Throughout her life, Agnes Martin repeated a reticence to, and even rejection of, biography. Her resistance puts Martin’s biographer in a difficult position. In her biography of Martin, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015), Nancy Princenthal masterfully meets the challenge with a sensitive, open and compassionate account. Princenthal presents the confusing and often-contradictory accounts of Martin’s life without judgment. Nonetheless, Princenthal is not ambiguous or dispassionate in her language, and she draws forceful conclusions and opens up rich avenues of inquiry and critical thought about Martin’s art. Martin’s mental illness and sexuality, two tropes that might have easily been sensationalized under less skilled hands, have been thoughtfully written about as a complement to Martin’s work, not a defining presence. Princenthal pulls from a haze of privacy and a smokescreen of mystery someone tangible: Agnes Martin.

Princenthal is upfront in her ever-increasing concerns at writing Martin’s biography, writing that she has “qualms about violating [Martin’s] privacy, which have grown in the writing of this volume.” Martin’s silence, exhorting close friends to guard the details of her life even after her death, was both personal and to protect her art from easy biographical interpretation. Princenthal elucidates: “Martin late in her life elicited pledges from friends that they wouldn’t talk about her after she was gone. Whether or not sworn to secrecy, many have honored her wish—a wish that is also plainly apparent in her deeply reticent work and even more explicit in her writing. Her paramount injunctions, against pride and ego, have continued to shape attempts to bring her life into focus.”

This hesitancy in undertaking the writing of Martin’s biography only increases the tenacity needed to write the book. The roadblocks Princenthal encounters are many and varied, not least is Martin’s injunction to her friends. Martin often and unsentimentally destroyed work that failed her exacting vision. During her first stay in Taos, New Mexico in the 1940s, there was a yearly bonfire: “At Taos I wasn’t satisfied with my paintings and at the end of every year I’d have a big fire and burn them all.” As a result, the evolution of Martin as an artist and painter is difficult, though Princenthal shows, not impossible, to trace.

Among the many forms of protest Martin used against biography, most challenging is her obfuscation of personal history while emphasizing her own mythos. Martin was born in 1912 in frontier Western Canada to Scottish emigrants, Malcolm and Margaret. There are specific confusions concerning Martin’s family, including the circumstances around the departure of Malcolm (when Martin was three years old). Princenthal carefully picks through the evidence of Malcolm Martin’s absence — variously suggested as death in the Boer War or syphilis, or just skipping town — by analyzing court records and Saskatchewan homestead records. Despite this diligence, the “particulars” remain murky.

In another example, the tantalizing yet baffling conflation between biography and myth is seen after Martin’s graduation from high school in Vancouver. For unclear reasons, Martin relocated to Bellingham, WA, arriving south of the border for the first time. Ostensibly, Martin said she had come to Bellingham to help her sister Maribel during a difficult pregnancy, though Princenthal is unconvinced by this reason: “It is an odd explanation, with conspicuous holes. (Where was Glen Sires, whom Maribel married in 1930? How precisely could Agnes, still a teenager, have been of help?)” Moreover, and this is where the story becomes stranger, while in Bellingham, Martin somehow ended up in California:

“At some point in 1930 or 1931, she took a job in Los Angeles offered by an employment agency—in another version of the story, she saw a sign offering a position while on a bus back to Vancouver—as household cook to a woman named Rhea Gore, and she wound up serving as a driver for Gore’s roughly 25-year-old son, John Huston. Soon to become a famous film director, Huston was then a budding screenwriter and miscreant (he’d been arrested for drunk driving a few times). Having been involved in a fatal car accident that was ‘something of a scandal,’ according to his son, Tony Huston—he’d struck a pedestrian—John Huston’s license was suspended, and during the trial that ensued, Martin drove him to court each day.”

Princenthal again and again makes clear discrepancies and ambiguities within Martin’s biography and the difficulties in writing that life. But the potential confusions nevertheless serve to sharpen Princenthal’s portrait. The “shape of myth,” a phrase Princenthal uses, provides scaffolding through which she builds Martin’s life.

