AGNES MARTIN
Index
1.Personal life Personal life 2.Career 3.Artistic style 4.Exhibitions 5.Collections 6.Legacy 7.Art market 8.In popular culture 9.Bibliography 10.Notes 11.Further reading 12.External links
1.Personal life Agnes Bernice Martin was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan, grew up in Vancouver,[2] and moved to the United States in 1931, becoming an American citizen in 1940.[3] Martin studied at Western Washington University College of Education, Bellingham, WA, prior to receiving her B.A. (1942) from Teachers College, Columbia University.[4] After hearing lectures by the Zen Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki at Columbia, she became interested in Asian thought, not as a religious discipline, but as a code of ethics, a practical how-to for getting through life.[4] 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).[5] She left New York City in 1967 and settled in New Mexico. She built an adobe home for herself there. She lived alone all her adult life.[1]
2.Career 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. That year, she settled in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where her friends and neighbors, several of whom were also affiliated with Parsons, included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. Barnett Newman actively promoted Martin’s work, and helped install Martin’s exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery beginning in the late 1950s.[6] Another close friend and mentor was Ad Reinhardt.[7] In 1961 Martin contributed a brief introduction to a brochure for her friend Lenore Tawney’s first solo exhibition, the only occasion on which she wrote on the work of a fellow artist.[8] In 1967, Reinhardt died and the studio at Coenties Slip was slated for demolition. After Martin left New York and moved to Cuba, New Mexico, she did not paint for seven years and consciously distanced herself from the
social life and social events that brought other artists into the public eye. She collaborated with architect Bill Katz in 1974 on a log cabin she would use as her studio.[9]
That same year, she completed a group of new paintings and from 1975 until her death 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 went on further to state that she could not conceive of working in any other space in New York. When she died at age 92, she was said not to have 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) – analyzed the spiritual dimension in Martin’s work.[citation needed] The Agnes Martin estate is represented by Pace Gallery, New York.
3.Artistic style In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, Martin’s early works included biomorphic paintings in subdued colors made when the artist had a grant to work in Taos between 1955 and 1957. However, she did her best to seek out and destroy paintings from the years when she was taking her first steps into abstraction.[7] Martin praised Mark Rothko for having “reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth”. Following his example Martin also pared down to the most reductive elements to encourage a perception of perfection and to emphasize transcendent reality.[10] Her signature style was defined by an emphasis upon line, grids, and fields of extremely subtle color. Particularly in her breakthrough years of the early 1960s, she created 6 × 6 foot square canvases that were covered in dense, minute and softly delineated graphite grids. [11] 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.[12] 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 reflected 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.
Martin worked only in black, white, and brown before moving to New Mexico. The last painting before she abandoned her career, and left New York in 1967, Trumpet, marked a departure in that the single rectangle evolved into an overall grid of rectangles. In this painting the rectangles were drawn in pencil over uneven washes of gray translucent paint.[13] In 1973, she returned to art making, and produced a portfolio of 30 serigraphs, On a Clear Day.[14] During her time in Taos, she introduced light pastel washes to her grids, colors that shimmered in the changing light. Later, Martin reduced the scale of her signature
72 Ă— 72 square paintings to 60 Ă— 60 inches[15] and shifted her work to use bands of ethereal color.[16] Another departure was a modification, if not a refinement, of the grid structure, which Martin has used since the late 1950s. In Untitled No. 4 (1994), for example, one viewed the gentle striations of pencil line and primary color washes of diluted acrylic paint blended with gesso. The lines, which encompassed this painting, were not measured by a ruler, but rather intuitively marked by the artist.,[15] In the 1990s, symmetry would often give way to varying widths of horizontal bands.
4.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 Jamaica (1992–94) and Agnes Martin: Paintings and Drawings 1874–1900 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, Pandora, organized Agnes Martin: Paintings from 2001, as well as a symposium honoring Martin on the occasion of her 90th birthday.
n 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); Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1992);[17] I 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[18] 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).[19]
5.Collections Martin’s work can be found in major public collections in the United States, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Her work is on “long-term view” and part of the permanent holdings of Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York.
International holdings of Martin’s work include the Tate, London and Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden.
