$39.95 (CAN. $47.

95)

gnes Martin, one of the great abstract

painters of the twentieth century, was a
woman of tremendous inner strength
and creative power. Born on a home-
stead in rural Saskatchewan, and inclined throughout
her life to bouts of extreme solitude, Martin nonethe-
less participated in some of the liveliest art communi-
ties of her time, including those in Taos, New Mexico
in the 1940s and downtown Manhattan in the 1960s.
In the process, she forged significant friendships with
any number of her contemporaries, including Geor-
gia O'Keeffe, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Indiana, and Ells-
worth Kelly.
Martin did not achieve recognition until she was
nearly fifty. Still, her work—serene, austere, penciled
grids and stripes on square canvases, washed with
pale or neutral colors—helped give rise to Minimal-
ism (while remaining grounded, as she insisted, in the
spirit of Abstract Expressionism), and is internation-
ally celebrated today. Martin’s legendary discipline
and reserve, as well as her many lyrical writings, have
become interwoven with the legacy of her art. And
though it was never openly discussed in her lifetime,
she battled schizophrenia, making the extensive,
painstakingly produced body of work she created
even more remarkable.
Agnes Martin is the long-awaited story of her
extraordinary life, integrated with and inseparable
from a critical discussion of her increasingly influ-
ential art.

38 illustratiom., 33 in color
 6537
MIB
71D
Zo

NANCY PRINCENTHAL

AGNES
MARTIN
HER LIFE AND ART

J6987

A LYON ARTBOOK

4 Thames & Hudson

CONCORDIA COLLEGE LIBRARY
BRONXVILLE, NY 10708
 Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art © 2015 Nancy Princenthal

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 2015 in hardcover in the United States of America by

Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, 10110
thamesandhudsonusa.com

Published in 2015 in the United Kingdom by

Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London, WC1V 7QX
www.thamesandhudson.com

Library of Congress Catalogue Number 2014952825

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-500-09390-0

Published in association with Lyon Artbooks

Design & typesetting by Mark Melnick

Page 2: Agnes Martin in her studio (skirt) on Ledoux Street, Taos, New Mexico, 1953,
The Harwood Museum of Art, Gift of Mildred Tolbert. © Mildred Tolbert Family.

Page 6: Agnes Martin in her studio (smock, standing %4 length) on Ledoux Street, Taos,
New Mexico, 1953. The Harwood Museum of Art, Gift of Mildred Tolbert. © Mildred Tolbert Family.

Plate photograph credits: plates 1, 5, 7: Courtesy Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe;
plate 2: Courtesy Peters Family Art Foundation, Santa Fe; plates 14, 35, 37: Photographs by
G.R. Christmas, courtesy Pace Gallery; plates 15, 24-26, 39: Photographs courtesy Pace Gallery;
plates 16, 17, 29: Photograph by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy Pace Gallery; plate 18: Photograph by
Tom Barratt, courtesy Pace Gallery; plate 28: Stills by Bill Jacobson, courtesy Pace Gallery;
plates 32, 33: Courtesy Donald Woodman; plate 34: Photography by Cathy Carver;
plate 36: Courtesy of The Harwood Museum ofArt of the University of New Mexico, Taos;
plate 38: Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery

Printed and bound in China

 . gee

CONT ENTS

EMIRODUCTION. «Abstraction
Abstraction | ance
........ tee cate eee 7

CHAPTER 1 Nogiitiest Passives. «wre maps

tre eee Oe 16

CHAPTER 2 NMILEIE (EACCTame ae ee.

te ee 36

CHAPTER 3 REGEN STAT DOTS Mase S ie ae ee ode i rn 64

CHAPTER 4 ESIES Of AMOUCT Tam ay Wie ates Md tee SS Re 92

CHAPTER 5 AS SHOUTIME cea so eR Eee 123

CHAPTER 6 SIC MCE ee ER ES oe. ks ots Petar te bcs ee 149

CHAPTER 7 DES ERAT BEN Morr ane MNES OR GREE 5 Sen Ri1 0s OE 177

CHAPTER 8 BACK 10 te World = fe. ain ee B12

CHAPTER 9 CONMLOUTS REATAWT, pctesd eden a 236

EPILOGUE COMUPOSUTE” acu fata, wins aaenenia neat bneeeadanrst

ive 258

IND INOTE Se ottagidonad aa son ener er aen nee onnoe Taam crite ebocarice oar poem ce reoad an aIcce 262

SEE CEO RE BIO GRAVELS 2 teseinata shoes seca datasets site tnne nsiae ch cca t ealsme ess 281

TISHDIDS else Tes noose Shee nae ae buen? eon pu sp auaobek ALON esc Muanna cob Ra Geer odLet. Once cr see 283

MINES.
SCRAONMAEISIDIOIN cadcne aoHednoot anotagn Sona adbouret ss: 288
G cubbonoconsroupnscaduadcads
 Introduction

ABSTRACTION

o be abstracted is to be at some distance from the material world.

It is a form of local exaltation but also, sometimes, of disorienta-
tion, even disturbance. Art at its most powerful can induce such a
state, art without literal content perhaps most potently. Agnes Martin, one
of the most esteemed abstract painters of the second half of the twentieth
century, expressed—and, at times, dwelled in—the most extreme forms of
abstraction: pure, silencing, enveloping, and upending.
Martin’s mature paintings (she destroyed most of her early work) are
incontrovertibly right, in the sense that they convince us that nota single
preliminary decision or incident of execution could have been changed
without damage. Composed of the simplest elements, including ruled,
penciled lines and a narrow range of forms—grids, stripes, and, very occa-
sionally, circles, triangles, or squares—and painted in a limited palette on
canvases that are always square, they reveal an esthetic sense that is, as her
friend Ann Wilson said, the visual equivalent of perfect pitch.’
Martin called her creative source “inspiration,” and she said that the
paintings came to her as visions, complete in every detail, and needed only
to be scaled up before being realized. (This scale shift generally required
bedeviling computation; sheets densely covered in calculations attest to
the trouble it caused.) It is possible to think of such a refined esthetic sense
as savant-like or akin to a religious vocation: an attunement to qualities
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

commonly imperceptible. Such acute sensibility is not rare, but many art-
ists who have a refined visual sense find it aliability, threatening to equate
the practice of their art with the design of their homes or the selection of
their wardrobes, all elegant and graceful. Martin wasn’t like that. She was
capable of the most robust gaucheries. Even when she was wealthy, her
choices of domestic furnishings and personal attire seem to have been
utterly free of the standards that guided her artwork. But she was a ruthless
judge of her own painting, discarding the many examples that failed her
vision, and her acuity allowed her to see concatenations of line and color
to an order of exactitude, surpassing common perception with ease, that
can only be called transcendent.
That is not to say that her motivation, or her world view, were mystical.
Martin’s ruled lines resonated with the hum of the physical world, and
while she resolutely denied that her paintings contained references to
the landscape, seascape, weather, or natural light (notwithstanding the
many titles of her works that suggest such associations, most of which
she later attributed to well-meaning but misinformed friends), her work
is inarguably grounded in visual experience. Moreover, the work is meant
to express universal emotional and existential states—emphatically not
those corrupted by lived, personal events. The states she represented—and
these in later years increasingly provided titles, unquestionably of Martin’s
choosing~are rarefied, ideal conditions: happiness, joy, and, especially,
innocence. These titles, and the paintings they name, guard against the
vulgarities of everyday life. Martin’s work, then, not only channels the
visual and psychic abundance of the world but also filters it, relieving it
of impurities.
As she stated often in the talks and lectures she started to deliver in the
1970s, many of which have since been published, the sense of self to which
she aspired was egoless and devoid of pride, and her paintings can be seen
to reflect that commitment in their refusal of either bravura execution or
centered composition. At the same time, and again paradoxically, much of
Martin’s work suggests a system of boundaries. In more cases than not, the
 INTRODUCTION

