Agnes Martin

Canadian-born American artist

• Born: March 22, 1912
• Birthplace: Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada
• Died: December 16, 2004
• Place of death: Taos, New Mexico

A leading American artist of the style of minimalism in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Martin persevered in her commitment to art as a means of spiritual expression. She became one of the few women artists of the twentieth century to be recognized for her artistic achievements.

Early Life

Born on a farm in Maklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, Agnes Martin grew up in a pioneer family in Vancouver, British Columbia, and moved to Bellingham, Washington, in 1919, where she attended high school and Western Washington State College. She went on to receive a degree from the Teachers College of Columbia University in were chosen, majoring in fine arts and art education. After working for four years as an art teacher, she moved to New Mexico looking for new opportunities and the chance to pursue her own work, away from the complexities of city life. She taught in a number of art programs in high schools and colleges in New Mexico and received early recognition for her own work with the receipt of scholarships and awards. In 1950, Martin became a United States citizen.

The experience of living in the beauty and open spaces of the West would always be inspirational to Martin’s work, despite a number of return trips to New York to complete her education and earn a master of arts degree in 1952. Although her early work was dominated by landscapes and floating abstract shapes, in the period of postgraduate study, she was finally ready to understand and accept the stylistic achievements of the avant-garde painters working in New York. Finding it too difficult and expensive to live in New York, she returned to Taos, New Mexico, for five years. Beginning in 1957, Martin lived and worked in the Coenties Slip area of lower Manhattan in New York City; nearby were such like-minded artists as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. It was a dynamic period for art, dominated by the New York school of abstract expressionists and action painters. For the next ten years, a critical phase of development in her early life as an artist, she would become part of the movement of many of her contemporaries to respond to the painterly aggression of the abstract expressionists . Seeking new solutions to the pictorial problems inherent in painting, she would progress from painting simple biomorphic shapes in open spaces to the tranquil geometric canvases of her own personal and mature vision of art. Here, too, she attended lectures by the yoga master Krishnamurti and Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, beginning her lifelong interest in Eastern philosophies.

In December of 1958, Martin had her first one-artist exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City and received critical acclaim for her work, a significant accomplishment for a woman artist at that time.

Life’s Work

The decade of the 1960’s in New York was definitive in the formulation of Martin’s personal aesthetic. Based on the total distillation of geometric forms to pure translucent surfaces, this aesthetic was quiet and simple. It appeared to be totally contrary to the brash and gestural painting techniques practiced by the abstract expressionists beginning in the 1940’s and much more structured than those of their followers, the color field painters, who reduced their canvases to freely formed areas of color. After many years of working with abstract shapes floating in space, Martin realized that geometry was the most appropriate vehicle for her to express the spiritual content that was implicit in her paintings. Taking the “expressionist” definition of modern painting seriously, she sought the means to express the inspirational views of nature that had so affected her for many years in the West. Inspired by the Greeks, who had also used the perfection of mathematical geometric forms as the basis of Classical art, her canvases used mathematics in their underlying organizational structure. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, the representational subject matter that was so important to the Greeks was no longer necessary; it had been rejected in favor of the purity of mathematical forms. Over monochromatic color surfaces painted in thin washes of oils, Martin penciled in geometrics as a series of grids of different sizes and arrangements within the rectangle of the picture frame. She said that the inspiration for the grids came when she was thinking about the egoless, untroubled innocence of trees.

In 1964, Martin changed her technique from oils to acrylics painted in a limited palette on white-gessoed canvases. With the graphite grids dematerializing beneath the muted colors, the paintings were simplified to the bare minimum. Acrylics also allowed her to create misty background effects that would enhance the spiritual and emotional content of her works. Requiring the utmost concentration, these canvases lured the viewer into their very being and acted as meditational devices. They created a transcendental reality in paint. With nature as the source of inspiration, the paintings of Martin went beyond the simple forms favored by the other artists of the 1960’s known as minimalists.

Although hailed as a minimalist artist during her entire career, Martin was inspired to produce simple geometric shapes for reasons that were quite different in concept from the minimalist school. Minimalism, with Martin in its midst, was introduced to the American public in 1966 through an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York titled Systemic Painting. True minimalist artists avoid expressive painting devices and representational subjects and concentrate on the repetition of simple shapes and forms that can be extended indefinitely. The repetitive grids played out in infinite series of variations by Martin appeared to reflect such ideas. Nevertheless, her work was full of personal meaning and human expression, while minimalism was purely objective and lacking in sentimentality. Actually, Martin was far more of an abstract expressionist according to its true definition and saw herself as such, rather than as a minimalist totally devoid of expressive feeling. Abstract expressionism embraces a number of styles that reveal emotional content, its “expression” manifested through “abstract” means. Martin also expressed herself, but with quiet sublime means based on the reductive abstract principles of geometry. These principles are closer to abstract expressionism than to minimalism.

Martin’s personal philosophy emerged from a number of sources that were popular in the intellectual communities of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The teachings of Daoism and Zen Buddhism joined those of the Bible as inspiration for artists looking beyond mundane earthly reality for their subject matter. Asserting that enlightenment could be attained through self-contemplation and inner awareness, these Asian philosophies directed an entire generation to participate in the tranquility of meditation. The paintings of Martin assist in the meditative process, affecting the viewer with the chant of their subliminal atmospheric vibrations. In an untitled 1962 painting, for instance, a small gray-blue canvas contains a dot-and-dash pattern. Without a central focus, the work invites the viewer to contemplate, rather than reason about, a vision that cannot exist in nature; this decentralization encourages an emptying of the mind of the influences that create the ego and an increased awareness of the mind’s larger realm.

