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).
The 13 paintings at Pace each measure 60 square inches—smaller than the 72-square-inch canvases she had been using, which had become too large for Martin, then pushing 90, to move herself. In comparison to her earlier grids, Martin saw these as “wind storms,” said Pace founder Arne Glimcher (father to Marc) during a preview of the exhibition. The syncopation of the lines is looser; her exploration of color, deeper. There’s tangerine and sky blue and a light limey shade of green (actually just yellow with a very thin sheet of blue on top). Each work contains a lifetime of struggle released, giving way to childlike wonder. These are paintings she only could have made at the end of her life.
“There was a freedom from fear…she gave herself that latitude. And they just poured out of her for a little over two years,” says Marc Glimcher. He actually watched it happen: He and his family—including his seven- and a nine-year-old—had recently moved to New Mexico. (He was a second-grade science teacher at the time, one of several chapters he had before joining the family business full-time.) “She struck up this incredible relationship with my kids,” he says. That was new for Martin, having children around in a regular fashion. “It supercharged this kind of joyful openness for her.”
Agnes Martin’s story begins in 1912 with her birth in the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada, which she once said was “like being born in Siberia.” Understandably, much has been made of the influence of the New Mexican desert on her art. But the Canadian plains are in there too: broad and spare, with much room for interpretation.
Her childhood was one of self-reliance. Her father died when she was young, leaving her mother to raise Agnes and her three siblings. When Agnes was six and needed her tonsils removed, she took a streetcar, unaccompanied, to the doctor for the procedure.
She first arrived in the United States in 1931, when she was 19. She taught at a public school in Washington State for a few years before enrolling at the Teachers College at Columbia University, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1942. (She returned some years later for her master’s.) Seeing art around New York City is supposedly what prompted Martin to pick up the paintbrush. “I thought, If you could possibly be a painter and earn a living—which you can’t—then I would like to be a painter,” she told The New Yorker for a 1993 profile.
After working odd jobs to support herself, Martin moved to the Southwest in 1946, taking art classes at the University of New Mexico. While she was in Albuquerque she met Georgia O’Keeffe, whom she found fun but a bit exhausting. (“When she left the room for a few minutes, I just had to lie down, right then and there,” Martin said.)
Few of the portraits and landscape paintings Martin made in the 1950s have survived; she destroyed most of them after she swung to abstraction. But it was the work she was making then that attracted New York dealer Betty Parsons, who told Martin she’d give her a show—as long as she moved to the city.
So back to New York she went, arriving via bus in 1957. She had a loft on the storied waterfront of Coenties Slip, where artists like Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, and Ellsworth Kelly were her neighbors. It became the hotbed of the art world, full of experimentation and collaboration. Martin considered herself one of the Abstract Expressionists, but she was also ushering in a new era for the nascent Minimalists.
Yet as her acclaim grew her mental health suffered. “She had to go back to the place where she got the source code,” Glimcher explains. She left the cultural hub of New York for the deserts of New Mexico. It took nearly a decade for her to get back to making art—but once she did, she reached a new career high, with blue-chip gallery and museum shows and newfound financial stability.
She built herself an adobe home (twice). She had friends. She loved listening to Beethoven and speeding around in her white Mercedes. For all the mythos of Martin the solitary eccentric, she also loved to have a good time.
“Agnes’s life was a work of art. She gave everything to this,” says Glimcher. It was deliberate to cap Pace’s 65th-anniversary celebrations with Martin’s work—not to mention work made at the twilight of her career. “When an artist lives to that age, the very last work is very, very important to look at. It is the most unpolluted work in their life.”
What does it mean, then, that Martin’s last work was so full of exuberance? She knew suffering, and she could be tough. But she was able to clear the cobwebs, time and again, and let the light in.
“Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you cannot have,” Martin said in an oft-quoted lecture from 1973. “If you do what you want to do and what you can do and if you can then recognize it you will be contented. You cannot possibly know what it will be but looking back you will not be surprised at what you have done.”
But it is surprising to us still, so many years later. The modesty of her paintings—just some bands of color, with ever-so-wobbly lines of graphite—belies the intense reactions they produce. That is her genius. What happens to you when you look at her art is the art.
“Agnes Martin: Innocent Love” is at Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street in New York, through December 20.