Agnes Martin

Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was a Canadian-born American abstract painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist. She won a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998.

Life and career

Agnes Martin was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan, grew up in Vancouver, and moved to the United States in 1931, becoming a citizen in 1950. Martin studied at Western Washington University College of Education, Bellingham, WA, prior to receiving her B.A. (1942) from Teachers College, Columbia University. A few years following graduation, Martin matriculated at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where she also taught art courses before returning to Columbia University to earn her M.A. (1952).

Her work is most closely associated with Taos, New Mexico, although she moved to New York City after being discovered by the artist/gallery owner Betty Parsons in 1957. In 1957, she settled in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where her friends and neighbors included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. After Martin left New York and moved to Cuba, New Mexico, in 1967, she did not paint for seven years. However, in 1974, she completed a group of new paintings and since 1975 has exhibited regularly. According to a filmed interview with her which was released in 2003, she had moved from New York City only when she was told her rented loft/workspace/studio would be no longer available because of the building's imminent demolition. She goes on further to state that she could not conceive of working in any other space in New York.

The Agnes Martin estate is represented by Pace Gallery, New York.

Artistic style

Her signature style is defined by an emphasis upon line, grids, and fields of extremely subtle color. In the 1966 exhibition Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Martin's grids were therefore celebrated as examples of Minimalist art and were hung among works by artists including Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd. While minimalist in form, however, these paintings were quite different in spirit from those of her other minimalist counterparts, retaining small flaws and unmistakable traces of the artist's hand; she shied away from intellectualism, favoring the personal and spiritual. Her paintings, statements, and influential writings often reflect an interest in Eastern philosophy, especially Taoist. Because of her work's added spiritual dimension, which became more and more dominant after 1967, she preferred to be classified as an abstract expressionist. She consciously distanced herself from the social life and social events that brought other artists into the public eye. When she died at age 92, she was said to have not read a newspaper for the last 50 years. The book dedicated to the exhibition of her work in New York at The Drawing Center in 2005 – 3x abstraction (Yale University Press) – analyzes the spiritual dimension in Martin's work.

Martin worked only in black, white, and brown before moving to New Mexico. During this time, she introduced light pastel washes to her grids, colors that shimmered in the changing light. Later, Martin reduced the scale of her square canvases and shifted her work to use bands of ethereal colour.

Exhibitions

Since her first solo exhibition in 1958, Martin’s work has been the subject of more than 85 solo shows and two retrospectives including the survey, Agnes Martin, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which later traveled to Milwaukee, Miami, Houston and Madrid (1992–94) and Agnes Martin: Paintings and Drawings 1974–1990 organized by the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, with subsequent venues in France and Germany (1991–92). In 1998, The Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico mounted Agnes Martin Works on Paper. In 2002, the Menil Collection, Houston, mounted Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond. That same year, the Harwood Museum of Art at the University of New Mexico, Taos, organized Agnes Martin: Paintings from 2001, as well as a symposium honoring Martin on the occasion of her 90th birthday. The Harwood also has a dedicated Agnes Martin Gallery, featuring their permanent collection of seven of Martin's paintings. Her work is on "long-term view" and part of the permanent holdings of Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York.

In addition to participating in an international array of group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale (1997, 1980, 1976), the Whitney Biennial (1995, 1977), and Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1972), Martin has been the recipient of multiple honors including the Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of the Women’s Caucus for Art of the College Art Association (2005); the Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts given by Governor Gary Johnson, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1998); the National Medal of Arts awarded by President Bill Clinton and the National Endowment for the Arts (1998); the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement by the College Art Association (1998); the Golden Lion for Contribution to Contemporary Art at the Venice Biennale (1997); the Oskar Kokoschka Prize awarded by the Austrian government (1992); the Alexej von Jawlensky Prize awarded by the city of Wiesbaden, Germany (1991); and election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York (1989).

Cultural references

Composer John Zorn's Redbird (1995) was inspired by and dedicated to Martin.

Sister Wendy Beckett, in her book American Masterpieces, said about Martin: "Agnes Martin often speaks of joy; she sees it as the desired condition of all life. Who would disagree with her?... No-one who has seriously spent time before an Agnes Martin, letting its peace communicate itself, receiving its inexplicable and ineffable happiness, has ever been disappointed. The work awes, not just with its delicacy, but with its vigor, and this power and visual interest is something that has to be experienced."

Frida Hyvönen's song "Straight Thin Line" was inspired by Agnes Martin.

Poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg's poem "Gridding, after some sentences by Agnes Martin" discusses patterns in the natural world, makes a parallel between writing and painting, and ends with a line about the poet's admiration of Martin's work.

Bibliography

• Martin, Agnes, Writings, edited by Dieter Schwarz, Winterthur: Ostfildern, Cantz Verlag, 1991.
• Martin, Agnes, "The Untroubled Mind," in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Kristine Stiles and peter Selz, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, pp. 128–137. ISBN 0-520-20253-8

Further reading

• Brandauer, Aline, Agnes Martin: Works on Paper, Lumen Books and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation /1998
• Fer, Briony, "Drawing Drawing: Agnes Martin's Infinity", in: 3 X Abstraction, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, New Haven: Yale University Press and NY: The Drawing Center, 2005. Reprinted in Women Artists at the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, MIT Press / October Books, 2006.
• Haskell, Barbara, Agnes Martin, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992.
• Krauss, Rosalind E., "Agnes Martin: The/Could/", in :Inside the Visible, edited by Catherine de Zegher, MIT Press, 1996.
• Pollock, Griselda, "Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes", in 3 X Abstraction, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, New Haven: Yale University Press and NY: The Drawing Center, 2005. ISBN 0-300-10826-5.

External links

• Zwirner & Wirth: Agnes Martin
• Agnes Martin on artnet
• Interview with Agnes Martin (1997) by Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama
• Oral history interview with Agnes Martin, 1989 May 15, Archives of American Art