penciled lines don’t go to the canvas’s edge, and the earliest grids were set
off by framing lines that echoed the canvases’ edges. And yet, exhibiting
one’s artwork, to which Martin was firmly devoted, is sure to breach such
boundaries—it is a public act, requiring pride and confidence. She made
art to be seen by a wide audience, and she believed it was incomplete
without the viewer’s response.
If it is hard to reconcile conflicting aspects of Martin’s work and char-
acter, it is because her internal life was deeply fragmented. By adulthood,
she had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia; she was hospital-
ized several times and was treated for the illness, with both talk therapy
and medication, throughout much of her life. Admiring accounts of her
capacity for extended periods of preternatural calm might also point to
the catatonia from which she occasionally suffered. As is often the case
with schizophrenia, Martin was subject to auditory hallucinations, and
although the voices she heard didn’t tell her what to paint—they seemed
to steer clear of her work—the images that came to her through inspiration
were fixed and articulate enough to suggest a relationship between visions
and voices: she heard and saw things that others didn’t.
The pencil that was always in her hand when she began a painting, cal-
culating its rhythms and transcribing her vision, may also be said to have
transcribed her thought; in a sense she wrote her work. Born into a gener-
ation trained in penmanship (she was for many years a teacher of young
children) and much given to handwritten letters, homilies, speeches, and
poems, Martin carried that graphic impulse into her painting, where it met
the geometric structures and color harmonies shaped by visual inspiration.
The sense of hyper-connectedness that is a feature of paranoia may also
be seen in Martin’s formal choices, the grid in particular. Representing
the structure of interconnection, the grid in common parlance names an
international communication system and a map of power. At once electric,
alive, and dangerous, it is also supremely orderly and harmonious.
Without question, such speculation is hazardous. Creativity and active
psychosis are incompatible; common sense tells us it is nearly impossible
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

to work when you're seriously ill, and luckily Martin was not acutely ill
often enough to prevent her production of a very substantial body of work.
Just as it would be wrong to call her a mystic, it would be a gross error to
see in her work symptoms of illness. Even less was it a cure. Moreover,
mental illness is a moving target. In the 1960s, under the reign of ortho-
dox psychoanalysis, schizophrenia (like all forms of mental illness) was
treated, literally, as narrative. It was understood to be the result of a per-
son’s circumstances, and it was believed to be curable by telling the story
of those circumstances, with honesty and feeling. At the same time—in the
sixties—art was stripped of personality, of narrative, of expression, indeed
of any information extrinsic to an exploration of art’s own boundaries, of
its function as a “language.” Fifty years later, these positions have flipped.
Psychosis is now treated most successfully (or so says current wisdom and
healthcare policy) with medication; early life experience and parental fail-
ure are not widely believed to be the most important contributing factors
to schizophrenia. On the other hand, artists have lately been urged to get
out in front of their work, to talk about its meaning and its sources, and
their own origins as well.
But Martin was unyieldingly, and successfully, opposed to talking about
her life, withholding details even from those who considered themselves
good friends. As she saw it, art was impersonal and universal—and mental
illness was something that didn’t need to be discussed at all. In any case,
friendship was a complicated undertaking for her, subject to firm con-
straints and beset by unpredictable lapses. She seems to have had the gift
of mirroring back to people their own best self, while guarding her own
identity. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t capable of engaging deeply with
others, and her impact on people was often enormous. Martin could be
compassionate, inquisitive, astute, and extremely generous. She was often
voluble and funny. She was certainly courageous. Most of her friends note
her love of the outdoors, of camping and, later, picnicking, of walks and
drives, of travel. And for some periods, she forswore all of these pleasures.
 INTRODUCTION

Her public persona, too, was at once tightly controlled and distinctly
eccentric. Increasingly described as a sage and an ascetic, attributes that
didn’t suit her and which she explicitly rejected, she wanted most of all to
let her work speak for her. If she was not the mystic saint some took her
for, neither was she altogether averse to exploiting that reputation. “Tell
them I’m a hermit,’ she said to Suzanne Delehanty,’ director of the Institute
of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, to avoid appearing at events there
connected to the opening of her first major solo museum exhibition, in
1973. And Martin was, indeed, a student of Buddhism, as well as of other
spiritual systems, including Christianity. She advocated humility, celibacy,
and above all egolessness, and she suffered fairly extreme poverty with
little protest. Even when she became wealthy, she lived simply. Her disci-
pline in all things was prodigious.
The religious practices Martin explored, Buddhism in particular, offered
not only guidelines for ethical behavior and glimpses of sublimity but
also protocols for resisting physical appetites. In its recommendations for
rising above the body’s demands, Zen, it has been argued,’ is particularly
appealing to those whose sexual inclinations run counter to what is socially
permissible. At the same time, by its determined openness and egalitar-
ianism, and its abrupt detours into precepts and stories that seem inex-
plicable, absurd, or bawdy, Zen licenses the forbidden. Martin’s romantic
attachments, if that is the right term—she was not given to sentiment and
preferred living alone—were largely with other women. But she refused
the label lesbian (as she did the term feminist when it was applied to her).
In her life, as in her work, renunciation was as important as embrace.

Martin was born in rural western Canada in 1912, and she died in New
Mexico in 2004. A contemporary of the Abstract Expressionist painters,
with whom she identified, Martin was long associated with the younger
Minimalists. She participated actively in a number of richly complicated

11
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

artistic communities, from Taos, New Mexico, in the 1940s, a proving

ground for modernism as well as various non-Western spiritual systems,
to the riverfront Coenties Slip area of Manhattan in the 1960s, where her
neighbors included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, and Jasper Johns, and
where both hard-edge abstraction and Pop Art took form. Like any artist of
genuine interest, she was both keenly alert to cultural developments and
averse to simply accepting them. Her apprenticeship was long; Martin was
in her late forties when she produced the grids that, she felt, represented
her true vision and that first won her acclaim. Her work has seldom been
out of the public eye since.
Any effort to reconcile Martin’s paintings, character, and life faces the
challenges of the many contradictions they present. A portrait drawn by
Rosamund Bernier in 1992, on the occasion of Martin’s first major ret-
rospective, which originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
begins, “On a country road not far from Santa Fe, a white BMW sedan
came flying.... There was a glimpse of close-cut gray hair, a strong jaw,
cheeks the color of a McIntosh apple, a face for all weathers. Hardly had the
visitor passed than a friend said, ‘Who on earth was that? She looked like
Beethoven’s sister. ‘Not at all; I replied. ‘That is Agnes Martin, the painter.”
Bernier continues, “Visitors who come in awe, and almost in terror, are
surprised to find that in the right company she likes to party.... But it is
also true that there are few people who can use a single syllable to greater
effect. Did she have any memorable experiences with fellow students or
teachers when she was a student at Columbia? No. Has she kept up with her
friends from Coenties Slip? No. Or with her friends from Taos? No.” These
dismissals are “often accompanied by an abrupt sideways motion of her
well-trimmed hand, as if she was brushing a fly away.” But Bernier shifts
into mythmaking mode herself in describing Martin’s gifts in drawing
people out. “On the other hand, she is a great listener. She turns her head
toward the speaker. Half thinker, half seer, she focuses her all-seeing gaze
upon eyes and lips. A deep silence, born of attention, envelops her. It could
be disconcerting, but the speaker—old friend or new acquaintance—feels

12
 INTRODUCTION

drawn into a magic space in which anything can be said without hesitation
and will be heard without prejudice.”4
In her later years, Martin gave interviews rather freely, and she spoke
with considerable frankness, which did little to dispel the confusion. To
the filmmaker Mary Lance, who produced a sensitive documentary about
her in 2003, Martin proclaimed, with refreshing satisfaction, “I was born
in the north of Canada, just like being born in Siberia. The land of no
opportunity, that’s where I was born. And still, I have had every kind of
opportunity and been every place and done everything I ever wanted.
And I’m rich and famous. God knows I’m rich.”> Indeed, she has come to
represent a certain kind of triumphant success. In Michael Cunningham’s
popular novel By Nightfall, we are led through a wealthy collector’s per-
fectly appointed Connecticut home to its inner sanctum, where we find
“on the one windowless wall the Big Kahuna, the Agnes Martin, presiding
over the room like the visiting god it is, satisfied, it would seem, by these
offerings of sofas and tables created by geniuses, by these stacks of books
and this gaggle of glass-eyed wooden saints and these Japanese vases full
of roses...”° Martin’s painting plays a similar cameo role in Donna Tartt’s
best-selling novel, The Goldfinch. A recent volume of critical essays about
Martin’s work, its cover showing an enlarged detail of a grid painting,
served in 2013 as an accessory on a table of shirts in a J. Crew store in
Manhattan: a quick emblem of educated taste and elegance, an elusive
promise of insider chic to the masses. On Martin’s birthday in 2014, Google
used a detail of one of her paintings from the 1980s as the banner for its
search page.
Perhaps anticipating just such promiscuous dissemination of her work
and image, 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. A champion of rigor, she elicited great feats of
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

