Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter (New York Times)
Hyfler/Rosner
Agnes Martin, Abstract Painter, Dies at 92
By HOLLAND COTTER
Agnes Martin, an American painter whose luminous fields of
pale color traversed by hand-drawn pencil lines preserved
the Romantic spirit of Abstract Expressionism and prefigured
the austerities of Minimalism, died yesterday in a
retirement community in Taos, N.M.
She was 92 and had lived in New Mexico for many years. Her
death was announced by the chairman of the PaceWildenstein
gallery, Arne Glimcher, her friend and longtime dealer.
In New York in the 1950's and 60's, Ms. Martin was an
integral part of a small, brilliant, diverse community of
artists - Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert
Rauschenberg among them - who lived in derelict 19th-century
shipping lofts in Lower Manhattan and created a new postwar
American art.
Yet Ms. Martin was fundamentally a loner. In 1967, when her
New York career was taking off, she abruptly left the city,
wandered the country for months in a pickup and camper, and
stopped making art for seven years. She finally settled in
New Mexico, building an adobe house with her own hands on a
remote mesa where in winter she was snowed in for weeks at a
time. After she resumed painting in 1974 her reputation grew
and took on the aura of a legend, and her work was widely
collected. She became an inspiration to younger artists,
from Eva Hesse to Ellen Gallagher, attracted to her
undemonstrative but intensely personal art.
Agnes Bernice Martin was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan,
Canada, on March 22, 1912, a descendant of Scottish
Presbyterian pioneers. Her father, a wheat farmer, died when
she was 2; her mother supported the family by selling real
estate. Ms. Martin spent much of her childhood with her
maternal grandfather, a gentle, religious man who introduced
her to inspirational literature, including John Bunyan's
"Pilgrim's Progress," which remained important to her
throughout her life.
She had a strong early interest in art, but opted for the
financial security of teaching, and in the 1940's moved to
New York to study art education at Teachers College,
Columbia University. While there she became aware of
Abstract Expressionism, the modern style that she felt most
in tune with, partly because its artists were of her
generation; she and Jackson Pollock were born in the same
year. It is possible to view her as the last of the
generation of Abstract Expressionists.
After hearing lectures by the Zen Buddhist scholar D. T.
Suzuki at Columbia, she became interested in Asian thought,
not as a religious discipline, but as a code of ethics, a
practical how-to for getting through life.
"One thing I like about Zen," she wrote. "It doesn't believe
in achievement. I don't think the way to succeed is by doing
something aggressive. Aggression is weak-minded."
In Taos in 1954 she did her first semiabstract work. The art
dealer Betty Parsons saw it and invited Ms. Martin to join
her New York stable, which included Ad Reinhardt and younger
artists like Mr. Kelly. The only stipulation was that Ms.
Martin return to Manhattan. She did so in 1957, joining Mr.
Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney and other artists on
Coenties Slip near Wall Street. Barnett Newman, with whose
art she felt a particular affinity, had a studio nearby.
During the decade she spent there, she developed a fully
abstract style based on tight grids and repetitive linear
marks.
Then she left New York. Urban renewal was about to
drastically alter her downtown neighborhood. The competitive
New York art world unnerved her. A relationship may have
gone wrong. Ms. Martin, who had a history of psychological
crises, said elliptically, "I came to a place of recognition
of confusion that had to be solved."
Before leaving she gave away all her paint and canvas rolls,
hoping young artists would use them. Once she starting
painting again in 1974, however, she worked solidly until
the end of her life, in a format that seldom varied:
six-foot-square canvases on which she drew horizontal
graphite lines and painted bands of color with subtly
vigorous strokes. She changed her palette from series to
series, using pale colors one year, and black, white or gray
the next.
She first showed at PaceWildenstein, formerly Pace Gallery,
in 1975, and became a mainstay there. Her most recent show
was in the spring, and in a departure, the paintings
referred back to the geometric forms of her Coenties Slip
work.
She had two career retrospectives, one at the Institute of
Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973,
the other at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992. In
1993 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam organized a traveling
survey of her post-1974 work. A selection of early paintings
is on view at Dia:Beacon through April. And an installation
of paintings is on permanent view in a specially designed
gallery in the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. Her work is in
most major United States museum collections.
Ms. Martin was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President
Clinton in 1998 and recently accepted a lifetime achievement
award from the Women's Caucus for Art.
Several years ago she moved to the retirement community.
There her daily routine seldom varied. She rose early and
drove to her nearby studio, where she worked alone from 8:30
to 11:30 a.m. One of the few concessions she made to age was
to reduce the size of her paintings so that she could
continue to move them herself. She never had an assistant.
Although shy in public, Ms. Martin lectured periodically,
offering her thoughts on art and life in series of
epigrammatic statements that combined Victorian poetry,
Buddhist philosophy, transcendentalism, American-style
positive thinking and the inspirational literature of her
youth. The lectures were collected into a book in 1992,
"Writings," which established her as a moral thinker as well
as an artist. Some critics consider her words an essential
complement to her ineffable paintings.
Like her paintings, her writing was lucid and severe,
measured but driven. She insisted that art was not an
instrument for social change and, in a post-1960's America
highly conscious of racial and sexual identity, her social
views tended to be conservative and provincial. Art's value,
in her thinking, was in its ability to counteract negative
thoughts and emotions, promote psychic calm over chaos, and
establish stability in a world of unpredictable and
potentially shattering change.
Before her death, Ms. Martin specified that she wanted no
memorial service or eulogies. She leaves no survivors.
"The value of art is in the observer," she said in an
interview with The New York Times. "When you find out what
you like, you're really finding out about yourself.
Beethoven's music is joyous. If you like his music, you know
that you like to be joyful. 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?"