FROST FINE ART

NOEL MARTIN

Noel Martin was born in 1922, and studied drawing, painting, and printmaking at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. After wartime service in a camouflage battalion in the Army Air Force, Martin was appointed chief designer for the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1947, and was instrumental in introducing modern design ideas to museum publications. His work in this field was recognized early and, along with Herbert Matter, Ben Shahn and Leo Lionni, he was included in the 1953 exhibition "Four American Designers" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

While at the Cincinnati Art Museum he was also a freelance graphic designer and art director, working on a wide range of projects for clients including Federated Department Stores, Strathmore Papers and Standard Oil, and a complete redesign of "The New Republic" magazine in 1958. In the same year he had a solo exhibition of his design work at the American Institute of Graphic Arts in New York.

Martin was influential as well as a teacher, both at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and as an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati. Also, from the early 1960s he was an active painter, working mainly in a Modernist vein reminiscent of the clean, clear lines of the European and American artists and designers whose ideas he espoused in his graphic work.

Additional exhibitions of his design work were held at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Addison Gallery of American Art (both in 1955) as well as in Europe, and his paintings were exhibited recently with those of his wife Coletta, Charley Harper and Malcolm Grear, in the Contemporary Art Center of Cincinnati's exhibition "Graphic Content: Contemporary and Modern/Art and Design". Noel Martin died in 2009.