Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin (Agnes Bernice Martin), 1912-2004, American painter, b. Macklin, Canada. She moved to the United States in 1931, became a U.S. citizen in 1950, and emerged as an important artist in the late 50s and early 60s. Martin is best known for her spare, abstract all-over grid paintings. Penciled on canvases that are monochrome or washed in muted colors, these emotionally evocative works seem to glow with an interior light. Her use of line expresses both strength and delicacy within a restrained yet luminous form. Martin, who came to New York City in 1957 and left it a decade later, settled in New Mexico, and abandoned painting until 1974. Her later works are intimate yet impersonal, and often created in series. They usually contain horizontal bands drawn in graphite and painted in a subtle, limited palette that suggest a shimmering, mysteriously lighted, and depthless space. Among the many public collections that include her paintings are the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and Guggenheim Museum, New York City, and the Tate Gallery, London.

Bibliography: See her Writings (1992); study by B. Haskell (1992).

Martin, Agnes (1912–2004). Canadian-born painter, printmaker, and writer on art who settled in the USA in 1932 and became an American citizen in 1950. She has lived mainly in New Mexico, but part of her intermittent studies in art were at Columbia University, New York (1941–2 and 1951–2), and she again lived in New York from 1957 to 1967. During this time she was a neighbour of several other painters (among them Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and James Rosenquist) in a block of artists' lofts, but essentially she has lived a fairly solitary life, a fact that is perhaps reflected in the cool detatchment of her paintings. Up to the mid-1950s her paintings were representational, but she then turned to abstraction, and by 1964 had arrived at her characteristic type of work—a square monochromatic canvas covered with a fine grid of horizontal and vertical lines: ‘My forms are square, but the grids are never absolutely square … when I cover the square grid surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.’ From 1967 to 1974 she concentrated on writing, but after her return to painting she achieved a high reputation, winning several honours. According to the catalogue of the exhibition ‘American Art in the 20th Century’ (Royal Academy, London, 1993), ‘There is a timeless quality about her images that, going beyond their superficially Minimalist character, reflects an interest in nature and poetry as well as in the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu.’ On the other hand, Peter Fuller referred to the ‘numbing vacuity’ of her work.