Agnes MARTIN — the mystic artist who disappeared into the desert
Disclaimer: The information provided in this episode comes from multiple sources and is not my scientific studies or discoveries. All authors and sources are credited at the end of this article. Thank you!
Welcome to HerArt podcast, a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. In our third episode, we will talk about Agnes MARTIN — the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert. My name is Nata Andreev and I am going to tell you seven curious facts that you didn’t know about an artist possessed of perceptive powers that have transformed her style into a fierce visual experience, the outcome of which produces mysterious and dynamic shocks of recognition.
Curious Fact #1
Her story begins on an isolated farm in a Canadian province. She was born to Scottish Presbyterian pioneers in 1912. Her father, a wheat farmer, died when she was 2. Her mother, harsh but resourceful, supported the family, though, by Martin’s account, it was her maternal grandfather who gave her a childhood. She believed that she was hated as a child. The silence was her mother’s weapon and she used it ruthlessly. Martin told her friend, the journalist Jill Johnston, that she had been emotionally abused, and yet she could also wring value from some of the harsh lessons of her childhood. Her mother liked seeing people hurt, but her unkindness did instill self-discipline, while the imposed solitude fostered Martin’s self-reliance.
Curious Fact #2
In a documentary made in 2002, Mary Lance’s With My Back to the World, Martin claimed she could remember the exact moment of her birth. She had entered the world, she tells Lance, as a small figure with a little sword. “I was very happy. I thought I would cut my way through life … victory after victory,” she declares, laughing. “Well, I adjusted as soon as they carried me into my mother’s hands. Half of my victories fell to the ground.” She pauses. “My mother had victories,” she says, and her candid, weather-beaten face darkens abruptly.
Curious Fact #3
The path, which took her away from home early, was peppered with byways, detours and emergency stops. Martin once wrote, in her Palmer-method cursive, a long list of jobs she’d worked since her youth, among them playground director, tennis coach, baker’s helper, ice cream packer, receptionist, janitor, dishwasher (three times), waitress (many times), warden to “criminal boys,” and manager of “five Hindus baling hay.” Somewhere in the summing-up, there is, no doubt, a mention of art instructor because that’s what she studied to be in 1941 at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York City. A year later, at 30, she decided not just to teach art, but also to make it, to be an artist. She started out painting portraits and landscapes but was dissatisfied with the results. (She said she concluded every year of her early career with a bonfire.)
Curious Fact #4
After a few years of teaching, she settled in New Mexico and devoted herself to painting, eventually developing an abstract style informed by Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. By the late 50s, Martin’s biomorphic works were supplanted by highly simplified geometric abstractions. These paintings were featured at her first show in New York, which took place at Section Eleven, an annex of the Betty Parsons Gallery when the artist was 46-year old. Over the next six years, Martin’s understated compositions evolved into subtle, dynamic monochromes featuring penciled grids on large, square, minimally prepared canvases. In 1966, her work was included in the exhibition Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which focused on painters working in reductive, methodical styles.
Curious Fact #5
“You go there and sit and look.” That was the precise advice that the painter Agnes Martin gave to anyone coming to her paintings, more than 100 of which are now floating up the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum. Her art is as abstract as abstract gets, yet her presence in it is very distinct. So is her story, once you know how to read it. She was right about learning by sitting and looking, though, in the case of her work, standing is even better because you can move around and take it in from different perspectives. View her paintings from several feet away, and their surfaces — whitish, pinkish, grayish, brownish — look hazily blank, as if they needed a dusting. Move closer, and complicated, eye-tricking, self-erasing textures come in and out of focus. Move-in very close, and you find that the surfaces are marked with hand-drawn lines, often faint but always firm, and regularly spaced, like the lines of a musical staff, or an accounting ledger, or a school notebook.
Curious Fact #6
When she turned 55 years old she abruptly changed her life. She gave away her brushes and paints, bought a truck and a camper, and headed out of New York. She spent much of the next two years living in trailer parks across the country until she finally arrived back in New Mexico, which she would make her permanent home.
Curious Fact #7
A late starter, Martin kept on going, working at the height of her powers right through her 80s; a stocky figure with apple cheeks and cropped silver hair, dressed in overalls and Indian shirts. She produced the last of her masterpieces a few months before her death in 2004, at the grand age of 92.
Thank you so much for listening to the second episode of season three, of HerArt podcast — a project for art lovers, especially art created by women. If you want to follow more of what I do, find me on Facebook and Instagram. And don’t forget to tune in next month, when I am going to tell you about Laila SHAWA — a prolific and revolutionary artist from Palestine. See you later!
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