Agnes Martin

Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in November 1966

New York, Dwan Gallery, 10, October 1966, cat. no. 6, illustrated
Fort Worth Art Museum, American Artists: A New Decade, November 1976 - January 1977
New York, Mary Boone Gallery, Agnes Martin, February 1991
Providence, David Winton Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Brown University, Reprise: The Vera G. List Collection, A Twentieth Anniversary Exhibition, October - November 1991
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Miami, Center for the Fine Arts; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Agnes Martin, November 1992 - February 1994, p. 71, illustrated in color (included at the New York venue only)

The underside of the leaf
Cool in shadow
Sublimely unemphatic
Smiling of  innocence

The frailest stems
Quivering in light
Bend and break
In silence
(Agnes Martin in Dieter Schwartz, Agnes Martin: Writings, 1992, p. 15)

Agnes Martin’s writings and poetry are reflections of the inspirational impulse and contemplative nature of her paintings. Her creative and philosophical spirit is not confined to her graphic and painterly expressions, as she explores art’s ability to reveal our relationship to nature, perception, and life. The quoted stanzas about leafs, shadow, stems and light, were concluded by Martin’s assertion, ``this poem, like the paintings, is not really about nature. It is not what is seen. It is what is known forever in the mind.’’ (Dieter Schwarz, p. 15) Martin’s paintings are about her quest to capture the illusory and unknowable qualities of perfection and the sublime.

Martin’s initial training was in education, which she viewed as a vehicle for enhancing the American spirit of individualism through personal experience. At Teacher’s College, Columbia University in the early 1940s, Martin enjoyed the school’s emphasis on art as integral to education, but she soon developed her own variation and belief that art reveals reality as a matter of intuition rather than intellect. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Martin pursued graduate degrees and advanced study in both fine arts and art education, alternating periods of employment with periods devoted solely to painting without distraction. New York was the ideal place for Martin to absorb the influences and ground-breaking work of the great American painters of the time. At the Betty Parsons Gallery, Martin reveled in an affinity for the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, whose genius for conveying transcendent experience in their paintings was entirely in tune with her ambitions. Martin also spent much of the 1950s in Taos, New Mexico, among artists inspired by the light and open horizons of the Southwest. Amidst these two alternating environments, Martin worked toward her mature aesthetic vocabulary which fully flowered in the paintings of the 1960s.

Leaves is a masterpiece from Martin’s first group of classic paintings which employed the classic geometric shapes of square and rectangle to obtain an impersonal detachment and create an intellectual artistic format. As Barbara Haskell has written, ``taking a cue from artists such as Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt, Martin began to appreciate that geometry could be used in the service of spiritual contemplation. ..it could offer a means of attaining a `plane of attention and awareness’ upon which the perception of sublimity depended.’’ (Agnes Martin, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 102) Martin’s paintings of the 1960s are 6 x 6 foot squares devoted to a minimalist vocabulary of line and geometry. Verticals and horizontals were ruled onto the painted canvas in pencil with the use of a T-square and stretched strings. Yet, Martin’s genius is to subvert this sense of order by subliminal means, thus acknowledging that perfection and order are to be desired but are ultimately unattainable.

Martin’s square paintings are constructed of rows of rectangles, placed by Martin ``a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, … When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.’’ (Dieter Schwarz, p. 29) Soft color emerges as a new element after 1964, in paintings such as the misty gray Leaves, when Martin turns from oil to acrylic as her base paint, allowing her to create background effects. But Martin’s command of her ruled line was the most essential component to embody both simplicity and complexity, as the artist modulated the pressure of her pencil or shifted the string to bring a sense of tremor and effect to her line. As Kasha Linville observed, ``Sometimes its own shadow softens [the line] – that is, it is drawn once beneath the pigment or gesso and then redrawn on top, …Most often, her line respects canvas grain, skimming its surface without filling the low places in the fabric so it becomes almost a dotted or broken line at close range. Sometimes she uses pairs of lines that dematerialize as rapidly as the lighter-drawn single ones.’’ (``Agnes Martin, an Appreciation’’, ArtForum 9, June 1971, p. 72)

The final result, in paintings such as Leaves, is an abstract `sublime’ that conveys a sense of light, atmosphere and purity in a minimalist vocabulary. Martin often acknowledges the basic futility of seeking perfection, but never abandons art’s attempt to convey it. As she wrote, ``In our minds, there is awareness of perfection; When we look with our eyes we see it, and how it functions is mysterious to us and unavailable.’’ But the artist emphasizes that perfection is unattainable in life (or reality) and in painting (or artifice). Yet we are capable of inspired glimpses, and ``A work of art is successful when there is a hint of perfection present – at the slightest hint…the work is alive.’’ (Dieter Schwarz, p. 32)