Martha Margaret McKay Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1924 - d. 1983

MARTHA MCKAY was born in Washington, DC in 1924. She graduated from the Corcoran School of Art in 1951 and attended the ecole Fernand Leger. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Academy of Science, Washington, DC; the Salon de Beaux Art, Paris; and the Rome-New York Art Foundation, Rome, among others. Her work is in several public and private collections in the United Stated and abroad, including the Rome-New York Art Foundation. In her paintings, McKay embraces the allover abstraction techniques of her expressionist contemporaries. Her frenetic, calligraphic strokes draw the viewer's eye around the entire canvas, subverting formal traditions of composition and perspective. McKay drew inspiration from the Japanese Gutai art group, as well as artists and critics she met while living in Paris and New York. Though widely exhibited during her career, McCay struggled to gain recognition from the larger art world due to her battle with mental illness. After being hospitalized before a major solo show in New York, the artist moved with her family to Maryland in 1961, where she lived and worked until her death in 1983.