6.Legacy Martin became an inspiration to younger artists, from Eva Hesse to Ellen Gallagher.[20] In 1994, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, part of the University of New Mexico announced that it would renovate its Pueblo-revival building and dedicate one wing to Martin’s work.[21] The gallery was designed according to the artist’s wishes in order to accommodate Martin’s gift of seven large untitled paintings made between 1993 and 1994.[22] An Albuquerque architectural firm, Kells & Craig, designed the octagonal gallery with an oculus installed overhead, and four yellow Donald Judd benches placed directly under the oculus.[23] [24] The gift of the paintings and gallery’s design and construction were negotiated and overseen by Robert M. Ellis, the Harwood’s director at the time and a close friend of Martin’s. Today, the Agnes Martin Gallery attracts visitors from all over the world and has been com-
pared by scholars to the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (Matisse Chapel), Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, and the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
7.Art market In 2007, Martin’s Loving Love (2000) was sold for $2.95 million at Christie’s, New York.[11]
8.In popular culture Composer John Zorn’s Redbird (1995) was inspired by and dedicated to Martin.[25] 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.”[citation needed] 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.[26]
Her work inspired a Google doodle on the 102nd anniversary of her birth on March 22, 2014. The doodle takes color cues from Agnes Martin’s late work which is marked by soft edges, muted colors and distinctly horizontal bands, turned to six vertical bars, one for each letter of the google logo.[27]
9.Bibliography Martin, Agnes, Writings / Schriften, edited by Dieter Schwarz, Winterthur: Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1991. (English and German edition) ISBN 3893223266 / 3-89322-326-6 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
10.Notes Schudel, Matt (December 18, 2004). “Influential Abstract Painter Agnes Martin Dies at 92”. The Washington Post. Retrieved November 25, 2011. MoMA | The Collection | Agnes Martin. (American, born Canada. 1912–2004), Moma. org. Accessed March 28, 2011. Collection Online | Agnes Martin, Guggenheimcollection. org. Accessed March 28, 2011. Cotter, Holland (December 17, 2004). “Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92”. The New York Times. Retrieved November 25, 2011. Knight, Christopher (December 17, 2004). “Agnes Martin, 92; Abstract Painter Won the Golden Lion”. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 25, 2011. Agnes Martin (12 November 2008). “Starlight 1963”. Lot Notes. Christie’s New York, Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Retrieved 22 March 2014. Ann Landi (March 13, 2012), Saved From the Artist’s Fire Wall Street Journal.
Agnes Martin, Homage to Greece (1959) Christie’s New York, Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 11 May 2011. Christopher Bagley (March 2008), Perfect Vision W Magazine. Agnes Martin, Untitled #1 (1989) Christie’s New York, Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 12 November 2008. Agnes Martin, Loving Love (2000) Christie’s New York, Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 13 November 2007. Dia Art Foundation – Exhibition Main : Agnes Martin, Diacenter.org. Accessed March 28, 2011. Agnes Martin: Five Decades, February 20 – April 26, 2003 Zwirner & Wirth, New York. Agnes Martin National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Agnes Martin, Untitled No. 4 (1994) Christie’s New York, Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 14 May 2002.
Tate Online: ARTIST ROOMS AGNES MARTIN, Tate.org. uk. Accessed March 28, 2011. “Book of Members, 1780– 2010: Chapter B”. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 25, 2014. Lifetime Honors – National Medal of Arts, nea.gov. Accessed March 28, 2011. “Deceased Members: Agnes Martin”. Retrieved 23 March 2014. Holland Cotter (December 17, 2004). “Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92”. New York Times. Retrieved 23 March 2014. Carol Vogel (September 23, 1994), The Agnes Martin Wing New York Times. “Agnes Martin Gallery, The Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico”. Taos, NM: HarwoodMuseum.org. Retrieved 28 March 2011. “Can you help me understand the Agnes Martin Gallery?”. Taos, NM: Harwood Museum of Art. Retrieved 23 March 2014. “Harwood Museum”. Kells + Craig Projects. Retrieved 23 March 2014. Tzadik catalogue Behm-Steinberg, Hugh (2008). “Three Poems”. EOAGH: A Jour-
nal of the Arts (Charles Alexander) (4). Retrieved March 23, 2011. “Happy Birthday Agnes Martin March 22. Google Doodle.”, Imgace, March 22, 2014
11.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. Glimcher, Arne, Agnes Martin Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, Phaidon Press, 2012. 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.
12.External links Zwirner & Wirth: Agnes Martin Agnes Martin on artnet Interview with Agnes Martin (1997) on YouTube by Chuck Smith and Sono Kuwayama Oral history interview with Agnes Martin, 1989 May 15, Archives of American Art Agnes Martin at New Mexico Museum of Art 1997 interview