The following information is submitted by Cathie Zusy, former Chief Curator, New Hampshire Historical Society

Versatile, epic painter Martin Joseph Hoffman (born 1935, St. Augustine) died Tuesday, February 5 at age 77 after a slow decline. Hoffman was both fine artist and illustrator, mounting five shows between 1973 and 1979 at the OK Harris gallery (NYC) while also doing freelance work for Playboy and for Frank & Jeff Lavaty & Associates of New York City.

A self-taught painter and gifted drummer, Hoffman played in the Miami Jackson High School Marching Band. Famous for its fragmented Be-Bop drum rhythms, the band toured Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Brazil. After just a week at the University of Miami on a four-year music scholarship, Hoffman transferred to the Florida State University. There, he studied physics for a year before starting a family with his high school sweetheart Gail Dougherty in Miami. They were married in 1956 and had four children. Hoffman provided for them by working as art director for the Miami News, and later Graphic Arts, Inc., in Miami and Steiner & Wall Advertising in Coral Gables. In 1970, Dougherty and Hoffman separated, and Hoffman moved to New York City.

In a 2007 article about Hoffman in Vero Beach Magazine, gallery owner Ivan Karp remembered Hoffman's confidence as he walked into OK Harris looking for a dealer. It was Karp who encouraged him to abandon painting nudes for the bleak industrial wastelands of the Jersey Meadows. In 1973, Hoffman showed a series of twenty 60" X 80" landscapes—the largest size painting that could fit in a freight elevator—depicting "the poetical and lyrical aspects of destruction and decay." Most of these are now in private collections in Germany and France. Later that year, Hoffman exhibited twenty-seven "Basement" paintings, also 60" X 80", "with heavily textured, traumatically rendered paint," depicting the basement of Hoffman's studio on the Upper West side. A series of street people and "Hulks," featuring the carcasses of giant machines, followed. "Hulks," in 1979, was Hoffman's final show at OK Harris.

Hoffman moved into an old farmhouse near Cooperstown, NY around this time, and he painted a series of 60" X 80" "Upstate Landscapes" and a "Stream series". These paintings are in private collections and were never publically exhibited. Hoffman did a series of 9' X12' "Epic Paintings" in 1980 that many believe are his best work. Autumn Landscape with Incident, depicting falconers on a hillside nearby his upstate home, and Abandon in Place, "combining elements from different sites" (a wrecked car Hoffman saw in New York, an abandoned launch site, and surfers at New Smyrna Beach), are both in the collection of the Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, MI. In the mid 1980s, Hoffman did a series of smaller, whimsical gouache brush-stroke paintings of little spirit people, inspired, perhaps, by the birth of his daughter Athena Marie.

When Hoffman returned to Florida in 1989, first to Daytona and later to Vero Beach, he painted Landscapes of the Apocalypse—empty landscapes seen from low vantage points—and paintings of surf and sand. A large body of Daytona "Beach" paintings of various sizes were represented and sold by R. Thames Fine Arts in Ormond Beach.

Throughout his career, Hoffman continued to do commercial work. From the 1960s until 1992, Hoffman was a regular contributor to Playboy; Hugh Heffner said recently that the artist "was always one of my favorites." The January 1980 issue notes Hoffman's "versatility is truly astounding; the same man who produces super-realistic paintings can also create stylish Thirties-style illustrations." In 1972, Playboy commissioned the artist to paint the "Woman Eternal" series, later featured in the December 1972 issue. Many of Hoffman's paintings still hang in the corporate offices in Beverly Hills.

In 1980, Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry asked Hoffman to create the cover for their album AutoAmerican. Hoffman pictures the band on his Greenwich Village roof. Other commercial clients included NASA, Harley Davidson, US Steel, Pfizer, Caesar's Palace (Las Vegas), The Fountainbleu Hotel (Miami), a Japanese tea company, sports teams, and manufacturers of cars, airplanes, and boats. Hoffman became part of the NASA Art Program in the 1980s and documented five shuttle launches. These paintings were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.

