Marty Greenbaum

Marty Greenbaum (born 1934 in New York City; died 2020) was an American painter, mixed media assemblage and book artist. He burned books in the 1960s, exhibiting the remains as ‘corpses’ and later made fetishistic notebooks filled with colored paper and scribbled equations, accretions of feathers and Rhoplex.

“Marty Greenbaum and Barton Benes destroy texts to create sculpture: Benes ‘Bound Book,’ a literal rope and wax imprisonment, and Greenbaum’s ‘Cutting Up,’ a mixed media paste over of muted colors.” Some of his most notable artist books include: Batman 1963-67, In ’84 Returned in 2004. In Marty’s words, “Many techniques and strategies have been used in my mixed media books. By the time of In ’84 Returned in 2004 I was cutting out shapes and opening up areas in the pages of a finished or an empty book. This device mirrored my sense of movement through space and time, the turning of the pages like a walk through the city, became an exploration of a multidirectional experience, ricocheting back and forth — the going out and the coming back, the going forward and the return.”