The personal content of Martin’s work demanded spiritual isolation and a level of quietude that was impossible in the vibrant life of the New York art world. In 1967, she announced her retirement from painting and left the constant interruptions of the city to find solitude in New Mexico. She settled on an isolated mesa near the village of Cuba, built an adobe and log house, and abandoned the distractions of the world for an existence without even a telephone. It was not until 1974, after several offers by gallery dealers and museum directors to organize exhibitions of her work, that she built a studio adjacent to her home and resumed painting. By then both her life and work had deeply impressed a new generation of artists, and collectors sought her paintings. In 1976 she expanded into film with Gabriel, which depicted a young boy’s fascinated exploration of the world.

At the age of sixty-two, Martin began another phase of her painting career. The translucent canvases with their wide variety of pencil grids barely visible through the dominantly white color field were replaced by paintings featuring broad stripes of lightly modulated colors. As if merely washed with bands of pale colors, her canvases of the late 1970’s and 1980’s are as luminous as the perfect natural harmony, the titles often reflecting the tones and grandeur of nature, as in Mountains, Dark River, and Starlight. The graphite markings are less conspicuous and washes of color are dominant. Still contained within the geometric construction of the canvas and defined by ordered and ruled markings, the broad color bands shimmer and tremble as if induced by a meditative state.

During 1990’s, Martin continued to work in solitude, surrounded by the desert beauty of the American West. Her earlier preference for symmetry in the bands of color evolved into bands of varying width. This innovation had the effect of reducing the austerity of her work, and critics found in it signs of contentment and serenity evidence of a transcendent celebration of existence in the world. In her 1999 series Innocent Love , for instance, the horizontal lines create the impression of infinite extension that touch on what Martin herself called the “untroubled state of mind.” She further wrote, “Art is a representation of our devotion to life. The enormous pitfall is devotion to oneself instead of to life. All works that are self-devoted are absolutely ineffective.” She recommended to young artists that, to appreciate existence, they take every opportunity to be alone.

In 1991 Martin moved to a retirement community in Taos, New Mexico, where she continued to work daily in her studio. The only significant change in her discipline was the reduction in size of canvases so that they were easier to handle. Hers was an austere, reclusive life focusing on beauty, which she considered to exist in the mind, rather than in the beholding eye. For relaxation she wrote poetry, was a fan of Agatha Christie mysteries, and enjoyed classical music, although she did not own stereo equipment or a television. She eschewed connections to social and political movements, never reading newspapers. Notably casual, she once attended an event hosted by Harper’s Bazaar, during which she was honored as among one hundred “Women of Achievement,” wearing moccasins and an unironed blouse and skirt.

She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1989, received the Golden Lion Award for Contribution to Contemporary Art at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and in 1998 was presented the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1997 the Agnes Martin Gallery, featuring her paintings, was created in the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico. The university also sponsored a symposium in honor of her ninetieth birthday in 2002.

Martin died of pneumonia in Taos on December 16, 2004, at the age of ninety-two. She left no survivors. In 2005, retrospectives of her art were held at Dia in Beacon, New York, and at La Biennale in Venice.

Significance

The history of modern art follows two major paths of artistic stylization: expressionism and abstractionism. Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, artists followed these paths in an effort to create a visual language significant to modern life. Martin determined that she could do both: express her own personal concepts about art and its meaning as a universal phenomenon created by human beings from their own instincts and also formalize these concepts within the perfect structures of geometry. As a woman working outside the commercial environment and demands of the New York art world, she was prevented from receiving the popular acclaim and recognition given to so many of her male contemporaries, despite critical praise from writers. The highly personal and intellectual nature of her art often demanded more than the ordinary art viewer was willing to invest to comprehend its meaning fully. Martin determined her own path as an artist and maintained her vision throughout her long career. It was a vision of sublime perfection incorporating deceptively simple imagery and the tenets of modernism as understood and successfully executed by very few artists. For this perfect association of personal expression and abstraction, Martin stands as one of the masters of twentieth century modern art.

Bibliography

Arnason, H. H. History of Modern Art. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1986. History of modern art includes section on minimal art and the work of Martin. Excellent basic survey of modern art.

Balken, Debra Bricker. Abstract Expressionism. London: Tate, 2005. A brief history and discussion of the style of art with which Martin most closely identified, illustrated by vivid examples of its most famous practitioners.

Franz, Eric. In Quest of the Absolute. New York: Peter Blum Editions, 1998. The author discusses the work of Martin and others in the context of the larger evolution of Western art toward the attainment of meditative grace through abstraction.

Gruen, John. “Agnes Martin: ’Everything, Everything Is About Feeling . . . Feeling and Recognition.’” ARTnews 75 (September, 1976): 91-94. Review of exhibition of Martin’s paintings at The Pace Gallery and Robert Elkon Gallery.

Haskell, Barbara. Agnes Martin. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992. The catalog for the major retrospective exhibition of Martin’s works organized by the Whitney Museum in 1993. Includes essays by Barbara Haskell, Rosalind Krauss, and Anna C. Chave and quotations from writings by the artist.

Martin, Agnes, and Arne Climcher. Agnes Martin: Paintings and Writings. New York: Pace Wildenstein, 2000. Side by side with essays by Martin affirming the power of love, nature, and meditation in her life are fifteen paintings from 1999.

Rodgers, Timothy Robert. In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of Agnes Martin, Maria Martinez and Florence Pierce. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2005. With essays by Rogers, Marsha Bol, and Lucy R. Lippard, this book, the catalog from an exhibition, presents Martin as one of three New Mexico artists, discussing both her works and career, and offers many reproductions of paintings.