Agnes Martin

Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was a Canadian-American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004.

Despite personal struggles with schizophrenia, Martin's dedication to her art persisted, and her legacy continues to inspire contemporary artists. Documentaries and films have explored her life and work, shedding light on her artistic process and impact. Beyond the art world, her influence extends to popular culture, as seen in a Google doodle and a song dedicated to her. Martin's artistic vision, blending minimalism and spirituality, remains an enduring and influential force in the realm of abstract art.

Early life

Agnes Bernice Martin was born in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterian farmers in Macklin, Saskatchewan, one of four children. From 1919, she grew up in Vancouver. She moved to the United States in 1931 to help her pregnant sister, Maribel, in Bellingham, Washington.<sup>:29</sup> She preferred American higher education and became an American citizen in 1950. Martin studied at Western Washington University College of Education, Bellingham, Washington, prior to receiving her B.A. (1942) from Teachers College, Columbia University. It was while living in New York that Martin became interested in modern art and was exposed to artists such as Arshile Gorky (1904–1948), Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974), and Joan Miró (1893–1983). She moved to New York City in 1957 and lived in a loft in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. A pioneer of her time, Martin never publicly expressed her sexuality, but has been described as a "closeted homosexual." The 2018 biography Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon describes several romantic relationships between Martin and other women, including the dealer Betty Parsons. She often employed a feminist lens when she critiqued fellow artists' work. Jaleh Mansoor, an art historian, stated that Martin was "too engaged in a feminist relation to practice, perhaps, to objectify and label it as such." It is worth noting that Martin herself did not identify as a feminist and even once told a New Yorker journalist in an interview that she thought "the women's movement had failed."

Martin was publicly known to have schizophrenia, After eighteen months on the road camping across both Canada and the western United States, Martin settled in Mesa Portales, near Cuba, New Mexico (1968-1977).

Career

Her work is most closely associated with Taos, Another close friend and mentor was Ad Reinhardt. In 1961, Martin contributed a brief introduction to a brochure for her friend Lenore Tawney's first solo exhibition, the only occasion on which she wrote on the work of a fellow artist. In 1967, Martin famously abandoned her life in New York. Cited reasons include the death of her friend Ad Reinhardt, the demolition of many buildings on Coenties Slip, and a breakup with the artist Chryssa whom Martin had dated off and on throughout the 1960s. That same year, she completed a group of new paintings and from 1975 they were exhibited regularly.

In 1976, she made her first film, Gabriel, a 78-minute landscape film which features a little boy going for a walk. A second movie, Captivity, was never completed after the artist threw the rough cut into the town dump. The 2018 biography Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon was the first book to explore her relationship with women and her early life in substantial detail, and was written in collaboration with Martin's family and friends.

Artistic style

In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, Martin's early works included biomorphic paintings in subdued colors made when the artist had a grant to work in Taos between 1955 and 1957. However, she did her best to seek out and destroy paintings from the years when she was taking her first steps into abstraction. Her signature style was defined by an emphasis upon line, grids, and fields of extremely subtle color. Particularly in her breakthrough years of the early 1960s, she created 6 × 6 foot square canvases that were covered in dense, minute and softly delineated graphite grids. In the 1966 exhibition Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Martin's grids were therefore celebrated as examples of Minimalist art and were hung among works by artists including Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Donald Judd. While minimalist in form, however, these paintings were quite different in spirit from those of her other minimalist counterparts, retaining small flaws and unmistakable traces of the artist's hand; she shied away from intellectualism, favoring the personal and spiritual. Her paintings, statements, and influential writings often reflected an interest in Eastern philosophy, especially Taoist. 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. In 1973, she returned to art making, and produced a portfolio of 30 serigraphs, On a Clear Day. During her time in Taos, she introduced light pastel washes to her grids, colors that shimmered in the changing light. Later, Martin reduced the scale of her signature 72 × 72 square paintings to 60 × 60 inches, and shifted her work to use bands of ethereal color. Another departure was a modification, if not a refinement, of the grid structure, which Martin has used since the late 1950s. In Untitled No. 4 (1994), for example, one viewed the gentle striations of pencil line and primary color washes of diluted acrylic paint blended with gesso. The lines, which encompassed this painting, were not measured by a ruler, but rather intuitively marked by the artist. the Governor's Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts given by Governor Gary Johnson, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1998); the National Medal of Arts awarded by President Bill Clinton and the National Endowment for the Arts (1998); the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement by the College Art Association (1998); the Golden Lion for Contribution to Contemporary Art at the Venice Biennale (1997); the Oskar Kokoschka Prize awarded by the Austrian government (1992); the Alexej von Jawlensky Prize awarded by the city of Wiesbaden, Germany (1991); and election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York (1989).

Exhibitions continue to be mounted since her death in 2004, including Agnes Martin: Closing the Circle, Early and Late from February 10, 2006 to March 4, 2006 at Pace Gallery. From August 2006 to March 5, 2007 Dia Beacon exhibited Agnes Martin: A Field of Vision: Paintings From the 1980's which displayed 18 paintings.