Martin was a teacher in small towns throughout the Pacific Northwest and came to New York City to Teacher’s College (though she said Columbia) in 1941. She moved repeatedly during the next 15 years, including stints in Taos, the Pacific Northwest, Delaware and New York City. In 1957, she came back to New York City, and established a studio in Coenties Slip, with neighbors who “included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Jasper Johns…” Martin was in her 40s when she began to work with the grids she is so well known for and, more importantly, “that, she felt, represented her true vision.”

Through evocative and spare language, Princenthal skillfully evokes Martin’s paintings, particularly the dependence of the work “on the observer’s response.” Princenthal’s account of viewing The Tree (1964) is the lived experience of one of Martin’s paintings: a symbiotic and mercurial relationship. The Tree was the first Martin painting Princenthal saw, and “has stayed with [her] ever since.” However, when Princenthal returned to the painting as she wrote this biography, she was disappointed to find it “static and coldly white.” “It was a dismaying moment; I sat on a bench with pad and pen in hand and saw nothing but pencil lines and paint.” Princenthal felt she was “failing” the painting. During another visit, her response shifted again:

It was again an image of nature sublimated into the radiance of geometry. Like the majestic pump that a big tree is, sucking water from the earth and moving it toward sunlight, the painting once more seemed to breathe visibly, with its biaxial double-stroke of inspiration and exhalation. A painting can create an updraft and take you with it. It can also be a buffer for the kind of shattering, screaming beauty that may swallow you whole, as I believe Martin often felt her sensorium threatened to do. The business of response is a delicate, willed operation, a deep but unstable joy even when it succeeds.

Princenthal wrote to Martin when she was an undergraduate at Hunter College. Martin’s letter in response exhorts Princenthal to “Write your true response.” Princenthal does just that in her mutating responses to The Tree; a formal description would have been meaningless. Princenthal’s biography of Martin could have had the same tenor as a formal description of one of Martin’s paintings, and would have been as disposable. Instead, Princenthal writes a “true response” to the art and life of Agnes Martin: a whole yet tenuous biography with myths and obscurities, intimacies and challenges. Moreover, it is most crucially that Princenthal’s “true response” aids our own such observations of Martin’s work.

Princenthal, Nancy. Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art. (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0500093900, 320 pages, $39.95

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June 3 to August 14, 2015
545 West 25th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York City, 212 206 0220

A group exhibition may be tightly focused, like a beam of light that penetrates the artfog to reveal a previously obscure order. Or it may cast a more diffuse glow, allowing the assembled works to illuminate one another, and viewers to intuit an order as they may. The latter curatorial style is just as rigorous as the former; if anything, a less programmatic exhibition requires (and rewards) heightened alertness to unexpected affinities among diverse works. Such an exhibition is the lively, elegant “Space Between,” on view through August 14 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea.

Curated by Louis Grachos, Executive Director of The Contemporary Austin, and FLAG Art Foundation Director Stephanie Roach, “Space Between” is ostensibly a consideration of objects in which the conventions of painting coexist with characteristics native to sculpture. This cross-generational exhibition of 33 works by 24 artists also reaches to photography to demonstrate the interplay of pictorial and physical space, exploring the fuzzy edges of this fruitfully gray area.

Of course, spatial ambiguity is not front-page news. Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare (1915 – 23) is but one illustrious 20th-century example, among many others. And then there is the ancient tradition of bas-relief, which transmutes ambient light into chiaroscuro. But “Space Between” doesn’t overplay this hand, as it touches also on the persistence of a certain shape-heavy, color-centric strain of abstraction and, by extension, urges viewers to think about art history in terms of continuity rather than wave upon wave of innovation, of radical newness.

Three relatively recent works by Ellsworth Kelly anchor the show. The most salient of these is Blue Relief Over Green (2004), two oil-on-canvas monochrome rectangles joined at a right angle and measuring about seven by six feet — plus, (the all-important third dimension) the two and three-quarters inches depth of the panels’ stretchers. The seemingly minor physical displacement of the picture plane interferes with the property of color — even Kelly’s full-throated hues — to appear to advance or recede in relation to one another. The visual tension is exquisite, and sets the tone for ”Space Between.”

