Agnes Martin

Pace Wildenstein, New York
Private Collection, St. Louis
Christie's, New York, 17 May 2001, Lot 320
Private Collection
Christie's, New York, 9 November 2005, Lot 545
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Edinburgh, Royal Botanic Garden, Agnes Martin: New Paintings, 1999 Edinburgh International Festival, Inverleith House, August - October 1999
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Lovely Life: The Recent Works of Agnes Martin, October 2000

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the blue is slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals some very light wear to the extreme lower left corner tip. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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“Watching clouds and never seeing any the same, or viewing waves of the sea, continuously breaking on the shore, always the same but always different.”
Agnes Martin, Exh. Cat., London, Agnes Martin, 2015, p. 29

A breathtakingly peaceful work of art, Agnes Martin’s Untitled #10 executed in 1999, captivates the viewer through its bold simplicity. In keeping with Martin’s legacy of abstraction that has inspired generations of artists, this work is an impressive example from her immediately recognisable oeuvre. Although restrained, Martin’s style is underpinned by a deep conviction in the emotive and expressive power of art. Through a connection with a spiritual inspiration, as opposed to a conceptual one, Martin developed an entirely unique artistic practice that scarcely wavered over the course of decades.

Martin’s practice is often separated into two distinct periods; the first being paintings she created up until 1967, when she left New York, and the second the work that she produced during her time in New Mexico from 1972 until her passing in 2004. A late starter, Martin’s artistic output began to flourish during her time in New York City living in Counties Slip in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Here she was surrounded by her slightly younger contemporaries, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, who strove to differentiate themselves from the more established abstract expressionists on the other side of Manhattan. During this time Martin began creating increasingly austere geometric abstract works that slowly resolved themselves into the repetitive pattern of the grid. These grids are synonymous with this first phase of Martin’s career, clearly evoking the extreme discipline and careful perfection with which she executed her paintings.

Whilst minimalist in form, these paintings were in fact quite different in spirit from those of her other minimalist counterparts. Deeply influenced by Taoism and Zen Buddhism, Martin always believed in creating works for the pure joy and emotional reaction they could incite in the viewer, instead of out of an interest in materiality. She explained that “the value of art is in the observer. When you find out what you like, you’re really finding out about yourself […] People who look at my painting say that it makes them happy, like the feeling when you wake up in the morning. And happiness is the goal, isn’t it?” (Ibid., p. 31). This resistance to the materiality of art, combined with a fear of the ego-driven business that had sprung up around the arts industry, heavily influenced her decision to leave New York in 1967. In 1972 she resurfaced in New Mexico, in the small town of Taos, where she began the second phase of her career.

In New Mexico Martin started out by first creating prints, then drawings, and then finally the stunning paintings of her artistic maturity. Her new paintings illustrated a shift in her approach to both composition and the use of colour. Prior to this phase her works had maintained a muted palette of black, white, brown and grey. In the new works she introduced heavily diluted, iridescent shades of pale primary colours, giving her paintings a new vitality. Whilst maintaining the logic of the grid, she further simplified this by introducing bands of either horizontal or vertical lines but did not return to combining the two in one composition. This new phase of her practice carried through for over three decades, creating her final painting at the age of 92 just months before passing away in 2004.

Untitled #10 shows the perfect clarity that Martin had achieved by the end of her career. It is an impressively serene work, with soft washes of hazy blue streaming across the canvas, breaking up the lighter, yellowed chalky bands. The hint of pencil can still be discerned in the outline of the strips of colour, a hallmark of Martin’s incredibly precise and structured practice. The canvas almost appears to radiate light, emitting subtle rays of peace and tranquillity into the space around it. This work is a beautiful example from the mature phase of Martin’s career and perfectly articulates her belief in the expressive and emotive power of art.