tact. In the context of sketching an “Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag

wrote, “what any work of art supplies is a specific model for meta-social
or meta-ethical tact [the emphasis is Sontag’s], a standard of decorum.
Each artwork indicates the unity of certain preferences about what can
and cannot be said (or represented).”” Martin clearly established such a
standard, in both her character and her art. My qualms about violating her
privacy, which have grown in the writing of this volume, are alittle allayed
by unintended consequences of her success in guarding it. Richard Tuttle,
a younger artist who had an exceptionally long friendship with Martin,
and who steadfastly resisted my shameless badgering for his insights about
her, finally gave me this: people often ask him whether he misses Agnes,
he said, but he (and his wife, the poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge) live with
her paintings, and everything of her is in them. There is, he said, noth-
ing to miss.’ But certainly she gave abundantly in her friendships, and in
the example of her life, just as she did in her work—even to those whose
attachments to her were less enduring.
As Tuttle suggests, the paintings are the most reliable sources of infor-
mation. I first saw one when I was a teenager, and I first wrote about her
when I was in college; at that time, we exchanged letters, and hers to me,
a long handwritten note in which she firmly encouraged me to dismiss
“intellect” and “ideas” in favor of “true feelings,” was a puzzle that I worked
at for years. It wasn’t what I wanted—I was writing an academic paper and
had asked for her opinions of various critical responses—but its deep gen-
erosity provided a story I’ve told students more than once. The more I’ve
come to know about her life and work, the more I’ve come to respect her
essential unknowability and to beware of her many inconsistencies. She
was a student of Plato and Saint Teresa of Avila, of Lao Tzu and Daisetz
Suzuki, and of Gertrude Stein; by the end of her life, her favorite author
was Agatha Christie. She was a fan of the director Akira Kurosawa and
equally of big-budget Hollywood Westerns.
Help in sorting out these disparate clues is offered by Martin’s own
written words; those seldom quoted are often the most revealing. Similarly,

14
 INTRODUCTION

her paintings require discriminating attention and a fair amount of time.

They are notoriously difficult to reproduce; as with live performance, you
have to be there. Like the horizon between sea and sky, the drawn lines
that organize her work are both firm and fluid, and they seem to change
with our changing perspective on them; so do the contours of her life.
 Chapter 1

NORTHWEST PASSAGES

tarting from scratch, working hard and alone with the simplest
of tools until the job—however exorbitant its demands—is done,
keeping your own counsel, and staying tuned to the earth’s
glory: these principles were all Agnes Martin’s birthright. Whatever the
crosswinds of material circumstance and prevailing opinion, they guided
her development of a body of painting as rigorous as it is, for the many
viewers who try and fail to account for its enchantments, ineffable.
The same principles guided new arrivals to the Western Canadian prai-
rie that was her first home, where life—like her work—was plain but far from
simple. Some of Martin’s recollections of her early years seem borrowed
from Little House on the Prairie. “My family were pioneers,” she said in
a 1989 interview for the Archives of American Art. “My grandparents on
both sides came from Scotland, and they went on to the prairie in covered
wagons. My paternal grandfather was a rancher and a fur trader and my
maternal grandfather was a wheat farmer. My parents were also pioneers;
they proved up a homestead in northern Saskatchewan, but my father
also managed a wheat elevator and a chop mill,” where livestock feed is
produced. Others of Martin’s memories reflect the difficulties, some of
them daunting, that she and her family faced.
Agnes Bernice Martin was born on March 22, 1912. An auspicious year,
it also saw the birth of Jackson Pollock and John Cage, and, in November,

16
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

the incorporation of Martin’s hometown, Macklin, in the Canadian prov-

ince of Saskatchewan. As it happened, 1912 was also the year when New
Mexico, where Martin would spend roughly half her life, gained state-
hood. Poles apart culturally as well as geographically, yet strikingly alike
in many ways, Saskatchewan and New Mexico would have formative roles
in her work. Similarly poles apart, Pollock and Cage would come to rep-
resent critical aspects of Martin’s sensibility, the former connected with
the vaulting expressive aspirations of Abstract Expressionism, the latter
with disciplined submission to fixed procedures, which the practice of
Zen Buddhism helped to support. Like both these artists, Martin was a
lifelong child of the North American West, bred into self-reliance and
wired to spring hard on the world, to make do with little if she had to, and
to invent herself as freely as circumstances required.
The year 1912 was propitious for art as well, one of several sometimes
named as birth dates of abstract imagery and of modernism itself. Duch-
amp’s Cubist Nude Descending a Staircase was painted that year, before
scandalizing a New York audience at the Armory Show the following Feb-
ruary. Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning introduced real-life objects
(a frame of thick rope around the oval canvas, a fragment of shelf paper
attached to its surface) into a painting. The first abstractions of Mondrian
and Malevich were in the works. The era of empire-building was ending
in Britain and continental Europe, as the “settling” of the West concluded
in North America. In the United States, the Gilded Age, its chasm between
wealth and poverty strikingly like that of our own day, had reached its
climax. The Titanic sank in one of the last years of peace before a half a
century of nearly continuous global war.
In Macklin, though, 1912 was effectively still the nineteenth century.
The town sits at the western edge of Saskatchewan’s central prairie, which
was (and remains) home to the once-nomadic Cree, Assiniboine, and
Saulteaux nations; in 1876 they were signatories, with representatives of
other regional indigenous peoples, to Treaty 6, which appropriated their
land in return for concessions fitfully and partially provided. The western

17
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

territories would only later be established as Canadian provinces, when

they were acquired from the Hudson Bay Company by the government
in Ottawa, which was concerned about the expansionist ambitions of the
United States; Saskatchewan became a province in 1905.
White homesteaders first arrived in the prospective Macklin township
in 1906, part of an enormous wave of emigrants that largely originated
in eastern Canada, the United States, and Great Britain. Martin’s father,
Malcolm, was among Macklin’s earliest settlers, filing his first claim, for
320 acres (a half section) in 1908, using scrip he obtained for his service, as
a British citizen, in the Boer War in South Africa; he eventually acquired
a total of a full section (one mile square). Rail lines had been laid across
Canada by the 1880s, and 20,000 homestead entries were registered in
Saskatchewan in 1903 alone. One E. M. Macklin, general manager of the
Winnipeg Free Press and a member of the survey crew for the area, lent
the hamlet his name; hence, a local history proudly records, “our town still
stands unique in Canada in having streets named after outstanding news-
papers and periodicals,” as in Times, Herald, and Post Streets, crossed by
Express Avenue. The first baby born in the newly established settlement,
in 1910—the year the railroad reached the town—was, inevitably, christened
Macklin; in the same year, the first street was graveled. The village’s first
recorded homicide, also in 1910, was originally attributed to a Saulteaux
native; the charge proved false. Other firsts—the building of a church (for
an itinerant minister) and a schoolhouse, the arrival of a doctor—had not
yet taken place.
The decades between 1897 and 1929 have been called, in some regional
histories, the “golden years for Saskatchewan’s rural economy.” The popu-
lation of the province grew tenfold, reaching nearly a million by 1931.3 (It
has scarcely changed since.) The great majority of the province’s residents
were farmers, with wheat the predominant crop; the prairies of Saskatche-
wan served as “the granary of the British world.”4 In this vast breadbasket,
even the biggest “urban centers,” Moose Jaw and Regina, were towns of
only a few thousand souls.’ Unlike modern agricultural communities, the
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

farming towns of that era were largely self-sufficient. Macklin, favored by

the intersection of two rail lines, boasted the handful of stores and ser-
vices—grain elevators, a lumber yard, meat market, furniture store, church,
and schoolhouse-that provided for its residents.
But rosy summaries are belied by local accounts. The type of wheat
initially planted on the prairie wasn’t suited to the climate, which had a
growing season barely one hundred days long (more regionally appropri-
ate seed, which matured a scant week or two earlier, was introduced only
decades later). Farmers lured west by the promise of free land were often
sorely disappointed. Requisites for holding title included clearing ten acres
and making “improvements” to the homestead: the minimum was a single
structure per quarter-section, built within three years of staking a claim.
Those built by the Martin family were “a frame house, twelve by fourteen”
and “a stable, fourteen by sixteen,” each valued at $100 in 1914. Modest
though these dimensions are, a wooden home was much preferable to the
sod houses in which some homesteaders dwelt; wood for building was a
luxury on the nearly treeless land, and it was particularly scarce in these
years, which followed a devastating prairie fire.
Thirty-five years old when he arrived in Macklin, Malcolm Martin was
by the standards of the time no longer young, and the physical challenges
of the prairie were considerable. More than a few men quit the land to
work on the railroad, leaving their wives and children behind. Many
families arrived with treasured belongings from the East—a piano, sets
of best clothes, or good china—to find conditions on the prairie a cruelly
disappointing surprise. Susan Conly, a local historian born in Macklin in
1919, recalls a homestead wife sitting regularly on her porch in her single
silk dress, for which she would never have a proper occasion. Conly also
remembers improvised emergency surgery being performed on her fami-
ly’s dining table, and the occasional overnight visits of Canadian Mounted
Police, whose patrols took them through Macklin not more than once a
month.’ Survival in these circumstances depended on substantial reserves
of resilience and resourcefulness. The temperate months, harvest times