Gazing down into Roni Horn’s Pink Around (B) (2008), a solid glass disk 40 inches in diameter and 15 inches high, the viewer is simultaneously impressed by its mass and beguiled by the blushing delicacy of its coloration. Sadie Benning’s compact wall pieces, such as Wipe, Montana Gold Banana and Ace Fluorescent Green (2011), embody color quite differently: on these small, plaster-covered panels, two distinct hues occupy the same physical plane while vying for illusionistic space. Meanwhile, the title divulges the object in Thomas Demand’s photographic triptych, Detail (Sportscar) (2005), in which extreme cropping renders unrecognizable these sleek orange forms.

In this context, attention to color doesn’t necessarily imply abundant chroma. The oldest work in the show is Mystry Man (1984) by Tony DeLap, a seven-foot-high wall construction made of canvas over an eccentrically shaped and beveled wood stretcher and painted a precise shade of gray. Nearby is Wyatt Kahn’s Untitled (2014), another painting/sculpture hybrid, in which the deadpan color of raw linen contrasts with the flat panels’ animated, undulating contours.

There are two corner pieces in the show. Untitled Still Life (2013) by Kaz Oshiro is a large, cherry-red, square canvas tipped 45 degrees, its left corner bent and crumpled where it meets the adjacent wall. It seems a bit reluctantly sculptural. Jim Hodges contributes Toward Great Becoming (orange/pink) (2014), in which two mirror-tiled panels — irregular polygons — reflect each other and complete themselves. It is dazzling, and makes you giddy.

Two adjoining galleries testify to the wide influence of Agnes Martin on the work of contemporary artists. One space houses Martin’s Peace and Happiness (2001), a wonderful 60-inch-square canvas comprising alternating horizontal bands of azure blue and dusty white, faintly delineated in pencil. The mirage-like effect is atmospheric one moment, concrete the next. In its proximity, Rebecca Ward’s clandestine (2015) — a five-foot-high work in which stitched sections of canvas, painted in pearly tones, are partially deconstructed to reveal the stretcher—shares this Martin’s split personality. The Sun, Chapter 1 [diagonal edge, horizontal stripe] (2001), a quiet stunner by R.H. Quaytman, also reflects on its own structure; the primary motif, a diagonal band, depicts in section the plywood panel on which it is painted. The interconnectedness of visuality and materiality is borne out in other splendid works in this gallery by Julia Rommel and Svenja Deininger.

A second Martin, the 12-inch-square Untitled #6 (1999), keeps company with a trippy, mirrored, space-confounding 2D work in glass, mirror and wood by Olafur Eliasson, Walk Through Wall (2005); a cast resin piece by Rachel Whiteread, titled A.M. (2011) — in homage to the Martin? — which seems to refer to a gridded windowpane; and two colored pencil drawings by Marc Grotjahn from his “butterfly” period of a decade or so ago. Rounding out the show are terrific works by Sarah Crowner, Liam Gillick, Sérgio Sister, Andreas Gursky, Blair Thurman, and Douglas Coupland (yes, the novelist).

In the mid-to-late 1950s, Kelly and Martin worked in a loft building on Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Contrary to the prevailing Abstract Expressionist autographic touch, improvisational composition and spatial flux, they concerned themselves with unbroken color and unambiguous, hard-edge shape. Decades of “isms” (and the neighborhood’s loft buildings) have fallen like dominoes since those days, but the deeper structures of contemporary art’s visual vocabulary remain intact and vital. As Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns are lauded for eliding painting and sculpture in the neo-Dada 1950s, so too do the efforts of Kelly and Martin (and other Coenties Slip figures like Jack Youngerman and Charles Hinman) echo today.

