Agnes Martin

New York, Pace Gallery, Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings, May 1976

The art of Agnes Martin manifests itself as an intellectual balancing act. Her gorgeous, uncompromising paintings seem to engage with a number of dichotomies 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. In paintings such as Untitled #12, Martin’s aesthetic vision finds a most sensitive equilibrium between the poetry of delicate mark making and the prose of the Modernist grid. Her paintings present themselves as portals into her unique spiritual sensibility, and yet they function within an ordered regimen. Martin strips down the notions of composition and perspective to essentials, and achieves a wonderful serenity in the process. Her manipulation of the logic of geometry and classical perfection manifests itself in the femininity of her gentle brushwork which contrasts and coheres with the masculinity of her pictorial structure. Minimalist abstraction is thus employed not as a clinical device, but rather as a means of revelation. The perfection of the surface becomes a means of engendering beauty, calm, and self-reflection in the viewer. As David 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.’’ (Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Agnes Martin, 1993, p. 6)

Martin’s early paintings of the 1960s established her classic and unique esthetic. The viewer’s attention is focused on a grid of tightly interwoven vertical and horizontal graphite lines, laid over monochromatic and muted grounds. Varying the pressure of her graphite line and allowing for human variation in the exactitude of the resulting rectangles, Martin created a visual effect that was dazzling: the evanescence of the purified ground chimed beautifully with the lightly-delineated grid that appeared to hover above the canvas. Martin managed to create a surface that was at once extraordinarily precious and yet, in its focus on the grid, extremely concrete.

In 1967, Martin left New York to travel around the West and Canada, finally settling in New Mexico in 1968. Martin had abandoned painting on her departure from New York and did not return to the practice for seven years. Her re-emergence into the art world was celebrated with an exhibition of new work at the Pace Gallery in New York in 1975. Untitled #12 was painted at this critical period and included in her second show at the Pace Gallery in 1976. The new work revealed a series of shifts in terms of the structure of the canvas and Martin’s use of color. A new Martin had emerged: one who maintained the logic of the grid, but now reveled in a more painterly approach. Her objectives and technique remained the same: just the style had changed, and Martin experimented with this refined aesthetic for another quarter century.

In paintings of the mid-1970s such as Untitled #12, color and area had now become transcendent over line. Martin’s pencil markings of the 1960s yielded to broader bands of lightly tinted color, often inspired by her environment of sky and sand in New Mexico. The lines are still barely visible, as if emerging from or disappearing into a mist. The power of symmetry has remained although the geometric components could now be singular – either horizontal or vertical, not necessarily both – and her compositions more elastic. The delicate ebb and flow of the blue and peach-pink tones of Untitled #12 are a subtly layered visual pleasure which is both constrained within the pencil demarcations of vertical bands while it also visually vibrates off the painting surface. From afar, these bands of color can appear flattened and regulated, but when seen up close, her brushwork was in fact remarkably dynamic and gradated, yielding glimpses of the white primer layer beneath. Color becomes dematerialized and light seems to emanate from the canvas. One can imagine the artist looking out over the Taos landscape, inspired by the economy of detail, luminous atmosphere and austere quietude of the desert.  Martin felt deeply that an artist should aspire to represent and reveal reality through their creations, not in a literal sense but in a deeper more emotive, philosophical and profound manner. As she wrote, ``We are in the midst of reality responding with joy. It is an absolutely satisfying experience but extremely elusive. …Works of art have successfully represented our response to reality from the beginning. The artist tries to live in a way that will make greater awareness of the sublimity of reality possible. Reality, the truth about life and the mystery of beauty are all the same and they are the first concerns of everyone.’’ (Dieter Schwarz, ed., Agnes Martin: Writings, Ostfildern 1992, p. 93)