19
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

in particular, brought people together, and small prairie towns of the era
had periodic cultural events (as they had periodic doctoring, policing, and
religious services): opera houses for itinerant companies were built and
halls for Chattauqua-style lectures. But in the long winters, isolation was
nearly complete; even schools—officially, built not more than four miles
apart, as children were not supposed to walk more than two miles each
way—closed in the coldest months.
Martin recalled, of her mother, “She always thought that if she ever got
a chance socially, that she would be a knockout. She would be a charming
hostess and all that, and when she got married, she thought, oh, now it’s my
chance, but then they went up north, way up north, cause the government
was giving away land, and my father was the manager of a grain elevator...
He was like the biggest businessman in town. But my mother was out on
the farm and she had three children in three years and she really didn't
like children, and I was the third.”’ The family grew to have four children:
Ronald, Maribel, Agnes, and then a second boy, named Malcolm after his
father. Martin’s maternal grandfather was a successful farmer and later
a builder, and she suggested that her mother, Margaret, labored hard to
sustain the prosperity in which she'd been raised. Agnes’s recollection
also hints at a curious distance between her parents (as does the historical
record, of which more below).
To be sure, like most people, Martin was hardly altogether consistent in
her recollections. On some occasions she said that she had no memories of
Macklin,® and on others that she recalled it vividly. In a documentary made
when she was in her eighties, she declared, “I do remember it. It was so flat
you could see the curvature of the earth.” And, recalling how far across
the planet one’s gaze could take you, from there: “When you saw a train at
nine a.m., it was still leaving at noon.”® Whether a memory from childhood
or a later reconstruction, it is a vivid evocation of the prairie—and it sug-
gests, perhaps, sights trained on escape. Historian John Archer describes
the deeply satisfying visual rhythms of the land at harvest time: “The
bull wheel of the binder traced geometric patterns on stubble fields. The

20
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

marching rows of stooks gave some assurance to hurrying farmers. The

hum and dust and fury of the threshing machine gave a vicarious thrill to
the onlooker and a deep, profound satisfaction to the participant.” The
novelist Wallace Stegner, who was born in 1909 and grew up on the south
Saskatchewan plains, wrote lyrically of its “winter wheat heavily headed,
scoured and shadowed as if schools of fish move in it; spring wheat with
its young seed-rows as precise as combings in a boy’s wet hair; gray-brown
summer fallow with the weeds disked under; and grass, the marvelous
curly prairie wool tight to the earth’s skin.” But he also called it—sugges-
tively, with respect to Martin—“a country of geometry,” one that was “flat,
empty, nearly abstract.” And as if conjuring the spirits with which Martin
would long wrestle, Stegner proclaims, “It is a country to breed mystical
people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones."
On an unseasonably balmy day in October 2014, Macklin (the current
population is approximately 1,400) greeted visitors with a sign promoting
farming, drilling for oil, and bunnock, a local sport traditionally played
with bovine or equine anklebones (there is also a giant replica of a horse
anklebone). The town remains fairly isolated and mainly agricultural,
though now visibly affected, in some streets, by oil money; surviving from
its frontier past is a hotel that once faced the train station. The Martin
homestead, still farmed though now otherwise vacant (the house and sta-
ble are long gone), is not perfectly flat, but rather billows slightly, and on a
bright autumn afternoon it is bristly with cut grain and sun-warmed, like a
big cat’s pelt. Its emptiness gives way here and there to hollows with small
stands of trees and shrubs, as welcome as people would be. Above, the air
is crystalline and in constant motion—the wind, which residents confirm
is nearly ceaseless, produces a sound that ranges between a hum and a
roar. As so many observers say, the land does seem limitless, a vast convex
disc, but it is the size of the sky that overwhelms—just as in New Mexico,
where Martin would later live. As in New Mexico, too, extreme variation
of temperature in a single day is common, and night comes down like a
knife. Perhaps most tellingly for Martin’s mature painting, notoriously so

21
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

difficult to reproduce, the Saskatchewan prairie is perfectly impossible to

photograph. The camera simply makes it disappear. One must experience
at first hand its irreconcilable visual aspects: its fine-grained texture and
soul-gulping immensity, its featureless planes and fully four-dimensional
grasp of the senses.
However nourishing to the future painter’s visual appetites, the fron-
tier idyll didn’t last long; Agnes Martin’s father was gone by the time she
was three years old, leaving his young family to an uncertain future. In
the 1993 profile for the New Yorker, Benita Eisler wrote that he died as
a result of injuries sustained in the Boer War.” By another account, he
contracted syphilis while there, which Martin’s mother experienced as an
intolerable disgrace."? The Boer War ended in 1902, so if Malcolm’s death
twelve years later can be attributed to his engagement there, illness seems a
likelier cause than injury. A third competing explanation for his departure
from the family is that he sold his homestead and skipped town; in a local
history, there is an account by a neighbor born in 1913, who reports that
Malcolm Martin “left the country for Black River Falls, Wisconsin, U.S.A.,”
selling his property to his neighbor Walter Henderson.” But Saskatchewan
homestead records show the property passing rather less scandalously—if
still murkily—to his wife, Margaret. These records also indicate that in 1910
Malcolm Martin made his wife his legal representative; another document,
from the local Surrogate Court and dated October 26, 1916, states that
he died, intestate, “on or about June 22, 1914” at Swift Current, 225 miles
southeast of Macklin (one historian believes that Swift Current is where
Malcolm and Margaret met'’). What particularly complicates the story are
documents showing that Margaret had already taken ownership of the
property by late June 1914. Some of the signatures on these documents
are date-stamped June 30 (a scant week after the ostensible and approxi-
mate date of her husband’s death); one signature, however, is dated, rather
suspiciously, June 23, and another, even more so, June 15. In other words,
Margaret may have assumed title to the homestead before Malcolm’s (dubi-
ously dated) death. The appearance of Margaret’s name on these records

S) N
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

is in any case unusual." Inheritance by a widow of her husband’s land was

hardly inevitable at that time; women had few legal rights (and no vote).
There are no feminine pronouns on any of the homestead records; they
were added by hand, as was “Madam’” for “Sir.”
Whatever the particulars were of Malcolm’s passing, Margaret Martin
raised the four children (the last arrived soon after he departed) alone and
in considerable bitterness. Her husband’s demise came at a particularly
difficult time. In 1914 the prairie boom years ended in a sharp economic
downtown caused by an exceptionally poor crop, disruption of trade fol-
lowing the outbreak of war in Europe, and tightening of London capital
markets.” Margaret thus seems to have come into possession of a good
deal of land from which it would have been hard to draw a profit even
with an intact family headed by an able-bodied man. (In 1916, she stated
that, while no acreage had been cleared in 1914, ’15, or ’16, forty, thirty,
and seventy acres, respectively, were “cropped”—considerable numbers
by comparison with their first years on the farm. By this time, the house
had grown to 16 by 20 feet.) Margaret also claimed that she remained on
the homestead “continuously” until 1916. If these declarations are accurate
(she would have had reason to falsify them, since residence on the home-
stead was required to retain ownership), Agnes was on the prairie until she
was roughly five years old—a school-age child, instead of the toddler she
later said she was when she left Macklin." In any case, both census and
homestead records show that by 1917 the family was residing, for at least
part of the year, several hours east of Macklin in the town of Lumsden,
where Margaret’s parents lived; her mother had died in 1913, but her father,
Robert Kinnon, survived until 1936, as the couple’s shared tombstone in
the Lumsden cemetery attests. Malcolm Martin is buried in the Lumsden
cemetery, too, somewhat to the rear of his father-in-law’s grand stone in
the Kinnon family plot and behind shrubbery. Nevertheless substantial,
the grave marker for Agnes’s father, dedicated to him “in loving mem-
ory,” adds simply that he has “gone home.” No space was left on his stone
for his wife.
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

