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Artist or Maker: Agnes Martin (1912-2004)
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Exhibited: The Stanford Museum; The Pasadena Art Museum; Seattle, University of Washington, Henry Art Gallery and Ridgefield, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,
Young Artists of the Sixties: The Charles Cowles Collection
, November 1967-February 1968.
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Coming of age during the ascent of Minimalism, Agnes Martin brought a new voice to the emerging Zeitgeist of literalism. Adhering to the frank exposition of materials and techniques in radically simplified compositions that were pegged to the grid, she nonetheless mined the expressive potential of pared-down abstraction. Infusing her work with the idiosyncrasies of handmade construction, Martin countered the hard-edges, sleek surfaces and industrial fabrications of doctrinaire Minimalism with a degree of subjective input and expressive flair. As its title alone attests, Desert, 1965 is far from non-allusive; yielding to poetic effect over luminous ground, Martin's faint tremulous lines are both intimate and meditative; expanding in front of the viewer like the desert itself, it offers a subtle counterpoint to the "what you see is what you see" rhetoric of her more dogmatic peers.
Bridging Minimalism with a measure of delicacy and tranquility, Martin straddled several seemingly irreconcilable polarities in her deceptively simple oeuvre. In Desert, she transformed the objective clarity of the grid into a portal of subjective spirituality. Indeed, Martin wielded Minimalist pictorial structure not as a means of stating pure materiality, but rather, as a means for attaining transcendence. Drawn to the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, whose simplified abstractions were meant to convey the Sublime, Martin developed a geometric style that brimmed with metaphysical ambitions.
Her earliest mature work-- deriving from the early 1960s-- settled on the fixed format of a 6 x 6 foot square canvas which she overlaid with soft graphite grids. Using a T-square, stretched strings and a pencil, Martin drew vertical and horizontal lines, producing an allover rectangular grid. Of this configuration she stated, "My formats are square, but the girds are never absolutely square, they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn't set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power" (A. Martin cited in D. Schwartz, Agnes Martin: Writings, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1992, p. 29). Coming together in what Michael Govan termed "transparent non-hierarchical fields of vision," Martin's canvases dispensed with composition to arrive at the very genome of painting itself. Sometimes, as in the case of Desert, they barely seemed paintings at all.
Ineffable on account of its luminescent ground and faint delineations that hover above it, Desert appears to dissolve in front of the viewer. Martin stated, "My paintings have neither object nor space nor line nor anything - no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form" (A. Martin cited in N. Rifkin, Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond, exh. cat., The Menil Collection, Houston, 2002, pp. 14-15). Emptied of image and narrative, Desert is an evocation of the immaterial.
Included in several seminal Minimalist exhibitions in the 1960s-- notably "Systematic Painting" which featured Donald Judd, Sol Le Witt and Robert Ryman at the Guggenheim in 1966-- Martin soon began to view the New York art world as too distracting for artistic inspiration. She moved permanently to the Southwest in 1967 and settled in Cuba, New Mexico in 1968. She gave up painting for the next seven years, resuming only in 1974 and continuing through her recent death. Desert is exceptional for its derivation from the earliest phase of her career and is strangely prescient of her move out West. Evocative of the sand dunes of the Southwestern landscape that stretch for miles on end, Desert is exemplar of the myriad of emotions Martin conveys in her characteristically gentle and unassuming manner.