Hoffman's paintings can be found in many major collections including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Indiana Museum of Art, the Norton Museum of Art (FL), the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, and the Flint Institute of Arts (MI).

He will be fondly remembered for his exquisite eye and his virtuosic, seemingly effortless gift of arranging light, color and form. Artist and friend Lisa Williamson recalls "the care he took to have each color of gray mixed for all rooms in his big farmhouse based on what sort of light each room would receive, northern, eastern, etc. And the lusciousness of his paint handling whether it be women or those New Jersey fields...." Former museum curator Cathie Zusy remembers the artfully arranged potatoes and onions in the kitchen, the rocks and shells on the porch, and the thoughtful landscaping around his farmhouse. Friends Jim and Mary T. Zaengle recalled that Hoffman "loved to spend hours discussing where we came from, the possible reasons for our existence, trying to understand the wonders of nature beyond the obvious, and what it will possibly be like after we depart this earth."

Hoffman continued producing work over the past decade, including, in 2002, a proposal for the New World Trade Center (now in the collection of the Library of Congress), a series of word paintings, and, finally, his metaphysical close: a "Circle Series." ?

Hoffman leaves behind three daughters and two sons, all with "Mar" in their names: Marsha Hoffman of Sarasota (FL), Marisa Oriaku of Vero Beach (FL), Athena Marie Leverock Hoffman of Oneonta (NY), Mark Hoffman of Vero Beach, and Marlan Hoffman of San Diego (CA); seven grandchildren; his ex-wife Gail Dougherty Guarino of Fort Pierce ( FL); and Linda Leverock, mother of Athena Marie, of Oneonta (NY).

Written by Cathie Zusy based on the notes of Martin Hoffman, Ellen Fischer's "The Many Moods of Martin Hoffman," written for Vero Beach Magazine (February 2007) and much fact checking.

MUSEUM CAPTIONS
Museum accession information provided by the Flint Institute of Arts (MI), which allows publication of these images as long as they are credited appropriately. Notes by Cathie Zusy, drawn from Martin Hoffman's writings.

Martin Hoffman
American, 1935 - 2013
Psyche and Techne
acrylic on canvas, 1980
102 x 144 inches
Collection of the Flint Institute of Arts, Gift of the artist, 2008.37
Note: This combines images of a lobby from Hoffman's New York apartment, a sculpture he had seen in Rome, and images from a rocket blastoff.

Martin Hoffman
American, 1935 - 2013
Andy Warhol and Archie Bunker
acrylic on canvas, 1975
60 x 80 inches
Collection of the Flint Institute of Arts, Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Fouad A. Rabiah, 1984.22
Note: Hoffman wrote: "Andy Warhol invited me to make this portrait of him and his doggy companion 'Archie'—It was painted at his factory on Union Square. Shown here, his collection of ocean-liner furniture, Cookie Jars, Deco Poster, Cecil B. DeMille's stuffed dalmation-doberman in the corner—The 'Halston' portrait was something that the Halston people meet with me to do—but since Andy was his friend he ended up doing it in my "Basement" style with his silk screen overprinted. It appeared as advertising in Vogue Magazine." [sic]

Martin Hoffman
American, 1935 - 2013
Autumn Landscape with Incident
acrylic on canvas, 1980
102 x 144 inches
Collection of the Flint Institute of Arts, Gift of the artist, 2008.38
Note: This depicts falconers on a hillside nearby Hoffman's upstate New York home.

Martin Hoffman
American, 1935 - 2013
Abandon in Place
acrylic on canvas, 1980
102 x 144 inches
Collection of the Flint Institute of Arts, Gift of the artist, 2008.39
This image combines elements from different sites: a wrecked car Hoffman saw in New York, an abandoned launch site at Cape Canaveral ("where the first men on the moon departed from"), and surfers on the beach in New Smyrna (FL).