It is generally said that sometime after leaving Macklin, Margaret took

the family to Calgary. Their residence in Calgary would have followed
the year or two in Lumsden, and it had to have been brief. By 1919—when
Agnes was seven—the Martin family had moved again, to Vancouver,
where Robert Kinnon had already established himself, in a very substantial
Craftsman-style house at 1147 Faithful Street (it still stands).'° In her child-
hood and adolescence, Agnes spent considerable time with her grandfather
Kinnon, whom she remembered with some warmth. “I felt ‘first’ with my
grandfather,” she recalled. “I’ve never felt first with anybody else. He was
a Scotsman, first of all, and he was a man who tried to be virtuous, really
tried.... He influenced me tremendously.” On another occasion, Martin
added, “He tried to be a good man. He believed in not interfering with
children. He didn’t talk to them. But you knew that he liked you. ... my
grandfather believed that God looked after children. And that it was none
of his business. Anyway, it made for a good life, I can tell you. Freedom.”
Distantly affectionate though this relationship may have been, it stands
in marked contrast to most of Martin’s remembrances of her mother.
According to Eisler, “Maternal authority was maintained by strict disci-
pline, and self-reliance was expected from an early age. When she was
about six, Martin recalls, she had to have her tonsils removed. Her mother
put her on the streetcar with carfare and instructions about where to get
off for the hospital. No one had told her that the operation meant staying
overnight. The next morning, she was sent home on the streetcar, alone. ‘I
wasn’t the least bit scared, she says.” In another even darker recollection,
Martin said her mother “didn’t like children, and she hated me, god how
she hated me. She couldn't bear to look at me or speak to me—she never
spoke to me.... When I was two, I was locked up in the back porch, and
when I was three, I would play in the backyard. When I came to the door,
my sister would say, ‘you can’t come in.” Further, Martin explained, “My
mother hated me because I interfered with her social life.” At this point in
the reminiscence, Martin laughed, with characteristic disjunction, then
continued, “She’s a fierce, fierce woman. She enjoyed seeing people hurt.”
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

Later, when her mother had a television, Martin said, “Her favorite tele-
vision program was boxing, and she got right up close to the television.”
To Arne Glimcher, whose Pace Gallery represented Martin’s work start-
ing in 1974, she said that “she loved her father, and that “he was the only
person who ever had faith in me,”” although it is hard to know on what
she based this belief, having known him only for her first two years. But
“she hated her mother for her sternness” and was relieved when she died.
“Glad to be rid of her,’ Glimcher reports her saying. On the other hand,
Martin told writer and friend Jill Johnston “all about how she died, how
it took two years and how happy she was when it happened, i mean how
happy her mother was, and agnes’s final pronouncement on death was
that you go out either in terror or in ecstasy and clearly her mother was
ecstatic.”*4 Perhaps the most pungent of Martin’s memories of her mother
is her earliest, recorded in Mary Lance’s documentary: “I can remember
the minute I was born. I thought I was a small figure with a little sword
and I was very happy. I thought I would cut my way through life victory
after victory. Then, they carried me into my mother and half my victories
fell to the ground.”
If this vivid—and mordantly funny—vignette has the shape of myth,
its emotional truth is well supported; many of her friends have testified
to Martin’s difficulties with her mother. But though daughter struggled
with mother, sword in hand, the two also shared characteristics that Mar-
tin was grateful for inheriting. Describing her mother as “a tremendous
disciplinarian,’ Martin continued, “My mother never said a word. ... She
had a strong sense of duty, and of justice.” Noting that she, too, had often
worked in one way or another as a disciplinarian, Martin conceded—or
boasted—“I never said a word either.”*5 And she proclaimed, “I have great
respect for my mother,’ a sentiment also expressed many times. Discipline
served Martin not only in her extensive work with children and young
adults, in her early life, but in every aspect of her career as an artist. And
while insisting on having been loathed by her mother, Martin claimed
some warm feeling for her nonetheless, “Because she worked so hard. She

25
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

made a good house clean, she was a good cook, she sewed, and I felt sorry
for her making my clothes when she hated me so much.” Clearly, living
with formidable levels of conflicting emotion was a lesson learned early.
In Vancouver, Martin’s mother supported the family-by buying, reno-
vating, and reselling houses. The city, which had been incorporated only in
1886, had grown almost 300 percent in the first decade of the new century,
to roughly 100,000 in 1911; by 1931 it had more than doubled again, to nearly
250,000. Housing was surely in high demand, and Martin’s mother arrived
at what seems a resourceful, and demanding, solution to the challenge of
single-handedly supporting a family of five. The physical and emotional
stresses of the work she did must have been considerable. Her choice of
work also suggests that Margaret Martin had a better-than-average design
sense and an interest in the visual aspect of things, although Agnes later
remembered little early art instruction and no family interest in it at all.
But she did recall doing a lot of drawing at home with her brother. She
told Mary Lance that she drew all the time as a child, using “anything she
could get her hands on.” She also told friends that she was especially close
with her younger brother, Malcolm.” But, in a reminiscence that evokes a
early inclination toward solitude, she said, “when I was a child I wouldn’t
walk home from school with my brother and sister because that would
distract me from my state of mind.”?”
As evidence of her childhood interest in art and of occasionally warm
associations with her siblings, Martin recalled that at eight or nine she
saved pocket money to buy postcard-sized prints of famous paintings,
which came in a series, and which she and her older brother would copy.
The first print in the series, which made a strong impression, was Jean-
Francois Millet’s The Angelus.*® Martin’s response to this sentimental
mid-nineteenth-century image of two peasants pausing in a potato field
at dusk, clasping their hands and bowing their heads in the titular prayer,
speaks not only to a love of painting but also to the deep roots in her life
of Christianity (though she was to become an admitted agnostic). As is
clear from her comments about her devout grandfather, Martin grew up
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

in “an atmosphere of stern Scotch Presbyterianism” that left an indelible

impression.
But as a teenager she was certainly not averse to pleasure, nor much
constrained by propriety. “When I was in high school,” Martin recalled,
referring to her years in Vancouver, “I don’t know what struck me. I was,
I guess I was promiscuous. But I got over it.”2° A similar recollection was
recorded by the artist Harmony Hammond, who befriended her in the late
1970s: “We laughed, drank a little too much, and Agnes told us stories, such
as the one about when she was sixteen and was into seeking degradation
in speakeasies but she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t succeed at degradation
because “There just aren’t enough people in the world who want to prey
on innocence.”*' Moreover, she became the object of nasty teasing, “And
so I stopped dating.” She concluded that the behavior “was just absent-
minded of me.”
More chaste—and lifelong—satisfaction was to be found in athletics,
swimming in particular, but also sailing and hiking. Vancouver is on the
Pacific, and Martin spent a good deal of time fishing and sailing as she grew
up, relishing the area’s beauty and bounty. “She spoke about oysters two-
feet deep on the British Columbia coast,” her friend Ann Wilson reported.
Late in life, Martin admitted, “I was brought up on the ocean and I tried
to convince myself that I like the mountains as much as the ocean but I
don’t. I like the ocean better.” In fact, Martin became a Provincial medalist
in swimming and in July 1932 got notices in the Vancouver Sun and the
Saskatoon Star-Phoenix for placing fourth in the women’s 440-yard free-
style race, part of that year’s Olympic trials. She did not make the team;
had she won, she would have participated in the notorious 1936 summer
Olympics in Berlin, documented by Leni Riefenstahl. Nonetheless, Martin
was a highly successful athlete and loved being in the water. (Late in her
life, she endowed a public swimming pool in Taos, one of many philan-
thropic gestures. She continued to relish sailing.) The rigors and routines
of competitive swimming and, perhaps most strikingly, its combination
of ambition and solitude, are all habits Martin would sustain. More than
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

