September 2025 Vol. 6, No.4
From “Obscene” to Revered:
The Radical Art of Martha Edelheit
What does “obscene” really mean? In 1964, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart tried to define it with the now-famous line: “I know it when I see it.” The problem, of course, is that everyone sees it differently.
The suppression of ideas in literature, academia, and the arts, stifles freedom, enforces conformity, and narrows the range of human expression to whatever the reigning powers deem “acceptable.”
The policing of nudity in art has a long and strange history. As early as the 16th century, the Catholic Church launched its “Fig Leaf Campaign,” literally painting over and covering the genitals of Renaissance nudes—even Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were not spared.
Mixed media, 33¼ h x 12¾ w inches
Acrylic on canvas, 98 h x 202½ w inches
The impulse to censor never really went away. Indeed, here in the U.S. today it seems to never end. Long before today’s AI algorithms flagged artworks as “Against Community Standards,” self-appointed morality committees and “concerned citizens” tried to shield the public from the naked human form.
The irony is hard to miss. The United States is the world’s largest producer and consumer of hardcore pornography—deliberately crafted to be as obscene as possible. One site, Pornhub alone, reports more than 42 billion visits per year. And yet, some still argue absurdly that Michelangelo’s David should wear a fig leaf. But with censorship always came resistance. Frank Zappa, whose lyrics drew the ire of censors, famously mocked the ludicrous system by slapping Parental Advisory stickers on his album Jazz From Hell. The record was entirely instrumental.
Acrylic on canvas 7h x 9w Ft (2 Panels) Destroyed in a fire
Acrylic on canvas, 55 9/10 × 72 in | 142 × 183 cm
The New York City–based artist Martha Edelheit, called Martie by her friends, has been accused of being alternately obscene and erotic. All that for simple nudity, which at the time classified her as “radical.” Erotic art has existed for millennia. For Edelheit, the nude was never obscene but human and empowering. As she put it: “How can it be obscene just to show the human body? Nudity isn’t eroticism.”
Acrylic on canvas, 68h x 54w inches
Acrylic on linen, 9h x 5w ft.
Edelheit liberated the human body from censorship, transforming it into a site of empowerment, erotic honesty, and feminist critique. Her work not only expanded the realm of modern art but also defended the right of women artists to create freely. She is a trailblazing pioneer whose courage gave future generations permission to see and to paint differently.
The Inspiration Art Group interviewed the artist in her tidy South Harlem apartment in July 2025. She didn’t mince words:
“What’s so obscene about it? It’s in their minds and in their eyes, not in mine. The Greeks and Romans did nudes. Rubens did nudes. Titian painted nudes. You can go back into the arts and you’re going to find nudes. Nudity isn’t eroticism. That is a very modern Victorianization of culture and it’s meaningless. I think it can be erotic, but a lot of it has to do with context and how you portray what you do.
The people who are upset about human nudity are victims of their own cultural inhibitions and prejudices, which are a combination of religious, political, and social. They are coerced into that type of thinking.
I think a lot of what I do is funny. I’m playing with ideas. It’s also making fun of the morality, the phoniness of it all. The New York Times art critic John Canaday came to my show in 1966—and he refused to review it. It was his loss… He spent two and a half hours looking at my work, and said, ‘I can’t review that obscene woman.’
The gallery had a show of postcard-sized landscapes hanging on the wall in the office, so he reviewed that. Two months later there was an artist named Harold Stevenson, who did huge male nudes, and he had no problem like I did, because I was a woman doing this. Had my name been Martin instead of Martha it wouldn’t have been an issue.”
Charles Byron was showing surrealist art at the time, and he was one of the few dealers who would give me a show in his gallery on Madison Avenue.”
String drawings, 24h x 36w inches
Oil pastel and pencil on paper, 11h x 15w inches
More than seven decades into her art career, Edelheit is still painting with focus and clarity, now looking forward to being in a major Whitney Museum retrospective (Sixties Surreal, 2025–26), a sweeping survey of American art from 1958 to 1972. The exhibition explores psychosexual, fantastical, and surrealist themes, placing Edelheit in conversation with some of the most provocative figures of her generation.
