with Fernand Léger. Harari was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, a dominant artistic collective championing abstraction based on Mondrian and his followers. Harari was active in myriad artistic projects.

With his encouragement, Szabo experimented with styles from Cubism and Constructivism to Expressionism, Surrealism, and even an Asian aesthetic.

She was in touch with the latest modernist movements and she made them her own throughout her long career. She regularly visited museums, and she lived in a culture-centric home lined with bookshelves her husband fashioned to accommodate their academic interests. Like many women artists of her time, she persevered without gallery representation—motivated by her own drive.

Within her flat template for exploration, Szabo’s bold strokes of paint constructed an independent modernist vocabulary informed by Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and the work of gifted American painters like Alfred Maurer, William Glackens, and Georgia O’Keeffe. From geometric, architectonic formats, to surreal fantasies that play out in atmospheric settings, these paintings describe a range of responses to her world.

Szabo’s self-limited format is the only constant in these paintings made over so many years, providing a framed view on which to project a full range of stylistic investigations, personal encounters, emotions and fantasies. In these paintings, we see effects of fog and snow, along with clouds and billowy smoke, all of which encouraged freeform abstraction and playful reflections of light and color. From a consistent viewpoint, these paintings are a visual record of the artist’s dialog between her closed private world and the outside. Today we may consider these windowed paintings as a series. Yet unlike the deliberate series of others like Claude Monet (Rouen Cathedral and Haystacks), Szabo never intended them as such.

Szabo painted in oil, using sure, textural brushstrokes to describe the built environment beyond her window. The layering of pigment at times becomes a kind of rectangular structure, itself, almost like that of architectural bricks. In paintings such as Untitled (#8) there is a focus on urban geometry, where rooftops, chimneys, and angular elements of other buildings create an interplay between solid geometric blocks, and shadows projected across lighted snow.

The Queensboro Bridge was a natural subject with its dynamic sculptural span. Queensboro Bridge in Fog shows the bridge majestically set in the foggy distance beyond nearby buildings—

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from twenty-two floors above the Northeast corner of First Avenue and 81st Street. The colored light amidst fog calls to mind famed waterscapes of Monet. Though this view of the bridge is now obscured by newer buildings, the almost universal magnetism of bridges in the city still holds—the pull that captured the imagination of other New York artists such as Joseph Stella. Untitled (Crimson Sunset) reveals foggy architectural outlines that recall Monet’s Parliament buildings and the huge red sun, of van Gogh’s The Sower.

Some paintings glowing with city lights make us wonder what might be going on deep in the city; of lively urban partygoers (Manhattan Night) or domestic interiors only imagined behind lighted rectangular windows that shield their interiors and leave us with colored patterns of lights knit together by imposing dark rooftops (Untitled, “Brownstones”).

Paintings such as Untitled (City Lights 1 and 2) include specific circular reflections that find their place amidst other nocturnal illuminations, almost dancing like celestial globes. In fact, these reflections derive from a specific lamp in the artist’s home, a modernist Lollipop Lamp whose lit design element here mixes with the lights of the city below.

Other paintings become Surrealist fantasies where architectural forms take on lives of their own.

In the artist’s private place, smoke transforms into mesmerizing anthropomorphic figures that frolic across her view, beyond reach but ever present. In paintings like Untitled (Apricot Sunset), the shadows of architectural elements become animated surreal figures. The anthropomorphized forms in Neon City and The Souls of Transformed Buildings, Celebrating remind us of grand sculptures from nineteenth century public parks—heroic female figures that here hold up against the brilliant sky, some dramatically framed against the lit tall building. Strong allegorical figures pictured in Károly Lotz’s frescoed ceiling in the Budapest University Fine Arts Building have also been noted as possible precedents. When shadows become figures, as those in La Vida es Sueno (for Calderón), her canvases may even conjure the theatrically themed paintings of Honoré Daumier.

Szabo’s foreground shapes also are not unlike the shadowy cypress trees seen in van Gogh’s Starry Night—painted from his view from the east facing window within the asylum at Saint-Rémy. Imbuing natural forms such as cypress trees with otherworldly features was a constant for van Gogh.

Szabo’s paintings also encourage the imaginary to overtake the specific, conjuring her own ethereal figures.

Informed by both earlier modernist precedents and the distinct view from her window, Szabo’s rich paintings are totally her own. As a group, they showcase a remarkable variety within the artist’s self-imposed restrictions—of place, and within the planar rectangular format. Unlike her early

European experience, when she was forcibly removed from normal daily life, this isolated position is on her own terms.

Over the years, as urban changes took place, some buildings were obscured by others, with alterations of light that accompany structural additions and replacements. Yet these paintings are never mere recording; we don’t trace specific changes. Though these views were a constant for her, the paintings are primarily cityscapes of imagination, a masterful record of place in lively dialogue between the external world and inward expression in front of that glass divide. She could experiment with artistic inventiveness, project her own self within the format, or play out a wondrous fantasy.

This body of work, painted from such a distance, becomes a nexus of forms transformed by Szabo’s imagination. Up some twenty-two floors above the fracas of urban life, one is within a world of one’s own, ripe for fantasy. Some architectural details may not have been important to those who designed them, knowing how little they would be seen. Yet they provide fodder for imagination. Ethereal, lighted shadows transcend the specifics in Szabo’s private reveries, played out in a modernist vocabulary. Considering that these astonishing paintings were made during decades of change and urban upheaval, one expects it must have been a comfort each time to return anew to her personal urban oasis, to build what her daughter, Julia, has called a “sanctuary city” amidst the changing skyline.