in any other organized athletic pursuit, swimmers, even when part of a

team, are profoundly alone when they practice and compete.
Looking back, she said she found racing uncongenial. “I used to be an
athlete many years ago,” she recalled. “If you're thinkingabout... winning,
...it tightens up your muscles,” a condition she said she opposed in every
way.*> But she also later compared painting to competitive sports: “The
canvas is like an athletic field [laughter]... Ihave to almost climb it.”° As
described by Canadian writer and visual artist Leanne Shapton, who, like
Martin, nearly won a spot on her country’s Olympic swim team when she
was a teenager, the sport has a distinct phenomenology: “Brief cheering
at an intake of breath, collapsing into bubbles as her head, aligned and
steady, dips back and under again at the turn. This is followed immedi-
ately by quiet.... As her head breaks the surface, the roar of the crowd
is, with each breath, loud then quiet, loud then quiet.””” That beat, loud
then quiet—the solitude, while in the water, contrasting with a roaring
audience that is heard only intermittently, as a kind of percussive back-
ground music—is strikingly like the rhythms that would play out, in longer
measure, throughout Martin’s life. They can also be seen expressed quite
clearly in her work. Notable, too, is Shapton’s description of her body in
water, which “immersed, feels amplified, heavier and lighter at the same
time. Weightless yet stronger.’ One thinks of the rather abstract relation-
ship to her physical self that Martin would later express: often treating her
body’s exigencies with some contempt, or at least impatience, she seems
to have had her most fulfilling experience of embodiment in her painting.
One thinks, too, of Max Ernst’s The Blind Swimmer, 1934 (The Museum
of Modern Art, New York), in which concentric series of ripples, regular
as the amplified beat of breath heard underwater, bring sharp focus to a
subject that isn’t there.

By the time she swam for the Canadian Olympic team’s tryouts, Martin was
no longer a full-time resident of Vancouver. Having graduated from King
George High School there in 1928, she left Canada in 1931 for Bellingham
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

in Washington State, joining her sister Maribel there, despite what she
recalled as a terrible relationship with an intellectually inferior sibling.
There are unanswered questions about the momentous relocation, includ-
ing why Martin began high school again in Washington State, graduating
at twenty-one; whom she stayed with during these years; and, most per-
plexingly, what really impelled her to leave home in the first place. Martin
said later that Maribel had become ill during a difficult pregnancy and
that she had come down “to take care of her.”3? 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?) There
are also explanations having to do with the opportunities, educational
and otherwise, of living in the United States. That is, Martin “noticed the
difference in American people and the Canadian people and I decided I
wanted to come to America to live, not just to go to college but actually
to become American.”*
And there is evidence that the trip to Bellingham had at least one detour.
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 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 sus-
pended, and during the trial that ensued, Martin drove him to court each
day. Tony, a Taos resident who knew Martin in her later years, conjectures
that his father might have had an influence on her because he had wanted
to be an artist himself and was “an excellent draftsman.”” Be that as it may,
the stint in California didn’t last long.
For her part, Martin explained that she had come to the U.S. “Because
I liked the kind of higher education that we have here... . 1 think it
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

contributes more to self development. ... In a British school [as in Can-

adal, if you’re studying Socrates—you’d memorize what Socrates said, but
in American schools you find out what Socrates thinks and then you find
out what you think.” (The precocious attention to Socrates is notable;
Martin would later call herself a classicist.) She spoke with appreciation
of freedoms, not only academic, offered in the United States. But she
also expressed surprise at its laxities: “I found out how easy it was here,
compared to Canada. In high school [there], I learned in one year... as
much as I did in four at college, at Columbia.... In Canada, we took 10
subjects—1o! Not four like they do here.” As a result, she declared, “I was a
good student.” The record doesn’t altogether support that assessment.
She seems to have taken a single art course in her second high school, a
drawing class; her grade is not recorded.
Perhaps, given her adolescent experiences in Vancouver, the most
appealing freedom on offer in the United States was from her own repu-
tation. Certainly Bellingham was a good place to start fresh; even more raw
than Vancouver, the area constructed its first high school only in 1899, in
nearby Sehome, serving 33 pupils. Bellingham Bay, first settled by migrat-
ing Americans and Europeans in the 1850s, was surrounded by old-growth
trees of colossal proportions that bore down on the land in such profusion
that clearing was prized not only (or even mostly) for the resulting timber,
but for providing space, air, and, above all, light. As described by Annie
Dillard, Puget Sound, gray with perpetual rain, was “the rough edge of the
world, where the trees came smack down to the stones. The shore looked...
as if the corner of the continent had got torn off right here, sometime near
yesterday, and the dark trees kept on growing like nothing happened.”4°
At the same time, at the water’s edge, when the clouds lift, the light can
be transcendent. But nothing could be further from the landscape of her
earliest childhood, so like the one in which she eventually settled.
For some time in these years, Martin was going back and forth between
Vancouver and Bellingham, swimming in Canada, attending school in the
United States, and living a rather uprooted life—another pattern that would
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

be sustained for many decades. Her later petitions for naturalization indi-
cate that she first entered the United States in 1936; perhaps she couldn’t
admit having attended a Washington State school while still a citizen of
Canada~—and, because of Canada’s status, a British national. But no lack
of security or confidence is recorded in the photograph of Martin in her
second high school’s yearbook, the 1933 Kulshan of Whatcom High School.
It shows a beautiful young woman, her hair pomaded into a fashionably
short, sleek bob, her small smile lively and eyes strikingly bright.
In the fall of 1933 Martin enrolled at Washington State Normal School in
Bellingham, a teachers college, which she attended for three years. (Until
that year, a teaching certificate had required only a single year of study;
perhaps the much more rigorous standards reflected the competition fac-
ing prospective teachers in the depths of the Depression.) Martin’s college
application gives her address as 1454 Ellis Street in the working-class York
Neighborhood of Bellingham, where she lived as a tenant in the home of
Mrs. Cora Johnson (Martin listed her as “guardian” on the application).
A recently widowed middle-aged woman-like Martin’s mother—Mrs.
Johnson had a daughter Bernice, four years Martin’s senior, who would
become a teacher too; also living at the house were another daughter and
her family. (Built in 1910, the house is now part of a historic district; it
was originally a modestly genteel neighborhood, Martin’s last for some
time.) In her first years at the Normal School, Martin’s academic record was
again uneven. Some semesters she got mostly Bs and a few As, excelling
in English and History (although at other points she drew poor grades
in both). Math seems to have been a source of consistent trouble; one
thinks of the pages of crammed mathematical notations she later created
in preparation for her paintings. She took four courses in teaching and its
techniques, and received two Bs and two Ds. For her work in her single art
class (Art I), she got an A.
Despite her apparent indifference to problems of pedagogy, on June
10, 1937, Martin received a teaching certificate, a license that was valid for
elementary and junior high schools (she returned to have the certificate
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

renewed in 1942). Her extended career as an educator indicates that she

found considerable satisfaction in working with young people. During the
following four years, she taught at various schools in rural Washington,
including the Livingston School of Clark County (1937-39), the Country
School in Hanson Ferry (1937-38), and the Burley School of Kitsap County
(1939-1941). At least some of these seem to have been one-room school-
houses, since on the document where she described this work history, she
entered “all grades 1-6” under the heading “title or type of work.”
The long list of jobs she said she'd taken in early adulthood would also
come to include several stints at lumber yards, where she was (as else-
where) a cook; she remembered baking twenty-five pies each morning at
one lumber camp. But she returned, regularly, to working with children
and recalled having taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Idaho, a country
school “in the forest,’ as she described it much later to her friend David
McIntosh. “I believe she was completely alone,” McIntosh said, and to the
remark that that sounded rather magical, he replied, “Much of her life was
magical. It could be described as difficult and crude but it was magical.”4*
Perhaps it is that quality that drew her to children—and, in turn, drew them
to her. Although she is not known to have had any children of her own, her
interest in them was lifelong, exceptionally sympathetic, and surprisingly
reciprocal. But they entered her art only in 1976, in the form of an anom-
alous project, the film Gabriel, which features a young boy. Said Kristina
Wilson, who was a close friend for decades, “Agnes often said she wished
she had a batch of kids.”49

This sketch of an outdoorsy adolescence and lonely, itinerant early adult-

hood, living in boarding houses and teaching children at a succession
of schools in the deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, gives no hint of
engagement with progressive culture in the 1930s. But as a teenager Martin
may have come across some of the livelier artists active in Vancouver: the
renowned Canadian modernist Emily Carr, for instance, lived near Martin’s
grandfather. She has been described as a “wildly conspicuous eccentric.”

