Agnes Martin

Pace Gallery, New York
Helen W. Benjamin, New York
Sotheby's New York, May 8, 1996, lot 50
Private Collection, United States
Ace Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above in May 1998

New York, Pace Gallery, Agnes Martin: New Paintings, 1975

Kasha Gula, "Review of Exhibitions: Agnes Martin at Pace," Art in America 63, May - June 1975, p. 85, illustrated in color
John Gruen, "Agnes Martin: 'Everything, every thing  is about feeling...feeling and recognition'." Artnews, September 1976, p. 91, illustrated in color

This painting is in excellent condition overall. Please refer to the department for a detailed condition report. This canvas is framed in a metal strip frame.
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Agnes Martin's, Untitled #7, from 1974 stuns the viewer with ethereal radiance as though it is emanating from the canvas itself.  Soft washes of lightly tinted blues and pinkish tans dematerialize the surface of the work.  Emptied of image, narrative and meaning in any conventional sense, the present work, and others from the artist's career are nonetheless expansive in their evocation of beauty, peace, happiness and a spiritual sublime.  An excellent example of the artist's return to painting after a seven year hiatus and her resonant affinity with the New Mexico landscape she then called home, Untitled #7, strips composition to its barest bones, producing an ineffable work that is as evanescent as light itself.

Agnes Martin grew up on a homestead in Canada surrounded by wheat fields and grew accustomed to the rhythms of nature, developing an attraction to wide open spaces and their division by the rows of wheat and the geometric demarcation of roads.  Martin moved from Canada to Washington State where she was immediately captured by the independence of America.  Martin's initial training was in education, which she viewed as a vehicle for enhancing the American spirit of individualism through personal experience.  She moved to New York to attend Teacher's College at Columbia University in the early 1940s.  Martin agreed with the school's emphasis on art as integral to education, but she soon developed her own variation that art reveals reality as a matter of intuition rather than intellect.  New York was the ideal place for Martin to absorb the influences and groundbreaking work of American painters of the time.  Abstract Expressionists, particularly, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newmann, inspired Martin with their insightful genius for conveying transcendent experience in their paintings.  Martin also deeply respected the Minimalists, and her work was often shown alongside these artists, however, her personal touch and incorporation of human expression differed from the theories of the movement.

Martin wanted her work to be about a transcendent experience.  Her philosophy centered on a sense of faith, yet her ideas are not to be confused with religion.  She was able to see perfection in life and believed that beauty expressed that perfection; she noted, "The miracle of existence, is that we are able to recognize perfection in beauty.  Beauty is unattached; when a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose.  Beauty is an awareness in the mind." (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and traveling), Agnes Martin, 1992, p. 93-94) Agnes Martin's philosophy was drawn from many sources including the bible and writings of Chinese sages.

Martin's mature works were comprised of 6x6 foot square canvases (a format that would sustain her through the mid-1980s) covered in monochromatic grounds and overlaid by soft graphite grids.  Most works are organized in horizontal rectangles, however, Untitled #7, employs a vertical composition of rectangles within the square.  Martin painted a small amount of works similar in composition to this in the early 1970s and would return to this format later in her life.  Of her chosen composition, Martin commented, "My formats are square, but the grids are never absolutely square, they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn't set out to do it that way.  When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power." (Agnes Martin in Dieter Schwarz, Agnes Martin: Writings, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1992, p. 29). The present work incorporates Martin's signature broad, evenly spaced, vertical bands executed in thin washes of color that alternate between shades of blue and pink-hued tan that hover over the surface in a soft haze of color.  Because the thinned acrylic combines with the chalky white primer, her colors both absorb and reflect light, adding a particular luminescence that appears to disintegrate the painting into atmospheric light.  One can imagine the artist looking over the New Mexico landscape, inspired by the incandescent and austere quietude of the sun-drenched desert.  Barbara Haskell comments, "Becoming obedient to the beauty and happiness of realism engages a different understanding of the world than which prevails today.  Agnes Martin's paintings offer a path to this understanding – a means of reawakening those experiences of joy that are present in each of us." (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (and traveling), Agnes Martin, 1992, p. 114)