Agnes Martin

Biography

At the Harwood Museum in Taos there is an octagonal room with an oculus in the ceiling: on the walls, seven large untitled canvases of 1993–1994; under the skylight, four yellow benches by Donald Judd. Agnes Martin gave the paintings to the museum and herself set out what the room should be; the design was by the Albuquerque firm Kells & Craig, and the negotiations were handled by the museum’s director, Robert Ellis, a friend of hers.

The gallery opened in 1997. The artist was eighty-five.

Agnes Bernice Martin was born on 22 March 1912 in Macklin, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, into a family of Scottish Presbyterian farmers; there were four children. From 1919 she grew up in Vancouver; in 1931 she moved to her sister in Bellingham, Washington, and from then on studied in the United States: at the Western Washington College of Education, then at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she took her bachelor’s degree in 1942. In New York she saw modern painting for the first time, Gorky, Gottlieb, Miró, and began to think seriously about the painter’s trade. In the summer of 1947 she worked at the field school of the University of New Mexico in Taos; at Columbia she heard Daisetsu Suzuki lecture on Zen and took from Asian thought not a religion but an ethic, a practical guide to getting through life. Then came the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she both studied and taught courses, American citizenship in 1950, and in 1952 a master’s degree in modern art from Columbia. In 1955–1957 she worked on a grant in Taos, painting biomorphic pictures in subdued tones; later she did her best to track down and destroy the paintings from the years of her first steps into abstraction.

In 1957, at the invitation of the gallerist Betty Parsons, Martin moved to New York and settled in a loft on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman and Lenore Tawney lived and worked. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1958; Barnett Newman promoted her work and helped hang her shows at Parsons’s gallery himself, and Ad Reinhardt became a close friend and mentor. In 1961 she wrote a short introduction to the brochure of Tawney’s first exhibition, the only time in her life she spoke in print about a colleague’s work. In the early 1960s her hand settled: square canvases six feet by six, covered with a dense, minute, softly drawn graphite grid, in black, white and brown only. In 1966, at the exhibition “Systemic Painting” at the Guggenheim Museum, these grids were hung beside Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman and Donald Judd as examples of Minimalism. She herself preferred to be called an abstract expressionist; of Rothko she said that he had “reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth”. To my mind the difference from the Minimalists is visible at arm’s length: in her grids the pencil trembles, the line falters, the hand is not hidden.

Her last New York painting was “Trumpet” (1967): instead of a single rectangle, a grid of rectangles drawn in pencil over uneven washes of translucent grey. That same year Martin abruptly left New York. Various reasons were given, Reinhardt’s death, the demolition of the houses on Coenties Slip; she herself said in a 2003 interview that she left only when she was told her loft would be pulled down, and that she could not imagine working in any other space in New York. For a year and a half she drove with a tent across Canada and the western United States, then rented fifty acres on Mesa Portales near the small town of Cuba, New Mexico, built an adobe house with her own hands and, over several years, four more buildings. Painting she set aside: until 1971, when the curator Douglas Crimp offered her a first non-commercial solo exhibition, she did not paint; in 1973 she returned to work with a portfolio of thirty serigraphs, “On a Clear Day”. In 1974, together with the architect Bill Katz, she put up a log-cabin studio, finished a group of new canvases, and from 1975 they were shown regularly; Pace Gallery and its founder Arne Glimcher remained her dealers to the end. In 1976 she made “Gabriel”, a 78-minute landscape film about a boy on a walk; a second film, “Captivity”, was left unfinished: the artist threw the rough cut into the town dump. From 1977 to 1993 she lived in Galisteo, where she again built an adobe house herself.

Newspapers, it was said, she had not read for the last fifty years.

In New Mexico light pastel washes entered the grids, shifting with the light; then Martin reduced her square from 72 to 60 inches and moved to bands of transparent, almost sky-like colour. In “Untitled No. 4” (1994) the pencil lines are drawn without a ruler, by eye, over diluted acrylic mixed with gesso; in the 1990s symmetry gave way more and more often to bands of varying width. The titles of the late canvases are simple and bright: “Happy Holiday” (1999), “I Love the Whole World” (2000). In a 1989 interview she said: “Beauty and perfection are the same. They never occur without happiness.” She had more than eighty-five solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum (1992–1994) and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam (1991–1992), three Venice Biennales (1976, 1980, 1997) and Documenta in 1972; in 1997 Venice gave her the Golden Lion, in 1992 she received the Kokoschka Prize, in 1998 the National Medal of Arts of the United States, and in 2004 she was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 1993 she moved to a retirement residence in Taos and died there on 16 December 2004, at ninety-two. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sets aside a permanent gallery for her work, and at Dia Beacon it is on long-term view.