Martin Sharp obituary | Art
Media blog AustraliaArtObituaryMartin Sharp obituary
Psychedelic artist, cartoonist and joint founder of the underground magazine OzMartin Sharp, who has died of emphysema aged 71, gave the 1960s counterculture its visual expression. He was Australia's pop artist extraordinaire, an innovator of psychedelic art and one of the founders of the underground magazine Oz. At a time when Sydney culture was at its most conservative and repressive, Oz was, in Martin's words, against "ignorance, intolerance and corruption".
I first met him in 1964, when I became secretary for Oz. He walked into the scrappy excuse for an office smoking a Gauloise, his blue eyes alight with a perceptive, intelligent gleam. In contrast to the constant verbal swordplay of the two Oz editors, Richard Neville and Richard Walsh, Martin, the magazine's art editor, had a more restrained, sardonic humour. It could be hard to tell what he was thinking, until he came out with some wry comment. His satire was as keen-edged as his name.
Martin was born in Bellevue Hill, a suburb of Sydney, into a wealthy family. He was an only child, and never had to earn his living. He was dispatched as a boarder to Cranbrook, the private school next to his home. When his art teacher, Justin O'Brien, awarded him an art prize of a book about Vincent van Gogh, it started a lifelong fascination with the painter. Martin came to regard Van Gogh as the patron saint of artists. He reworked many of Van Gogh's images as the basis of his own art. In Still Life (1973), for example, he placed Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe portrait at the centre of Van Gogh's sunflowers, the green of Marilyn's eye-shadow matching the green behind the sunflowers, to signify, he said, that the influence of both artists "still lives".
He enrolled as an art student at East Sydney Technical College (now Sydney Institute) in 1960. The following year, he transferred as an architecture student to the University of Sydney. He stayed there for two terms, before returning to the Tech. There he met Garry Shead, with whom he collaborated on a student newspaper, the Arty Wild Oat, in 1962. He also began contributing cartoons to the weekly magazine the Bulletin and, later on, to the Australian newspaper.
Martin drew with a strong, incisive line. It was largely his cartoons, with their witty social and political observations, that made Oz successful. His black-and-white cover drawing of a topless Mona Lisa drew shocked gasps. For an anti-Vietnam war Oz cover, Martin subverted Lyndon Johnson's campaign slogan "All the way with LBJ", portraying the US president as a bomb-dropping eagle, followed by the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, as a lumpy bird defecating smaller weapons.
But it was Oz No 6 that really drew down the ire of the government of New South Wales. Martin's mocking monologue in that issue, The Word Flashed Around the Arms, was a particular target. The three Oz boys were charged with obscenity, and the case dragged on for more than two years, with their convictions eventually overturned on appeal.
In 1965, Martin's first solo exhibition, Art for Mart's Sake, was held at the Clune Galleries in Sydney, showing mainly pop art. By 1966, with the court case resolved, Martin and Richard Neville headed for London via India. Martin was the first to arrive. Visiting the Speakeasy Club, he met Eric Clapton, who casually mentioned he was looking for lyrics. Martin scrawled out the lines of Tales of Brave Ulysses, a poem he had just written. Clapton recorded the song for Cream's second album, Disraeli Gears (1967), and commissioned Martin to do the cover. Martin's gatefold sleeve for Cream's third album, Wheels of Fire, won the New York art directors' prize for best album design in 1969.
In 1967, Richard and Martin started London Oz. Martin's flair and brilliance produced issues such as the all-graphic Magic Theatre Oz; his Plant a Flower Child collage in issue five symbolised the spirit of free love; his Bob Dylan cover for issue seven, later published as a poster in metallic inks, like his Jimi Hendrix cover, was as electrifying as the music. The posters were snapped up by, among others, the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Martin lived in a studio at the top of an old building, the Pheasantry, in Kings Road, Chelsea, where other Australians also took up residence. Among them were Bob Whitaker, the Beatles photographer; Germaine Greer, who was writing The Female Eunuch; and Tony Cahill, drummer with the Easybeats.
For his exhibition Sharp Martin and His Silver Scissors, held at Sigi Krauss gallery in 1969, he cut up, spliced and re-created works of art by his heroes Van Gogh, Hokusai and René Magritte. Art Book, a collection of his collages, was published in 1972.
By then, Martin had returned to Australia where, over the next couple of years, he created the Yellow House, an artists' community open 24 hours a day, where each room was an artwork in itself. It received thousands of visitors before closing in 1973. It was re-created for a retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1990.
Martin contributed to the cultural dynamism of Sydney, which was redefining its own identity. His posters and stage designs for the Nimrod theatre were popular in the mid-70s, and he produced posters for the modern circus group Circus Oz. He increasingly deployed favourite figures from comic-books, such as Ginger Meggs, in his paintings.
In 1972, he took on the renovation of Luna Park, the amusement park at Milsons Point, on the other side of Sydney harbour from the high art of the Opera House, and repainted the huge face at the entrance, the gateway into the fairground that he saw as a metaphor for the world. In London in 1968, he had attended a concert by the American singer Tiny Tim, in whose renditions of popular songs Martin saw an echo of his own reconfiguring of old masters. He spent over a decade making Street of Dreams, a film tribute to Tiny Tim (an obsession of his that bemused and puzzled most people) and to Luna Park. A fire in the ghost train at Luna Park, which killed seven people, mostly children, in 1979, devastated Martin. He concluded that it was not accidental, and remained convinced that the culprits should have been brought to justice.
He became more of a recluse, working from home, repainting, reworking, re-creating, until he thought the art was perfect. While many of his friends thought this process took far too long, Martin never isolated himself. He shared with several others the crumbling mansion that he inherited from his mother, where the kitchen remained exactly as it had been 100 years before.
For more than 30 years, the word Eternity, written in copperplate script, had appeared as graffiti around Sydney. Martin included it in many of his works, including the 1977 screenprint Eternity Haymarket!, and at the millennium it was transformed as a magnificent celebration, lighting up the harbour bridge as part of the New Year's Eve fireworks. His painting of the Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil, The Thousand Dollar Bill, reproduced as a series of silk banners for the Sydney Open gallery, hung resplendent along the streets in 2006.
Martin was slow to be accepted as a major artist by the establishment, but a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Sydney in 2009-10. He was made a member of the Order of Australia in 2005, and awarded an honorary doctorate in visual arts from Sydney University in 2012.
On my last visit to Martin earlier this year, with our old friend Louise Ferrier, Martin asked us to sit down in front of his huge work Graceland: A Reprise of Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love. Pointing out that the head of Apollo in the painting, modelled on the sort of plaster cast that used to be found in any art school, looked uncannily like Elvis Presley, he rose shakily from his bed and put on a disc of Love Me Tender. As the music played, I could almost swear I saw Apollo's lips move.
Martin Ritchie Sharp, artist, born 21 January 1942; died 1 December 2013
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