Gwen F. Chanzit, Ph.D. Curator Emerita, Denver Art Museum

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Martha Szabo Manhattan Night 38, 1988 Oil on board 16 x 12”

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Initialed “MS” and dated “93” front lower right.

Martha Szabo Untitled Brownstones 6, 1963 ca Oil on linen 24 x 35”

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Martha Szabo Rooftops in Snow 11, 1964 ca Oil on linen 24 x 35”

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Martha Szabo Queensboro Bridge in Fog 9, 1966 Oil on linen 25 x 35”

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Initialed “MS” front lower left. Inscribed “Queensborough Bridge from the North”, signed and dated 1970 verso.

Martha Szabo Untitled 39 Crescent Moon over Manhattan, 1993 Oil on canvas 16 x 12”

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Martha Szabo Untitled City Lights 2 16, 1975 Oil on linen 22 x 29”

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Martha Szabo Untitled 28, 1975 Oil on canvas board Plyex by Grumbacher 18 x 24”

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Initialed “MS” front lower left.

Martha Szabo Untitled Crimson Sunset 2, 1976 Oil on board Plyex by Grumbacher 18 x 24”

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Martha Szabo Night Scene with Crescent Moon 35, 1976 ca 8 x 10”

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Martha Szabo Untitled Pink Sunset 20, 1975 Oil on board 12 x 16”

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Martha Szabo Untitled Apricot Sunset 19, 1975 Oil on board 12 x 16”

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Martha Szabo Demilunes 29, 1975 ca Oil on canvas 20 x 24”

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Martha Szabo Untitled 22, 1975 Oil on linen 22 x 28”

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Martha Szabo Rooftop Dance 5, 1959 Oil on linen 28 x 22”

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Martha Szabo Neon City 23, 1975 Oil on linen 22 x 28”

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Martha Szabo The Souls of Transformed Buildings Celebrating 26, 1975 Oil on linen 22 x 28”

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Martha Szabo La Vida es Sueno For Calderon 21, 1978 ca Oil on linen 24 x 39”

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Martha Szabo Untitled 3, 1962 ca Oil on board 18 x 24”

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Martha Szabo Quatrefoil 4, 1962 ca Oil on linen 28 x 18”

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Martha Szabo Untitled 8, 1963 ca Oil on linen 35 x 24”

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Martha Szabo Untitled 1, 1962 Oil on board 24 x 18” Signed and dated 1962, front lower right in red marker.

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Additional Paintings Paintings from Martha Szabo’s Later Career studies in the 1990s at The Art Students League New York City

Martha Szabo Untitled 36 View from window at Art Students League, 1990 ca Oil on canvas 16 x 20”

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Martha Szabo Untitled 37 View from window at Art Students League, 1990 ca Oil on canvas 20 x 16”

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Martha Szabo, circa 1954. Photograpgh by George Szabo

Martha Szabo (1928 – 2023) 69

Born in Debrecen, Hungary, in 1928, a New Yorker since 1957, Martha Szabo has consistently pursued a distinctive, painterly abstraction of the urban skyline. The unique POV of her 21st-floor studio afforded the artist sweeping views of a city in transition over many decades, notably the rapid development of the 1970s. These changes, subtle or dramatic, she recorded on canvas with oil paint, in a unique modernist style that merges abstraction with tribal forms.

Her substantial body of work is proof of Szabo’s commitment to the city she has observed and documented for 50+ years. Displaying a conceptual depth rarely seen in cityscapes, the paintings reference architecture, archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, geology. Towering silhouettes reminiscent of Pre-Columbian culture (or Picasso’s African Period, and the haloed figures of medieval illuminated manuscripts) dominate the foreground of these highly personal vistas, as rectilinear structures yield to the biomorphic ones that Szabo calls “the souls of transformed buildings celebrating.” In “Tectonics,” formidable structures appear displaced as the very foundations of the city meet a powerful force from below ground.

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The artist in her studio 1964

Her sun-drenched studio for an observatory, Szabo’s brush captured skyscrapers-in-progress making their upward climb, while low-rise buildings, their days numbered, remained standing with undemolishable dignity. Predating the “Manhattanhenge” phenomenon by several decades, her paintings convey the splendor of urban sunrises and sunsets. From her South by Southwest coordinates, through blizzards and blackouts, Szabo recorded breathtaking urban tableaux.

Surviving World War II, Martha came of age in Budapest, part of the Hungarian Avant Garde’s second wave. Two years after earning her MFA from the University of Fine Arts, she immigrated to America with her archaeologist husband; the couple became naturalized citizens in 1957 (he later became a noted art historian and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Among the couple’s friends and elder fellow-expats were the brilliant polymath filmmaker-anthropologist Paul Fejos, and the artist Emory Ladanyi, MD. A longtime member of the Art Students League, Martha Szabo attended master classes in 1989-90 with Hananiah Harari, one of the founders of American Abstract Artists (1936) and a onetime student of Fernand Leger.

Martha Szabo passed away in December, 2023.

By Julia Szabo (Daughter)

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Martha and Julia Szabo attending Martha Szabo, Up On The Roof: Liberation, Transformation, Celebration at David Richard Gallery

DAVID RICHARD GALLERY