32
 1947-1954 ——

Agnes Martin in New Mexico, late 1940s.

Courtesy Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe

 2 (ABOVE)

Portrait ofDaphne Vaughn, ca. 1947-49.

Encaustic on canvas, 20 x 16 in.

Courtesy Peters Family Art Foundation, Santa Fe

3 (RIGHT)

Self Portrait, late 1940s. Oil on canvas, 26 x 19 in.

Collection Christa Martin

 4 (ABOVE) 5 (BELOW)
New Mexico Mountain Landscape, Taos, 1947. Agnes Martin painting in

Watercolor, 11 x 15%4 in. New Mexico, late 1940s.

University of New Mexico Art Museum, Courtesy Peyton Wright Gallery,
Albuquerque, Raymond Jonson Collection. Santa Fe
Gift of Mercedes Gugisberg
 3058
Su

a
ae

a
See

6 (ABOVE)

Nude, 1947. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.

The Harwood Museum of Art
of the University of New Mexico, Taos.
Gift, John Schaefer

7 (RIGHT)

Agnes Martin displaying Nude, 1947.

Courtesy Peyton Wright Gallery, Santa Fe
 8 (ABOVE) | 9 (BELOW)
Untitled, 1949. The Bluebird, 1954.
Oil on masonite, 14 x 21 in. | Oil on canvas, 28% x 40 in.
Collection Scott K. Stuart | Roswell Museum and
Art Center, Roswell
 10

Untitled, 1953.
Oil on canvas, 335 x 47% in.
The Harwood Museum of Art
of the University of New Mexico, Taos.
M. A. Healy Family Foundation
Purchase Fund
 11
The Expulsion ofAdam and Eve
from the Garden of Eden, 1953.
Oil on board, 48 x 72 in.
Private collection, Denver
 12

Mid-Winter, 1954.
Oil on canvas, 33 x 48 in.
Taos Municipal Schools
Historic Art Collection, Taos
 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

who often walked through the neighborhood with her pet monkey and
half a dozen sheepdogs—a commanding single woman, she might well
have drawn Martin’s attention. The painter Lawren Harris, who later lived
in Taos, was from Vancouver as well.® It is also possible that Martin was
aware of, and perhaps even directly engaged in, the animated art scene
taking shape in northern Washington State at the time she was there. Bell-
ingham, while conveniently (for Martin) close to Vancouver, is also only
eighty miles from Seattle, which in the late 1930s was a substantial city of
365,000. The small but energetic Cornish School of Music, founded there
in 1914 by Nellie Cornish, was a hub of activity: vanguard dancers, actors,
musicians, and painters, all established professionals, were drawn to it.
The painter Mark Tobey, who was at the Cornish School in the mid-
dle 1920s, traveled widely in China and Japan, studying calligraphy and
Buddhism—he spent a month in a Zen monastery in Kyoto in 1934. He
returned to Seattle in 1935, and that year the Seattle Art Museum showed
Tobey’s Eastern-influenced paintings. Broadway Norm, a small canvas
that was his first abstract, calligraphic work, dates to 1935, and from this
point forward, his work was generated by line. Writing in 1962, MoMA
curator William Seitz (who would later champion Martin) praised Tobey’s
“white writing” as an integration of two “related innovations: ‘multiple
space’ and ‘moving focus. They lie behind—and often within—the over-all
calligraphic picture.”" The intimate relationship in Martin’s mature work
between handwriting and painting, as well as its mobile and multiple focal
points, make it tempting to imagine she saw this prominent local painter’s
pioneering work.
The pull of Asian influences and of Zen, so much more pronounced
on the West Coast in these years than in New York, was also evident in
the work of Morris Graves, another Seattle-based artist. He had shipped
out, as a very young man, on a merchant vessel to Shanghai, Kobe, and
Yokohama (as well as Honolulu and San Francisco), and on a second trip
returned to Japan, China, and Hawaii, besides visiting the Philippines. He,
too, studied Zen in the early 1930s. Known for images of birds and other

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small animals drawn with spidery, mist-shrouded lines, Graves met Tobey
in 1939, a year after having befriended John Cage, who began teaching
at the Cornish School in 1938. Merce Cunningham had recently arrived
there too; Cage and Cunningham’s lifelong professional and romantic
partnership stemmed from this encounter. Cage and others at the school
organized several exhibitions at Cornish of paintings and watercolors by
such leading European modernists as Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, and
Alexei Jawlensky. In addition to Klee, the Bauhaus figures Laszlé Moholy-
Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes appeared at the school in the 1930s. Dance was a
particular focus of the school; Martha Graham taught a summer class at
Cornish in 1930. Among the modernist disciplines pioneered there was
puppetry, and the first marionette course in the country was offered there;
later, at Teachers College, Martin took such a class.
One can see affinities with Graves’s bird imagery, and with his delicate,
skittish line, in some of Martin’s early paintings. Likewise, Klee’s darkly
playful and unflaggingly inventive paintings and works on paper influ-
enced her early work. But among the artists in Seattle when Martin was
in the area in the 1930s, only Cage would be engaged with Martin’s circle
of friends and colleagues when she was later in New York. His importance
for her work came largely through his promulgation of Zen Buddhism,
which he had learned about from Tobey.» Even if Martin had no occasion
to visit the Cornish School for a public presentation by Cage, she might
have seen one of his several lecture recitals at the Seattle Artists League,
the local Pro Musica society, and elsewhere in the area.® It is possible that
Martin’s years in the Pacific Northwest were spent in unremitting rural
isolation. But it is hard to imagine that she would have headed to New
York City with the intention of being an artist if she had not had a taste,
in Seattle, of what the country’s cultural capital offered.
At this point as at many others in Martin’s life, there are lacunae in the
record, and some may be explained by the onset of illness. Schizophrenia
generally emerges in early adulthood, and though there are no reports
of Martin suffering a breakdown or undergoing hospitalization until the

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 NORTHWEST PASSAGES

1960s, it is likely that the illness had affected her long before that. If that
is true, her achievements in the face of it are the more remarkable; initial
episodes are often severe. What is known is that by the turn of the decade,
with the country still in the grip of the Great Depression and the Second
World War already raging in Europe, Martin had decided to pull up stakes
in the Northwest and take on bigger challenges.
 Chapter 2

STUDENT / TEACHER

ike many of the momentous choices Martin would make, her deci-
sion to leave Washington State for New York City in 1941 has the
shape of myth, at once dramatic and blunt. “When I found that I
could work my way through college, I asked everybody what was the best
college; I thought I’d go for that. They said Columbia University. So Iwent
to New York.” She also had decided to be an artist. “I thought if I could
make a living painting, that’s what I would like to do.”
The move, which propelled Martin from small-town teaching in the
remote Northwest to studying in a preeminent cultural center, was a cru-
cial turning point, but looking back, she would have absolutely nothing
to say about her schooling in New York, her teachers, or her classmates.
She did mention having seen paintings in quantity, but she gave no infor-
mation about what they were. Moreover, some details of Martin’s account
are slightly fudged. She enrolled not at Columbia, but at Teachers College,
which is affiliated with Columbia but is a separate institution. And the
road to becoming a self-supporting painter proved unexpectedly long.
It is worth noting, moreover, that Teachers College was not the only
school she considered; four months prior to applying to Teachers College,
Martin’s transcript from Washington State Normal School had been sent
to UCLA.’ A few friends report that she received and accepted a swim-
ming scholarship at the University of Southern California, and that she
 STUDENT / TEACHER