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Agnes Martin: An Homage to Life
April 19 – June 30th, 2004
PaceWildenstein
32 East 57th Street
New York

Agnes Martin arrived at her signature style in the 1970s, when she was nearly 60. Within the narrow parameters she set for herself, a square format (72 inches x 72 inches until 1995, when she changed to 60 inches x 60 inches), thin washes of color, and straight graphite lines, the paintings were endlessly varied and beautiful. Reams of serious criticism have been written about them; her monastic lifestyle fascinates interviewers. Martin is now 92. Two concurrent exhibitions bracket some 30 years of her production with rarely seen paintings that preceded it, up at Dia:Beacon, and Martin’s most recent work at PaceWildenstein uptown.

“….going forward into unknown territory…Agnes Martin’s Early Paintings 1957 – 1967” at Dia:Beacon features an exploratory phase during the decade she lived in New York. Three linked galleries were specially constructed to display the 21 paintings on view in roughly three stages of chronological time and formal development. Martin moved to New York from the southwest in 1957 to join Betty Parson’s abstract expressionist gallery at Parson’s invitation. She settled into a loft on Coenties Slip near the Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Manhattan. Many paintings did not survive the artist’s severe editing, so what still exists is what passed muster, or was out of her reach. The latest painting in the show is dated 1965. Martin left New York in 1967, eventually relocating in New Mexico where she lives today.

The seven works from 1957 – 1959 in the first gallery straddle late abstract expressionism and color field painting. Drained of saturated hues, they’re like lunar reflections of these late modernist modes. “The Spring,” dating from 1958 and measuring 50 inches x 50 inches, salutes the planes and horizontal bands of Mark Rothko in shades of gray and white. Perhaps in an effort to find a color language without referring to modernist color, Martin established at this time a reductive palette of black and neutral tones in gray, yellow, and white oil paint brushed on thinly or applied with a knife. Aspects of Martin’s mature style were emerging in other ways. Her preference for the square format had come into place, from small sizes at 25 inches x 25 inches up to 65 inches x 65 inches, about the size she would eventually use consistently. Geometrical motifs, circles, triangles, and rectangular forms echo the Native American culture she had absorbed while teaching in the southwest. These motifs adapted well to the influence of Martin’s mentor at Betty Parsons Gallery, Barnett Newman. “Untitled,” from 1957, is a composition with a central white strip separating two equal black diamond shapes. Tonal modulation is evident in Martin’s underpainting and scumble, techniques she later discarded for acrylic washes. In “Window,” (1957), a pale ground surrounds four rectangles, two in gray set above two in pale yellow , as if to compress sky and earth into four congruent parcels of pigment.

In the second gallery, seven more paintings from 1959 to 1960 accentuate geometric form and introduce pencil line. The artistic milieu where Martin moved was keenly interested in eastern philosophy. Ancient Taoist writings of Lao Tse and Chuang Tzu inspired her with the lasting idea that inspiration comes from within. “Earth” (1959, 49 3/4 inches x 49 3/4 inches) has bands at the high and low extremities of the picture plane while a deep and uniform umber holds several rows of black dots. Delicate white pencil rims distinguish them upon close view. In “Untitled,” (1960) the vertical, bilateral symmetry Newman often used is rotated into a horizontal composition where the energy and speed of the vertical translate to an analog for planetary rotational movement, perhaps another allusion to southwestern landscape, Native American thought and culture. The pale circles at top and bottom could be a meditational motif from Tantric art.

“Untitled” (1959) uses the most pared down of painterly means to delineate simple forms. Here, twin white rectangles sit in tension within a dimmer field of white. Two smallish vertical paintings from 1959 are more like cuneiform tablets than picture planes. Their unusually thick surfaces in a creamy bone color are incised with graphite lines trailing through wet oil paint. One canvas is divided into a wide spaced grid that is regular yet handmade, while the other is segmented by horizontal lines interspersed with triangular outlines.

The third gallery contains the first grid paintings, dating from 1961 to 1965. Underpainting appears for the last time in “Night Sea,” from 1963, wherein gold leaf line peeks up between regular brush strokes in two shades of blue. “Flower in the Wind,” also from 1963, has a rose-tinted field with lots of vertical graphite lines activating the surface. “The Islands” (fig 4) is painted only with touches of white inside a graphite grid that leaves a border of plain canvas all around it. The natural color of flax threads pulled taut in the canvas weave plays its own part in the painting’s structure, surface, texture, and tone. Two gorgeous blue wash paintings with graphite lines from 1964 look similar except for an important switch: “The Peach” was done in oil, but “The Beach” initiates Martin’s use of acrylic paint.

