Idaho History: Fletcher Martin was a painter who loved action and adventure
Painter Fletcher Martin was largely self-taught, but by the late 1940s he was nationally known for works he did for the New Deal Works Progress Administration arts program in California and Idaho, and especially for his work as an artist-correspondent for Life magazine in World War II. Many of his drawings of soldiers in North Africa and Europe made its pages, and one of his paintings made its cover.
Martin was born in 1904 in Palisade, Colo., one of seven children of Clinton Howard Martin and his wife, Josephine. The elder Martin was a newspaper publisher and editor who moved his family from one small Western town to another, buying or starting newspapers. In 1910, when Fletcher was 6, the Martins moved to Emmett, where Clinton ran a local paper, the Emmett Examiner. He also bought a paper in Craigmont.
One of the first skills young Fletcher learned was printing, and by the age of 12 he was setting type and running presses. He dropped out of high school and for a few years bummed around the Northwest, sometimes as a hobo on freight trains and sometimes as a lumberjack and farm laborer. He later described that time in his life as “no real hardship. Everything was so exciting or potentially so. It was freedom, movement, change, life, color and drama. It was awful and wonderful.”
At 17 he lied about his age to get into the Navy. He was soon in trouble and spent time in the brig. His three years in the Navy allowed him travel to the South Sea Islands, Australia and the Caribbean. He also became a light heavyweight boxer and later fought as a professional.
Martin worked as a printer in California in the late 1920s and was an assistant to noted Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in the early 1930s before becoming part of the WPA Southern California Art Project during the Great Depression.
Although he had been chosen to paint the murals in the 1938 art deco Ada County courthouse, he dropped out of that project, feeling it would have taken too much time away from his teaching responsibilities and lucrative portrait commissions.
His earlier murals included an ambitious one done in 1937 in North Hollywood High School depicting native life and ritual with more than 50 individual human figures. In 1938 he created “Mail Transportation” in the San Pedro, Calif., Federal Building and Post Office. His muscular male figures wrestle heavy bags of mail as though in combat with them. Probably his best-known painting, also done in 1938, is “Trouble in Frisco,” now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It is a dynamic portrayal of muscular longshoremen slugging it out as seen through the porthole of a ship.
It is Martin’s brutal vision of the great maritime strike of 1934 that shut down all West Coast seaports from Seattle to San Diego for 83 days and led to violent confrontations between union and nonunion dock workers and police. Martin’s paintings often show dynamic and sometimes brutal conflicts between powerfully built men. He painted prizefighters and bullfighters, and when he painted baseball players, he chose a runner sliding into home plate with the catcher and umpire, making up a dynamic threesome.
He did two works in Idaho under the auspices of the WPA art program. A mural in the Kellogg post office, painted in 1941, entitled “Discovery,” shows Noah Kellogg and his donkey discovering the famous Bunker Hill mine. A 1939 study for the same location, entitled “Mine Rescue,” is now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It was rejected by mine owners because it showed the dangers of mining, even though officials of the miners union praised it.
Perhaps the finest example of Martin’s work in Idaho is three limestone relief panels on the facade of the Boundary County Courthouse in Bonners Ferry. It was designed to show mining, logging and farming, the county’s main industries; Martin carved two of the three himself.
Martin’s private life was as adventurous as his artistic life. He was married five times and had a much-publicized affair with movie actress Sylvia Sidney, of whom he painted two portraits. In 1962 he and his fifth wife, novelist Jean Sigsbee Small, retired to Guanajuato, Mexico, where he died in 1979. His paintings are in most major American museums.
Arthur Hart writes this column on Idaho history for the Idaho Statesman each Sunday. Email histnart@gmail.com.