...going
forward into unknown territory...
Agnes Martin's Early Paintings 1957 - 1967
May 16, 2004 - April 18, 2005
Dia:Beacon Riggio Galleries
Agnes Martin: An Homage
to Life
April 19 - June 30th, 2004
PaceWildenstein
32 East 57th Street
New York
by DEBORAH
GARWOOD
Agnes Martin Window 1957.
oil on canvas, 37-7/8 x 37-7/8 inches
Courtesy Dia Art Foundation
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.
Agnes Martin
Untitled
1960
oil on canvas, 70 x 70 inches
Private
Collection, Courtesy PaceWildenstein
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.
Agnes Martin Untitled
1959
oil on canvas, 69-1/2 x 69-1/2 inches
Courtesy Dia Art Foundation
"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.
Agnes Martin The
Islands c.1961
acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
Collection Milly and Arne Glimcher, Courtesy PaceWildenstein
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.