Canvas, sheet metal, oil paint on masonite, 80h x 57w inches
Ink on paper, 10 7/8h x 8w inches Private Collection
Edelheit is widely credited as a pioneer for bringing erotic, feminist, and tattooed imagery into large-scale painting at a time when such subjects were considered taboo.
“How can it be obscene just to show the human body?
Nudity isn’t eroticism.”
“I never thought of myself as an erotic artist as such, though I did do a whole series of children’s games with what was going on. I had looked at pornography. I looked at what is called erotica. For me it was fun and games, and that was really what they were about. They were playing around with these ideas. I didn’t specifically think of them as erotic, just because they had penises and vaginas. I don’t think that’s erotic as such. It simply is human anatomy. I had a friend whose husband had a Japanese erotic pillow book, and I was absolutely blown away by it. That was in many ways what fed my fantasies about erotic art.”
Acrylic on birch plywood, 8 x 4 Ft
Acrylic on birch plywood, 8 x 4 Ft
Acrylic on wood, 13¾ h x 19¾ w x 4½ inches
Acrylic on wood, 13¾ h x 19¾ w x 4½ inches
Her intellectual foundation was as rigorous as her studio practice. She began her studies at the University of Chicago in 1949 and earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in Early Childhood Education in 1956 . She also audited Meyer Shapiro’s art history classes at Columbia University. Edelheit’s art history education was mostly a matter of practical self-education than formal training: “I spent many summer weeks in Europe visiting every gallery, museum and cathedral feasible. I just took it all in like a sponge.” She also took a painting class with Michael Loew, an artist linked to neo plastic painting.
“He was one of the of artists that carried on the Mondrian style and kept a very exquisitely geometric process. He had a studio on Broadway between 10th and 9th Street. I learned an enormous amount from him. One summer I shared a house with his family on Monhegan Island…He set up his studio downstairs in the big living room and I put up a table on the balcony to watch him paint. It’s like watching somebody cook. You can learn a lot more from watching than from all the talk and reading. I took a class with him in his studio where he set up still life. One day on the way to class there was a woman walking in front of me who was magnificent. So, when I got up to the studio I started to paint her from memory, and Mike came over and said, “You can’t do that.” I walked out. That was the end of that. I wasn’t supposed to do figurative work.”
Her debut was in 1960 at the Reuben Gallery in New York City. In her first solo exhibition, she introduced her experimental “extension paintings.” This artist-run Tenth Street gallery was central to the avant-garde scene, and she exhibited alongside figures such as Jim Dine, Rosalyn Drexler, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Whitman. Her second solo show, staged in another experimental venue tied to performance and radical artistic experimentation, was in 1961 at the Judson Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Ink and watercolor on rice paper, 11¾ h x 17¾ w inches
Ink and watercolor on rice paper, 12 h x 17½ w inches
Her Flesh Walls series, first shown in the mid-1960s at New York’s Byron Gallery, redefined eroticism in visual art. These vast works transformed the body into a site of empowerment and feminist critique, shocking audiences and cementing her reputation as a radical voice. Decades later, in her exhibition in 2018, Flesh Walls: Tales from the 60s reaffirmed its continuing relevance. The multi-panel canvases often depict nude, communal, and tattooed figures. She foregrounded sexuality, intimacy, and vulnerability as legitimate aesthetic concerns. Far from exploitative, Edelheit’s treatment of the erotic was sensual, consensual, and life-affirming. That daring spirit, first seen in the 1960s, is precisely why her work now takes center stage again at the Whitney.
The Eric Firestone Gallery has repeatedly revisited Edelheit’s work, from Flesh Walls: Tales from the 60s (2018) to Naked City (2023) and her curated survey Erotic City (2025). Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including MoMA, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, the Jewish Museum, and many more.
Edelheit’s influence extended well beyond the studio walls. In 1973, she was an early member of Fight Censorship, a coalition of women artists founded by Anita Steckel, with the likes of Joan Semmel and Hannah Wilke—that challenged the policing of female sexuality in art. At a time when women’s erotic imagery was routinely dismissed as obscene, Edelheit’s activism positioned her not only as a painter but as a fearless advocate for artistic freedom and feminist expression.
