As the bills for treating and housing him piled up, painter Frank Ettenberg suggested a simple solution to his partner, Deborah Martin.
“He was like, ‘Oh, just give them my work,’” she says of Ettenberg, known well beyond Santa Fe for his abstract expressionist creations spanning several decades. “He thinks you could just give his painting to the electric company. He doesn’t quite get that that’s not how this works.”
Not exactly, but Martin is selling pieces from Ettenberg’s extensive collection to help pay for his care and living quarters as he struggles with dementia, a condition that has progressed since he was profiled in Pasatiempo five years ago (see “In search of lost time,” January 2019). Martin, a sculptor, opened a sprawling gallery in 2023 at 628 Old Santa Fe Trail to display and sell the works, and she estimates it houses more than 300 of Ettenberg’s paintings and 1,000 or more paper works. The gallery is called martin modern, and some of Martin’s art also is there.
Between the new gallery and an exhibition at the Vladem Contemporary, Ettenberg’s paintings are getting plenty of face time in Santa Fe. The latter, Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000, runs through May 4, 2025 (see “Frame of reference,” June 7). Martin took a couple of photographs of Ettenberg at the June 8 opening, gazing at his featured piece New York-New Mexico #9, which he created in 1972.
Some of Ettenberg’s pieces are several feet wide. That, plus the sheer volume of his work, created a challenge when Martin was looking for a display gallery. Finally she came across a space that previously housed The Rugman of Santa Fe, which now operates on Lincoln Avenue.
Works by Frank Ettenberg on view at martin modern includeGreetings from Down Here(2002), acrylic on canvas.
“I started cleaning the roof of the building, and it took forever,” Martin says. “I rolled 14 gallons of paint in here and just moved everything. It’s been a lot of work in the past year, but it’s so nice to have somewhere to show Frank’s big paintings.”
Happy beginnings
Martin and Ettenberg, now 79, met in 2010 in Vienna and began dating within a couple of years. Martin recalls meeting the esteemed Ettenberg at a gallery in the Austrian capital.
“I thought he was retired and much older than me,” she says of her impressions before meeting Ettenberg, whose work she had been familiar with since the 1980s. “He came in, and it was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s my age and he’s cute.’ And he came right over and sat by me. I was seeing someone and he was seeing someone, so nothing really happened for over a year. Then we connected again and ended those relationships.”
Those were heady days, Martin says. Ettenberg loved Vienna in part because of Austria’s rich classical music history, and his fluency in German (the main language spoken in Austria) made it easy for the couple to make friends.
Unfortunately, darker forces were beginning to make their presence known.
“That’s when this dementia really started; even then I could tell that he had memory issues,” Martin says.
The year after the couple began dating, Ettenberg was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of blood cancer. He spent three months in a hospital in Vienna, Martin says, and went through 14 rounds of chemotherapy.
“I mean, he was really sick,” she says. “But they saved his life. It was pretty amazing. I don’t speak German, so I was just in our flat and at the hospital every day.”
Ettenberg has been in remission since, but the cancer took its toll. Martin endured another stressor after Frank returned home.
“I think it really kicked the dementia into overdrive,” Martin says. “I had a daughter who was special-needs, and she was in serious decline at the time. I had her on hospice care at my house for, like, seven months.” (Kristina “Sparky” Giles died April 20, 2018.)
Glimpses of old Frank
Ettenberg can still get around; his recent visit to the Vladem is just one example. He’s not much of a talker anymore, Martin says, but Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000 coaxed him out of his shell.
Works by Frank Ettenberg on view at martin modern include One Thinks of Two(2003), acrylic on canvas.
“Last week, I took him to see that show,” she says. “He talked so much that day. I haven’t heard him talk so much in, like, a year. I mean, it was amazing.”
Ettenberg clearly recalls events from long ago, Martin says.
“He still speaks fluent German,” she says. “He knows so much about classical music. I keep the radio on a classical music station. The other day, he said, ‘Oh, I played this when I was a kid, on clarinet,’ or he’ll recognize Beethoven. He still knows operas. He’ll know exactly who it is.”
The painful reality of dementia, of course, is that Ettenberg’s short-term memory has been decimated. When the couple visited the Vladem for the June 8 opening of Off-Center, he didn’t recall that the contemporary museum had been built.
“He doesn’t remember that we just had lunch five minutes ago,” Martin says. “It’s like everything’s new. Everything’s a surprise. I haven’t told him that our favorite cat died.”
Martin credits Ettenberg’s ex-wife, Silvia Stenitzer, with playing a huge role in ensuring he has been properly cared for. While there’s nothing amusing about Ettenberg’s condition, the situations that arise occasionally bring a smile. Martin recalls a time when Stenitzer walked into Ettenberg’s room just a few seconds after Martin had departed.
“He comes out of his room and says, ‘You know, I just walked this woman to the door, and I think I’d like to date her,’” Martin says of her longtime boyfriend’s response to seeing his ex-wife for what he thought was the first time.
Martin still visits the couple’s friends in Austria, but the trips aren’t the same without Ettenberg.
“A really, really bad part about [the most recent] trip was, I took the train by myself to Salzburg, and it was so just sad being on that train, [looking at] all these places we went together,” she says. “I was crying.”
While Ettenberg’s presence in her life has diminished, Martin doesn’t worry about having to say goodbye.
She says, “I keep telling people that he’s gonna outlive me.”
