Agnes Martin

1912 - 2004

Biography(b Maklin, Sask., 22 March 1912; d Taos, NM, 16 Dec 2004).
American painter of Canadian birth (see fig.). She grew up in Vancouver and moved to the USA in 1932, taking American citizenship in 1940. She began making art in the early 1940s, while studying at Columbia University in New York and intermittently living in New Mexico. In 1957 she moved to Coenties Slip, two blocks of artists’ lofts in Lower Manhattan, where her neighbours included the artists Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman (b 1926), Robert Indiana, and James Rosenquist.

Martin held her first one-woman exhibition at the BETTY PARSONS GALLERY in New York in 1958. She constructed her paintings on a rational grid system, superimposing a network of pencilled lines and later coloured bands on fine-grained canvas stained with washes of colour in such a way as to reconcile these apparently antithetical elements. Often the impression is conveyed that the colour is floating off the canvas, with the delicately drawn pencil marks hovering within the edges of the canvas but not quite touching them, as in White Flower (1960; New York, Guggenheim) or Morning (1965; London, Tate). These paintings were influential on the development of MINIMALISM in the USA, especially on the wall drawings executed in coloured pencils by Sol LeWitt, although Martin regarded her use of grids as a development from the ‘all-over’ compositional methods of Abstract Expressionism. She persistently rejected the suggestion that her paintings were conceived in response to the landscape of New Mexico, where she settled again in 1967 and where she chose to work most of her life.

From 1967 Martin concentrated on writing, but when she returned to painting in 1974 she continued refining the idiom that she had established in the early 1960s, favouring geometric structures of uniform bands of evanescent colour in works such as Untitled Number 3 (1974; New York, Pace Gal.; see 1977 exh. cat., p. 16). Her convictions about the emotive content of her work, underlying its apparent reticence and austerity of form, were cogently expressed in a lecture, ‘We Are in the Midst of Reality Responding with Joy’, delivered at Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 1976 (printed in full in 1977 exh. cat., pp. 17–39). [Klaus Ottmann. "Martin, Agnes." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T054642.]

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