The fall edition of The Paris Review features the work of two artists. Martha Bonnie Diamond is one of them. Born in New York in 1944, she died just two years ago, in 2023. She was among the most singular pictorial voices of her generation. For more than six decades she explored the city as a perceptual register. Rendering it recognizable never interested her.

She studied at Carleton College and later at New York University. Without much effort, she slipped into the intellectual atmosphere of downtown New York, speaking as an equal with poets and artists aligned with the New York School. From within that circle she cultivated a painting that granted nothing to emotion, concentrating instead on the purely perceptual—seeking, it seems to me, a mental reorganization born of light and color rather than architectural structure.

Her work—poised between urban figuration and an almost atmospheric abstraction—is built through broad, rustic brushstrokes, dense layers of color, and a visual structure that reads like an energetic re-encounter with the city. She insisted more than once that she was not attempting to “paint emotions” but “perceptions.” One might understand this as the desire to inhabit her territories—always suspended between the literal and the symbolic—through a syntax that remains entirely pictorial.

Diamond was recognized by institutions such as MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, and was celebrated—belatedly—with a major monograph in 2024: Martha Diamond: Deep Time, organized by the Colby College Museum of Art and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her legacy introduces fragility as a quality within the contemporary dialogue on the urban landscape. Fragility understood, if I’m reading it correctly, as the fleeting instant in which buildings, streets, and light unsettle the retina before we can perceive them as architecture.