She was also active in advocating for the emancipation of women in the arts:
“In 1973 a poet friend of mine said she had heard about this woman who was starting an art organization, and I had to go to this meeting. The organizer was an artist named Ce Roser .. Initially, I was totally uninterested, but I went anyway. The first meeting was Ce Roser, Cynthia Navaretta and me and a couple of other women artists, film makers and writers. It became very clear that the problems that women writers and filmmakers had were very different than the problems of women artists. Women artists couldn’t get past the front desk and there was a high school student or college student that was sitting there who would take your portfolio and put it in the garbage can. For women writers it was screwing the editors and publishers, the filmmakers with the producers and directors. Women writers had four-martini lunches. Women filmmakers never got to go to lunch, period. In the second meeting it was just artists – painters and sculptors. At first, there were maybe eight women the first meeting; there were like 16 or 20 at the next meeting. By the third meeting we had to have it in an auditorium, because 40 or 50 women showed up. Soon we were 300 women in Elaine de Kooning’s loft. It was unbelievable. They all crawled out of the woodwork suddenly. Nobody could imagine there were that many women artists in New York City. We had a big exhibition at the Huntington Hartford Museum, which is now the Museum of Art and Design, called “Women Choose Women.” At that point I had borrowed a Super 8 camera from a woman artist named Regina Bogat and I had started filming my models –trying to figure out what to do with it. And one of the women towards the end of the meeting after the opening raised her hand and asked, “Is there anybody here who also makes films? Raise your hands.” I went up with one finger, and that’s how I met Rosalind Schneider. That’s how Women/Artist/Filmmakers started.”
Martha Edelheit holds a sober view of the art business: “Art is an investment for big collectors… If you’re going to be a painter or sculptor, it’s not something you do to succeed; you do it because you must. Galleries may love your work, but without buyers they can’t afford to show it. Even with all the love of art, it’s still a business.”
Mixed Media on paper, 73h x 69w inches
Acrylic, papier-maché, steel wire, chicken wire, and ink, 38h x 37w inches
In 1993, Edelheit left New York for Sweden, settling on 10.5 acres in Svartsjölandet, an island 32 kilometers outside Stockholm. The move transformed her work. Removed from the city’s studios and models, she turned to the rural landscape around her. For 30 years she painted sheep, creating an unexpected rural chapter in her career. She experimented with papier-mâché and chicken wire. Nearly three decades later, Stockholm’s Larsen/Warner gallery showed The Naked Truth: Works from the 60’s & 70’s (2021), marking the first Swedish exhibition of her groundbreaking nude paintings.
Welded wrought iron, waxed and polished
Left lamb (29.5 x 32 x 7 inches), Ewe (31 x 55 x 19 inches),
Right Lamb (32 x 35 x 12 inches)
Today, her legacy is enjoying a powerful resurgence. Critics, curators, and artists are re-evaluating Edelheit’s role in shaping 20th-century feminist art, recognizing her as a trailblazer who shattered boundaries. Curator Bibiana Huang Matheis stated, “Martie Edelheit is an inspiration to generations of artists, especially to women, because she is strong, fearless, true to herself and her convictions.”
“I’ve always had a very intense dialogue in my work and in my head with art history, more than contemporary art – although I always felt I was going against the grain with what was being done in the art world at any given time. I also learned a lot from it, so I wasn’t totally outside of it, but I thought of myself as an outsider. I’m sort of startled and amazed at the current interest in my work. I’m delighted, but it’s not something that I personally sought out.”
At 94, she remains what she has always been: uncompromising, visionary, and ahead of her time.
Frank Matheis, Writer
Writer/Photographer Frank Matheis contributes the arts column “In Other Words” and the artivism column “Eco-Activism” to the Inspiration Art Group International. His current book project is titled “Rooted in Wonder – My Journey from Earth Child to Naturalist” with Jenny Richards. He is the co-author of the book ‘Sweet Bitter Blues’ with National Heritage Fellow Phil Wiggins (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). He is a retired contributing writer to Living Blues magazine (Center for Southern Culture Studies) and the former publisher/editor of thecountryblues.com. Frank was formerly an award-winning radio producer.
