Agnes Martin Totally Explained

Everything about Agnes Martin totally explained

Agnes Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was a Canadian-American painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist.

Childhood and background

She was born in Macklin, Saskatchewan and moved to the United States in 1931, becoming a citizen in 1950. She studied art at Columbia University and then later at the University of New Mexico. Her work is most closely associated with Taos, New Mexico, although she moved to New York City after being discovered by the artist/gallery owner Betty Parsons in 1957. Disillusioned with the art scene in New York, she returned to New Mexico in 1967 and established herself as an artist/hermit at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in Galisteo, New Mexico.

Artistic style

The bulk of her work is composed of square grids. While minimalist in form, these paintings were quite different in spirit from those of her other minimalist counterparts; she shied away from intellectualism, favoring the personal and spiritual. Many of her grids represent Taoist reflections. Because of her work's added spiritual dimension, which became more and more dominant after 1967, she preferred to be classified as an abstract expressionist. She consciously distanced herself from the social life and social events that brought other artists into the public eye. When she died at age 92, she was said to have not read a newspaper for the last 50 years. The book dedicated to the exhibition of her work in New York at The Drawing Center in 2005—3 X Abstraction (Yale University Press)— analyses the spiritual dimension in Martin's work.
Martin worked only in black, white, and brown before moving to New Mexico. During this time, she introduced light pastel washes to her grids, colors that shimmered in the changing light. She then moved onto working with shoes, shirts and other clothing. She blended these into paintings through a technique she called 'clothed spacing.' In 1997 John Spillman, art critic with the New York Times, called this work "the greatest improvisation in modern painting since Pollock."

Cultural references

Composer John Zorn's Redbird was inspired by and dedicated to Martin. Sister Wendy Beckett, in her book American Masterpieces, said about Martin: "Agnes Martin often speaks of joy; she sees it as the desired condition of all life. Who would disagree with her?... No-one who has seriously spent time before an Agnes Martin, letting its peace communicate itself, receiving its inexplicable and ineffable happiness, has ever been disappointed. The work awes, not just with its delicacy, but with its vigor, and this power and visual interest is something that has to be experienced."

Bibliography

Martin, Agnes, Writings, edited by Dieter Schwarz, Winterthur: Ostfildern, Cantz Verlag, 1991.
Krauss, Rosalind E., "Agnes Martin: The/Could/", in :Inside the Visible, edited by Catherine de Zegher, MIT Press, 1996.
Pollock, Griselda, "Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes", in 3 X Abstraction, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, New Haven: Yale University Press and NY: The Drawing Center, 2005. ISBN 0-300-10826-5.
Fer, Briony, "Drawing Drawing: Agnes Martin's Infinity", in: 3 X Abstraction, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, New Haven: Yale University Press and NY: The Drawing Center, 2005. Reprinted in Women Artists at the Millennium, edited by Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, MIT Press / October Books, 2006.

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