It seems overly simplistic, saccharine even, to describe Agnes Martin’s paintings as pure, but I just can’t find a way around it. Using only simple lines and grids, often in gray or very muted colors, Martin somehow distilled the essence of human emotion in pictures so seemingly plain you can barely photograph them. And yet they are so moving it is common for even the most art-skeptical among us to stand in front of an Agnes Martin and feel a sense of awe.
Perhaps she said it best: “If you wake up in the morning and you feel very happy, but [there’s] no cause—that’s what I paint about.”
Martin, who died in 2004 at the age of 92, was well into midlife when she hit her first career peak in the 1960s, after she developed her signature minimal grid. The reception in New York, where she was living at the time, was rapturous. “The whole art world was loving her,” says Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery, which has shown Martin’s work since the 1970s.
But the pressure was too much, and Martin, who had on and off battles with schizophrenia, retreated to her adopted home state of New Mexico, where she more or less stayed for the rest of her life. While there, she went through periods of isolation when she made very little art, and periods of profound productivity. Zen Buddhism, especially its tenet of restraint, was a guiding philosophy throughout her career.
Martin’s many chapters culminate in an arresting body of work from the late 1990s and early 2000s called her Innocent Love paintings—a selection of which has just gone on view at Pace’s flagship gallery in New York. For these late paintings, Martin brought in more color (for her) and gave them whimsical titles like Little Children Loving Love (2001) and I Love Love (1999).
Agnes Martin, Beautiful Life, 2000, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60 x 60″.Photo: Peter Clough. © Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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