MARTYL (1917-2013)
Martyl Langsdorf, professionally known simply as Martyl, first began to paint as a child when she accompanied her mother to the summer program at the Cape Cod School of Art. Although she earned a degree in art history and archaeology from Washington University, St. Louis, she concurrently attended summer art programs and began her painting career working on murals for the General Services Administration before World War II. Outside art museums and collectors, she is famous for the Doomsday Clock that she designed as a logo for the cover of a 1947 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. A world traveler to Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Central and North Americas, she served as illustrator on several archeological digs in Egypt and Greece.
In her oral history she discussed her approach to composition: "...I always found it fascinating to look and look and look, and spend all kinds of time until something would just ring a bell, and I would know how to rearrange nature to make a good composition." (p. 45) "These grand configurations [the Grand Tetons] challenged me as an artist to express something of their powerful structure and the light and space around them." [Martyl, Mountains & Islands, 1999]
- "Acropolis - Athens," 1966 [Greece].
- "Oxford," n.d. [England].
- "Le Grand Tetons 2001" [Wyoming].
IVAN LE LORRAINE ALBRIGHT (1897-1983)
Albright's father Adam Emory Albright studied with the American artist Thomas Eakins and passed that training on to his twin sons Ivan and Malvin. After Ivan's World War I experience as a medical illustrator for the American Expeditionary Force Medical Corps he enrolled in classes at the School of the Art Institute and later the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design in New York City. The Art Institute owns several of his best-known paintings including The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Albright's travel sketches are more lighthearted than his paintings - they lack the sense of decay or disintegration so prevalent in his paintings and offer more quick impressions of the sites rather than detailed depictions. Albright was a world traveler - in the decade of the 1970s alone he made eight trips abroad to Western Europe, Egypt, China, the Caribbean Islands, and Tahiti.
- "Smolny Leningrad," 1967.
- "Lindos," n.d. [Rhodes].