>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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