>Subject: Richard Martin
>
> From the New York
>>Times on the web.
>>
>>November 9, 1999
>>
>>
>>        Richard Martin, 52, Curator of the
>>        Costume Institute 
>>
>>        By ANNE-MARIE SCHIRO
>>
>>        Richard Martin, who infused the Costume Institute of
>>        the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his deep
>>        knowledge of popular culture and art history, died
>>        yesterday at his apartment in New York. He was 52. 
>>
>>        The cause was melanoma, said Dr. Richard Slusarczyk, his
>>        companion. 
>>
>>        Martin had been the curator of the Met's costume
>>        collection since 1993. Since coming to the Met from the
>>        Fashion Institute of Technology, he presented such
>>        exhibitions as "Cubism and Fashion," "Gianni Versace,"
>>        "Christian Dior," "American Ingenuity: Sportswear,
>>        1930's-1970's," "Orientalism: Visions of the East in
>>        Western Dress," "Madame Grès" and "Swords Into
>>        Ploughshares: Military Dress and the Civilian Wardrobe." 
>>
>>        Martin also organized an exhibition with the unlikely name
>>        of "Wordrobe," a historical look at clothing adorned with
>>        words, from poems to political slogans. He described it as
>>        "the reconciliation of textile and text." 
>>
>>        An April 1998 exhibition, "The Ceaseless Century: 300
>>        Years of 18th-Century Costume," was called scintillating in
>>        a review by Grace Glueck in The New York Times. "Too
>>        often," she wrote, "historical costume shows are yawny
>>        dissertations on, well, the history of clothes. Not this one.
>>        The clothes may be overwrought, but there's real panache
>>        to the presentation." 
>>
>>        Some of Martin's exhibitions at the Met disappointed
>>        fashion critics because they weren't as showy as those he
>>        had been involved with at the Fashion Institute of
>>        Technology or as flamboyant as those mounted by his
>>        predecessor at the Met, Diana Vreeland. But he was
>>        constrained because the space allotted to the Costume
>>        Institute had shrunk after Mrs. Vreeland's tenure and
>>        because he was obliged to display everything behind glass
>>        rather than in the round. (That had been the custom at the
>>        fashion institute and at the Met under Mrs. Vreeland.) On
>>        the other hand, he brought a more scholarly approach to
>>        the subject of fashion. 
>>
>>        "Richard's major contribution to costume studies was his
>>        ability to input vigor and academic interest from his art
>>        history background," said Harold Koda, his associate
>>        curator for almost 20 years. "He saw fashion design as a
>>        manifestation that had richness of content that could be
>>        analyzed the way an art object was analyzed. He didn't see
>>        any kind of contradiction in that. Costume exhibitions were
>>        transformed because of his work." 
>>
>>        Martin also added to the Costume Institute's collection by
>>        accepting donations of clothing from designers and their
>>        clients and by shopping at auctions, flea markets, discount
>>        stores and Barneys New York's warehouse sales. 
>>
>>        In April he told The Times about buying a John Galliano
>>        dress at Century 21, the discount store. "Absolutely off the
>>        rack," he said. "In fact, falling off the rack." The dress was
>>        later displayed in the Met show "Our New Clothes:
>>        Acquisitions of the 1990's." 
>>
>>        Martin's involvement with fashion exhibitions began in
>>        1980 at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he
>>        worked with Koda and Laura Sinderbrand, the director of
>>        the school's Design Laboratory, now called the Museum at
>>        F.I.T. He had begun his career in New York in 1973,
>>        teaching art history at F.I.T., at the School of Visual Arts
>>        and at New York University. He served as the editor in
>>        chief of Arts Magazine before being appointed the
>>        executive director of the Shirley Goodman Resource
>>        Center, which is responsible for exhibitions and collections
>>        at the fashion institute. 
>>
>>        Among the landmark exhibitions the three of them mounted
>>        at F.I.T. were "The East Village," "Fashion and
>>        Surrealism," "Undercover Story" and "Three Women:
>>        Madeleine Vionnet, Claire McCardell, Rei Kawakubo."
>>        Their work earned them a special award in 1987 from the
>>        Council of Fashion Designers of America. In 1996 while at
>>        the Met, Martin won another award from the council, "for
>>        furthering fashion in art and culture." 
>>
>>        "'East Village' was the best example of what Richard did
>>        so well," Ms. Sinderbrand said. "There was a wall of
>>        painting, sculpture, music and the club scene. It was
>>        avant-garde and off the 57th Street-Madison Avenue
>>        scene. We showed work produced by young people in the
>>        East Village. To eat, they had to produce wearable art
>>        because they couldn't exist on fine art alone. Many
>>        produced clothing and jewelry that was outrageous and
>>        wonderful." 
>>
>>        In a review of "The East Village" in Time magazine, Jay
>>        Cocks called it "an eye-scalding, rambunctious and
>>        appropriately free-spirited tour of boho fashion, Manhattan
>>        style." 
>>
>>        Most of the ideas for the exhibitions at both the fashion
>>        institute and the Met originated with Martin, said Koda,
>>        who left the Met in 1997 to study landscape architecture.
>>        "His interests were so vast," Koda said. "We did five or
>>        six shows a year at F.I.T. and three a year at the Met, while
>>        most museums do only one. And he always had three or
>>        four years' worth of ideas. Some fashion people had
>>        difficulty with his language, because his language was the
>>        language of art, not fashion." 
>>
>>        An example of his literary style can be gleaned from notes
>>        accompanying "The Ceaseless Century: 300 Years of
>>        18th-Century Costume," shown in 1998 at the Met. Martin
>>        observed, "Display was far more important than the body
>>        it sought to cover and ameliorate." 
>>
>>        In a 1995 article in The New York Times about
>>        cutting-edge fashion, Martin was quoted as saying that art
>>        and fashion often faced the same problem. "It has become
>>        very difficult for anything to retain its shock value for very
>>        long," he said. "A commercial art form like fashion almost
>>        immediately takes on those forms that have any degree of
>>        transgression or shock about them." 
>>
>>        Richard Harrison Martin was born on Dec. 4, 1946, at
>>        Bryn Mawr, Pa. He graduated from Swarthmore College in
>>        1967 and received two master's degrees, both from
>>        Columbia University. 
>>
>>        He was a tireless lecturer and reviewer and held many
>>        academic positions, including those at the School of Visual
>>        Arts, New York University, Columbia University, the
>>        Juilliard School and Parsons School of Design. 
>>
>>        Martin wrote more than 100 scholarly papers on subjects
>>        as varied as "Art History and the Assimilation of Images
>>        by Contemporary Artists" and "Redress of the Nerds: The
>>        Assertion of Nerd Style in Men's Clothing and Imagery in
>>        the 1980's." He also wrote books on fashion and art,
>>        including "Fashion and Surrealism" and "Charles James,"
>>        and was a co-author of others. 
>>
>>        In addition to Dr. Slusarczyk, Martin is survived by his
>>        brother, Robert, of Montreal. 
>>
>>        Ms. Sinderbrand, who knew Martin for two decades, said
>>        he rarely talked about himself, but in a note to her after her
>>        retirement, he expressed ambivalence about giving up
>>        teaching to go to the Met: "I realize that I want and
>>        probably need to be effective and expressive in some
>>        public way." 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Mary A.McLellan, Admin. Asst., Ext.243
AMERICAN TEXTILE HISTORY MUSEUM
491 Dutton Street, Lowell, MA 01854-4221
Phone (978)441-0400, Fax (978)441-1412
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
                "Dressed for the Part"
Hollywood Costumes from the Silver Screen
    November 16, 1999 to March 12, 2000
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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