(The Tarot)

Fred Martin

This large work has a number of small, individual relief prints - linocuts printed in black. The whole work is hand colored by the artist making it a kind of hybrid 'monoprint'. No two would be alike.

Fred Martin was inspired to create images of the Tarot while teaching at Cal State San Jose, in the late 1970s. He notes: "A student had brought some Tarot things she had made using oil pastel on paper, with the information and imagery coming from Douglas' book on the Tarot. ...I was thinking my work had become the product of a stale subjectivity, and here was the opening into an abjective archetypal system, one I could explore as a way beyond the limitations of my ego and the tedium of its life." - Fred Martin (from https://www.fredmartin.net/index.html)

To create the series, Martin first made slides of the Major Arcana of the Tarot, the major arcana being the suit of 22 permanent trumps within the deck of 78 Tarot cards. He then projected and traced the imagery, improvising where the slides were overexposed. After producing the 22 drawings, Martin translated each of these images into linoleum blocks and eventually collaged the printed works onto sheets of heavy wove paper, drawn individually with imagery inspired by the Tarot exploration in watercolor and ink.

Fred Martin launched his career in San Francisco’s North Beach, exhibiting at the city’s avant-garde galleries including the Beat Generation gallery 'The Six', in San Francisco's North Beach (his was the featured artwork at The Six when poet Allen Ginsberg first read his poem 'Howl'). He also exhibited at the Spatsa and Dilexi galleries, which, along with The Six, prioritized artistic and personal exploration over identification with established artistic movements or financial success.

In 1954, Martin was hired by the Oakland Art Museum as registrar and worked there for four years. He joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), served as the gallery director, and was appointed director of the college in 1965, a post he held until 1975. He later became Emeritus Dean of Academic Affairs.

The first solo exhibition of his work was mounted in 1949 at the Contemporary Gallery in Sausalito, California and his was included that same year in a group exhibition of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A retrospective exhibition was assembled in 2003 at the Oakland Museum of California and, in 2014, his work was highlighted in the exhibition Fred Martin and Friends in the Fifties: Oh How Much It Hurt at the Ever Gold Gallery in San Francisco.

Martin was a contributing editor to Artweek between 1976 and 1992. His artist’s books include Beulah Land, published by Crown Point Press in 1966; A Travel Book, published by Arion Press in 1977; and From an Antique Land, published in 1979 by Green Gates Press. His work is represented in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Art Museum, the Richmond Art Center, the Crocker Art Museum, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Fred Martin retired from teaching in 2016 and continued to work in his Oakland, California studio. Fred died in Berkeley, Califormia on October 10, 2022.