Other exhibitions have been held in New York, Zurich, London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Cambridge (England), Aspen, Albuquerque, British Columbia in Canada. In 2012, The Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, University of New Mexico launched a museum-wide exhibition titled Agnes Martin Before the Grid in honor of her centennial year. This exhibit was the first to focus on the work and life of Martin prior to 1960. The exhibit focused on many, never seen before, works Martin created at Columbia, Coentis Slip and early years in New Mexico. It was also the first to consider Martin's struggle with mental health, sexuality and Martin's important relationship with Ad Reinhardt. In 2015, Tate Modern ran a retrospective of her life and career from the 1950s until her last work in 2004, which will travel to other museums after the show in London. The exhibition included Anne Truitt, Mary Corse, and contemporary artists Shirazeh Houshiary and Tomma Abts.

In 2016, a retrospective exhibition of her works from the 1950s through 2004 was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2016, she was also featured in the Dansaekhwa and Minimalism Exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and earlier in the year in the show titled Aspects of Minimalism: Selections from East End Collections at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York.

She was also featured in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at The Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, New York which shined a light on women artists who worked post World War II and before the start of the Feminist movement. The exhibition went from April 2017 to August 2017 and featured Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell, Lygia Clark, Gego, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse.

Martin's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

Martin was a featured artist in the 2024 exhibition 'Friend, A Survey of Op-Art and Minimalism' at the Ki Smith Gallery. The exhibition benefitted Sentebale, a Lesotho based charity co-founded by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Prince Seeiso of Lesotho. Martin exhibited alongside Bridget Riley and Frank Stella, among others.

From April 4 to July 3, 2026, Dia Beacon exhibited Agnes Martin: Painting is not making paintings, featuring works created during the breath of her career and drew primarily on the DIA's collection.

Collections

Martin's work can be found in major public collections in the United States, including the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, among others. Her work is on "long-term view" and part of the permanent holdings of Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a permament gallery deciated to works by Martin on the fourth floor of the museum galleries.

Art market

In 2007, Martin's Loving Love (2000) was sold for $2.95 million at Christie's, New York. In 2016, her Orange Grove sold at auction for $13.7 million, the same year as the Guggenheim held a retrospective of her work.

Legacy

Martin became an inspiration to younger artists, from Eva Hesse to Ellen Gallagher. Contemporary artists often discussed in relation to Agnes Martin's influence include Tauba Auerbach, R. H. Quaytman Julie Mehretu, Amadour, Alicja Kwade, and Jennie C. Jones. Italian artist Agnes Questionmark cites Agnes Martin as the inspiration for her stage name; "Agnes" is also her chosen name as a trans person.

Her image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

In 1994, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, part of the University of New Mexico, announced that it would renovate its Pueblo-revival building and dedicate one wing to Martin's work. The gallery was designed according to the artist's wishes in order to accommodate Martin's gift of seven large untitled paintings made between 1993 and 1994. An Albuquerque architectural firm, Kells & Craig, designed the octagonal gallery with an oculus installed overhead, and four yellow Donald Judd benches placed directly under the oculus. The gift of the paintings and gallery's design and construction were negotiated and overseen by Robert M. Ellis, the Harwood's director at the time and a close friend of Martin's. Today, the Agnes Martin Gallery attracts visitors from all over the world and has been compared by scholars to the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence (Matisse Chapel), Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, and the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

Films about Martin

2000: Thomas Luechinger: On a Clear Day – Agnes Martin. Documentary, 52 minutes.
2002: Mary Lance: Agnes Martin: With my Back to the World. Documentary, 57 minutes.
2002/2016 (re-edited): Leon d'Avigdor: Agnes Martin: Between the Lines. Documentary, 60 minutes.
2016: Kathleen Brennan and Jina Brenneman: Agnes Martin Before the Grid. Documentary, 56 minutes.

In popular culture

Composer John Zorn's Redbird (1995) was inspired by and dedicated to Martin.

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."

Poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg's poem "Gridding, after some sentences by Agnes Martin" discusses patterns in the natural world, makes a parallel between writing and painting, and ends with a line about the poet's admiration of Martin's work.

Her work inspired a Google doodle on the 102nd anniversary of her birth on March 22, 2014. The doodle takes color cues from Martin's late work which is marked by soft edges, muted colors and distinctly horizontal bands, turned to six vertical bars, one for each letter of the Google logo.

The song "Agnes Martin" by American rock band Screaming Females, from their album All at Once, is an ode to the artist.

Poet Victoria Chang's work With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) is in conversation with both Martin's artwork and writings.

Publications

Cooke, Lynne and Karen Kelly, editors. Agnes Martin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. .

References

External links

Agnes Martin in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Oral history interview with Agnes Martin, 1989 May 15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Agnes Martin: Before The Grid, 2012, Documentary , Harwood Museum of Art