Exceptional Works: Agnes Martin

“[Painting is] something that you can’t resist putting on … representing. And it’s something that drives you to expression. And it’s irresistible.”

—Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin, near her house in Cuba, New Mexico, 1974

Known for her spare, geometrically rigorous compositions, Agnes Martin (1912–2004) produced a prolific body of work that stands apart from the predominant aesthetic styles of her time. Martin’s precise, softly nuanced works based on grids, lines, bands, stripes, and zips embody a search for abstract emotions and concepts, expressed through form.

Agnes Martin

Untitled #12, 1998

Acrylic and graphite on canvas

60 x 60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)
Framed: 61 1/8 x 61 1/4 inches (155.3 x 155.6 cm)

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Martin left New York permanently in 1967 and settled in New Mexico the following year. In 1993 she moved from Galisteo to Taos, where she remained until her death in 2004 at the age of ninety-two.

The move to Taos marked a subtle but pivotal shift in her artistic output: she introduced a new format, employing five-foot square canvases—as in the present work—rather than the signature six-foot square stretchers that she had used since 1960.

Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond, Menil Collection, Houston, February 1-May 26, 2002. Present work seen on the left wall.

In New Mexico, where she painted in relative seclusion, Martin rarely departed from a formula of painting horizontal bands of luminously diluted colors or hues of gray. Other examples can be seen in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Tate, London (acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland).

Agnes Martin, Untitled #3, 1998, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (left); Agnes Martin, Untitled #5, 1994, Tate, London and National Galleries of Scotland (right)

The present painting comprises alternating bands of pale blue and ivory delineated within lightly inscribed graphite lines that extend horizontally across the canvas. Visually sparse and vibrantly radiant, the painting conveys a rhythmic and open-ended dynamism, and exemplifies the systematic and linear compositions that Martin pursued throughout her mature oeuvre.

This manuscript, first published in the Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné in 2017, is likely the earliest examples of Martin’s writing and date to circa early 1950s based on their provenance. Martin was a prolific writer and reader; her words provide a window into the artist's mind, add a dimension to her paintings, and expand the understanding of her work.

“For more than five decades, Martin has created paintings that are evocations of light, each an individual issuance of ethereal rhythms. Simultaneously powerful and gentle, they are spartan works, beautiful without the slightest adornment. The paintings that Martin has offered us with unstinting consistency are pictures of anything. They are cadences of light, form, and color. You can ‘hear’ them with your eyes. They are silent sounds.”

—Ned Rifkin, Agnes Martin: The Nineties and Beyond

Alexander Liberman, Agnes Martin with level and ladder, 1960. Alexander Liberman Photography Archive, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Photo: © J. Paul Getty Trust

“Once you are caught in one of her paintings, it is an almost painful effort to pull back from the private experience she triggers to examine the way the picture is made. The desire to simply let yourself flow through it, or let it flow through you, is much stronger...”

—Kasha Linville, Artform

Consign With David Zwirner

Exceptional Works: Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin

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