Martin’s engagement with the grid, a motif that came to figure prominently in the art of the 1960s and 1970s was, for her, a “classical” ideal more in line with Chinese, Greek, Coptic, and Egyptian art than the Minimalist aesthetic emerging at the time. Curator Lynne Cooke’s excellent essay for “…going forward into unknown territory…” provides an insightful mix of historical background and visual analysis to ground the exhibition in its present context. She draws on previous critical writings on the artist’s work and includes a selected bibliography so one can always seek out other sources. Cooke is careful to point out that Martin did not think of herself as a Minimalist, but as a participant in late abstract expressionism. Martin entered the dialogue in her mid forties in 1957, rather late in the game for ab-ex, but she feels that that was her generation – no matter what anyone else thinks.

Critical tides shift, and as time goes on Martin’s work looks transitional in significant ways. It’s very interesting to see these early paintings exactly where they are right now at Dia:Beacon’s ground floor permanent galleries, around the corner from work of the 1960s and 70s that was attuned to the viewer in very specific ways. Martin’s graphite lines are echoed in Fred Sandback’s taut yarn sculptures tethered to wall, floor, and ceiling boundaries. As graphic surface, a Martin grid painting compares to Sol le Witt’s drawing installations, without their rational mathematical permutations. For both Heizer and Martin, the landscape of the American southwest held the inspiration of sublime infinities of light, space, and time. Martin’s paintings concentrate the viewer’s attention on proportion, linear exactitude, and laborious patience as surely as Michael Heizer’s plummeting, steel lined cavities set in the gallery floor impel a visitor to keep alert. By leaving Coenties Slip at the threshold of fame to settle back in New Mexico, she was painting in the lap of Earthworks territory.

In hindsight, the phenomenological aspect of art in this era mirrors the dilemma of real figures in the landscape who had to contend with the Vietnam War, FBI surveillance of private citizens protesting for civil rights, the Weather Underground’s bombs in American cities, political opacity. Perhaps the exponential growth in the scale and ambition of art had something to do with NASA and the exploration of outer space. Thought itself was getting bigger. These days, as natural light spreads through Dia:Beacon’s long exterior skylights during the approach of summer solstice, the works seem to accentuate human sensation, nature, and geometry as they might interact with unbounded landscapes. Martin’s sensibility is congruent with this sense of astronomical scale and distance.

Return now to earth, and from Dia:Beacon to PaceWildenstein where Martin’s most recent work is on view . In “An Homage to Life,” Martin recapitulates some of her least known past motifs and imbues them with fresh ideas. The 1957 motif of a double black diamond around a central axis rotates 90 degrees into side by side twin black triangles lit up with bright yellow green tips. Unusually dark graphite lines tether the pair against an energetically brushed gray wash ground. If this ancient masonic iconography looks familiar, look at the back of an American dollar bill, and on the left you will see an eye levitating over the top of an Egyptian pyramid. Martin has given away much of the money her paintings have earned over the years to a charity for abused adolescents.
Other paintings in this new series place strong, thickly painted black geometric figures

within wash grounds. In one, double black squares which at first glance look regular and symmetrical but are not hover in a a reddish orange wash. In another, a single obdurate and thickly painted trapezoid rests on a gray wash, again applied with energetic strokes. This same thick black paint is used to make one of Martin’s signature grids in reverse; lines created by the absence of black paint are so fine that they seem to bare a single thread of the canvas weave. Elsewhere, the familiar pale washes in blue, yellow, gray, with graphite line, return in unpredictable new combinations. Martin has often said that she paints what she sees in her mind. We may be sure that these departures from her best known work and recapitulations of her earliest themes are true to her classical ideal of innocence, happiness, and love.

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