Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin’s beautifully simple paintings seem to present the viewer with a set of binary antagonisms that, in the mind, appear impossible to negotiate and yet, when seen in the flesh, do so with a grace and integrity that verges on the Sublime. Her aesthetic vision finds a most sensitive equilibrium between the poetry of delicate subjective mark making and the prose of the Modernist grid. Martin’s paintings can be seen as portals, leading the viewer into her unique spiritual sensibility, and yet they function within the ordered regimen of the grid. She strips down any notions of composition and perspective to its bare bones, and yet achieves a wonderful visual serenity in the process. Her manipulation of the logic of geometry serves a higher pursuit of a classical perfection which the artist considers absent from nature, and only held in the mind. This manifests itself in the femininity of her gentle brushwork which both contrasts and coheres with the masculinity of her pictorial construction. The tenets of Minimalist abstraction are thus employed not to engender discussions of phenomenology, but rather the opposite: as a means of inspiring revelation. As Michael Govan notes, “In the mid-1960’s, Martin was applauded as a herald of the cool geometric Minimalism that was emerging in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism, but she herself declined that claim, for she saw the Minimalist approach as impersonal and dispassionate.” (Michael Govan, “Agnes Martin” in Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, Dia: Beacon, New York, 2003, p. 207). The perfection of the surface becomes a means of engendering happiness, beauty, calm and self-reflection in the viewer. As David A. Ross wrote, “A quintessential twentieth-century ascetic, Martin has successfully pared down both her art making and her life and in so doing has found the kind of focused tranquility that informs her abstract painting.” (David A. Ross, “Director’s Foreword” in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art [and traveling], Agnes Martin, 1993-94, p. 6)

Martin’s early canvases focused the viewer’s attention firmly onto the grid. Soft graphite lines were laid over monochromatic grounds in a series of structural configurations. She worked with verticals and horizontals and allowed differing, but exact spaces between her lines. The grid was laid bare and open for the viewer to see, as if she had arrived at the very genome of painting itself. Their visual effect was dazzling: the evanescence of the purified ground chimed beautifully with the lightly-delineated lines that appeared to hover above the surface. Martin managed to create a surface that was at once extraordinarily precious and yet, in its focus on the grid, extremely concrete. Govan notes the difference between Martin’s grids and those found in such heroes of abstraction as Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich: “Even the inventors and heroes of abstraction … [Mondrian and Malevich] … had clung to the powerful dynamics of painterly composition. Martin’s delicate rectangular grids of pencil lines … border on the edge of being paintings at all.” (Govan, Op. Cit., pp. 209-210).

The artist worked in New York throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s. She received her Masters from Columbia in 1952 and had her first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1958. The 1960’s were a relatively prolific period for her, and she was included in many exhibitions; her work was linked to a number of movements, notably Minimalism, and her continued exploration into the boundless ramifications of the grid was championed in a number of important texts. In 1967, however, Martin left New York and abandoned painting for seven years, moving to New Mexico. Her re-emergence into the art world was celebrated with an exhibition of new works at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1975. This show revealed a series of shifts in terms of the structure of the canvas and the use of color. A new Martin had emerged: one, which maintained the logic of the grid, but was now created in a more painterly fashion. Her technique and objectives remained the same: the style had changed, and she has experimented with this style now for more than twenty-five years.

The present work is a glorious example of Martin’s later aesthetic at the end of the 1980’s. The delicate structural divisions of the 1960’s, often so minute in scale that one could only appreciate them up close, have now given way to larger, more expansive bands of color. The pencil markings of the 1960’s have now yielded to these broad bands of lightly tinted gray that dominate her work in the 1980’s. The order and power of symmetry has been retained, but now her composition is a little more elastic or ‘free-flowing’, lending Untitled #5 an innate freedom. Here, large striations of the most delicate, pale grays and thin lines of graphites are juxtaposed with each other. Seen from afar, they appear regulated and flattened. When seen up close, her brushwork is, in fact, very dynamic and the build up of differing gradations of gray is astonishing. Washy, thinned-out passages of paint commingle together to form a delicate, translucent skin that seems to dematerialize color and give the impression of a celestial, otherworldly effulgence. Light seems to emanate from behind the canvas, as if the painting were a light-box, and Untitled #5 does indeed possess that glorious radiance, which marks much of the beauty of Martin’s painterly enterprise.