attended but did not stay; one said she tried a few sororities there, “but
didn’t care for them at all.”} Neither of these California schools has any
record of Martin’s enrollment. Martin stayed at Teachers College for a
single academic year during the first of two periods there; she returned
to the school a decade later, finally completing her formal education in
1954, at the age of forty-two.
Teaching remains the most common day job for artists. But it was not
as reliable a fallback in the 1930s as it is today. When Martin began teach-
ing, the post-World War II explosion of art education, both in indepen-
dent art schools and, especially, in the fine arts departments of liberal
arts colleges, was more than a decade away. The prewar options for an
art teacher were largely restricted to elementary and secondary schools.
Classes in non-matriculating atelier-based programs, like New York’s Art
Students League or the National Academy of Design, were led mostly by
established artists; independent studio-schools, such as Hans Hofmann’s,
were another option.
In the depths of the Depression, any teaching position—any paying job
at all—was both hard to come by and, even by the standards of the time,
poorly paid. Writing about Barnett Newman, a painter seven years Martin's
senior who would become an important friend to her in the late 1950s,
Thomas B. Hess recounts, with some mirth, that “to earn a bit of money,”
in 1930 Newman and fellow painter Adolph Gottlieb

both decided to look for work as high school art teachers; they took
the Board of Education examination and to their blank astonishment
flunked....In the spring of 1938, after seven years of intermittent [sub-
stitute] teaching, [Newman] took the regular teacher’s exam again and
again flunked. Outraged, he took a copy of the test to his near-neigh-
bor on Martha’s Vineyard, Thomas Benton (who was a conspicuous
presence at the Art Students League) and got him to state in writing
that he would have flunked it, too. Then Newman wrote a letter to the
newspapers exposing the scandal: America’s most famous artist states

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 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

that he couldn’t pass a test given by the New York Examiners Board.
It was published in the Tribune, made a local furor; the results of the
exam were canceled.... When a new test was given, Newman and his
friends took it—and they were all flunked again!

Undeterred, Newman did some public-school substitute and adult-day-

school teaching between 1931 and 1945, for which he earned not more than
$7.50 per day; for comparison, though, the Federal Arts Program of the
Works Progress Administration, which supported many artists during the
Depression, paid an even skimpier $87.60 per month in the years 1937-41.
These are the circumstances under which Martin had begun teaching
in the Northwest; her chances elsewhere would surely have been slim.
In other words, Martin had many reasons to want to boost her qualifi-
cations—and, of course, to go to New York. She also had some basis for
confidence. When she arrived “with advanced standing” at Teachers Col-
lege, she was already furnished with a teaching certificate from Western
Washington State University, and her teaching experience distinguished
her from many of her classmates. (After the war, the GI Bill supported a
vast expansion of enrollment in colleges across the country, a shift that
transformed society. As one consequence, it made it easier after the war
for qualified teachers, including Martin, to find work.)
Similarly, she benefited, on her arrival at Teachers College, from the
precipitous drop in enrollment that resulted from the advent of World War
I. Indeed, the war abroad loomed large even at the outset of Martin’s time
at Teachers College. According to a report in the Teachers College Record
of 1941,° by the summer of 1940, the faculty had developed a “Creed of
Democracy” in which every department was called upon to enter into the
spirit of defense. Faculty and staff engaged in defense work were asked to
suggest services that “teachers everywhere can render to promote commu-
nity stability and welfare at present and also the protection and improve-
ment of the position of America on into the post-emergency period.” The
 STUDENT / TEACHER

language of this report may seem, for its time, both vague and alarmist as
well as stridently nationalist; Japan had not yet struck Pearl Harbor. Yet,
“Throughout the latter part of 1939 and 1940, there was a steady develop-
ment of ‘defense-mindedness’ at the College,’ which included, in addition
to preparing for civil defense and campus protection, activities like “orga-
nizing entertainment in the event of air raids” and “a fine arts course on
Posters in the War Effort’; this impulse was “perhaps at its peak during the
early months of the war.”®
Martin may well have been sympathetic with the school’s call to arms.
Although her political commitments would never be strong or clear, she
became an enthusiastic patriot and declared herself in solidarity with the
country’s military efforts. She first petitioned for U.S. citizenship in 1946
and attained it in 1950. She took considerable pride in being a U.S. citizen,
as she did in her younger brother’s military service during World War IL.
But whatever advantages the war years may have afforded Martin as a stu-
dent and prospective teacher, she did not have an easy ride in New York.
In the winter, spring, and summer sessions of 1941-42 she had a heavy
course load. Each term she enrolled in at least one class devoted strictly to
teaching skills;” her other courses were in studio art. They included Mario-
nette Production and Stage Design, and Letter and Advertising Art, as well
as classes in Drawing and Painting, Figure Drawing, and Clay Modeling.
Overall, in studio coursework—her strongest subjects—she maintained a
steady B+ average. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in October
1942, with a double major in Fine Arts and Fine Arts Education.
Martin was ruthless in destroying artwork that she considered imma-
ture, which for her included anything made prior to the late 1950s. None
of her student production from Teachers College is known to exist, so it
is hard to determine what she was exposed to or absorbing. The earliest
of her paintings to have survived her purgative efforts, from the middle
1940s, suggest that she was reluctant to adopt the lessons of modernism,
to the extent they were on offer; presumably she'd seen examples both in

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 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

Washington State and in New York City in the early 1940s. Her character
suggests that a will to understand and to excel battled with a resistance to
ostentatious experimentation.
Teachers College seems to have offered a range of possibilities for such
experimentation. Its faculty and program were progressive enough to have
lured promising students such as Ad Reinhardt, whose radically reductive
“Black Paintings” would make him an important link between New York
School painters and a succeeding generation of abstractionists during the
1950s and 1960s, when he was a good friend of Martin’s. Reinhardt was at
Columbia from 1931 to 1935, and he went next door to Teachers College
for instruction in painting; one teacher he remembered there was Elise
Ruffini, who would also be among Martin’s teachers in 1941, for a class
called Color and Design. The elementary-grades curricula Martin and her
fellow students were being trained to teach are suggested by the series
of instructional booklets called New Art Education; volume 9, of 1947, is
co-authored by Ruffini (then acting head of the Fine Arts department at
Teachers College) and Harriet Knapp,’ and begins, “Art means selecting
and arranging,’ as in shopping for clothing and furnishings, or advertising.
Succeeding subjects, each addressed summarily with a captioned image,
include flower arranging, historic costume and textile design. “Color” is the
tenth such subject, painting the twelfth (it follows greeting cards). Career
opportunities in the applied arts are touched upon. Three-quarters of the
way through the book is a page headed “How to Look at Painting,” with
a color reproduction of the sunny 1930 townscape Le mur rose by André
Derain, “one of the important modern French painters”; the painting is
deemed “an excellent example of design in painting. The artist has used
only essentials to express his idea and these he composed with sensitive
feeling.” Ruffini, who also wrote the catalogue essay for a 1948 exhibition
of the work of Hilla Rebay, founding director of what became the Guggen-
heim Museum, was evidently a committed modernist and more sophis-
ticated than this booklet suggests, but it seems likely that the teaching
classes, at least, were not especially progressive.

40
 STUDENT / TEACHER

A 1951 essay by Arthur Young, under whom Martin studied for four
of the six semesters she ultimately spent at Teachers College (he taught
two of her courses in two separate terms), provides more insight into the
program’s ideology at the time, if little indication of what actually went
on in its classrooms and studios. Civic-mindedness, American exception-
alism, and, above all, a commitment to the principles of democracy are
expressed in nearly every paragraph of Young’s bromide-filled essay. The
arts, Young wrote, were to be a social good; each child should be encour-
aged to develop his or her creativity; the popular and applied arts (with
the wary inclusion of advertising) must be celebrated along with the fine
arts, which were to be supported despite their occasional elitism and per-
verse difficulties. Immigrants were welcomed, but the special character of
American culture, conceived in explicitly populist terms, must be upheld.
“The social structuring of a nation devoted to democracy does not encour-
age nor accept an imposed critical hierarchy expressing the opinions and
standards of wealth, social position, or prestige,’ Young wrote.
Though his remarks on the avant-garde were strenuously polite, Young’s
feelings were evidently conflicted. He warned that avant-garde criticism
exploited “highly personal and often obscure and esoteric dimensions of
the individual,” yet he allowed that such criticism was the most enlight-
ened of the day. Likewise, rebellious young artists had “opened up a wealth
of expression exploring all of life’s dimensions,” but were also “guilty, at
times, of a perverse obscurantism.””° If Martin had come seeking unqual-
ified affirmation of an inclination toward vigorous experimentation with
challenging new ideas in art, she would not have found it under Arthur
Young, unimpeachable social progressive though he was.
Among the handful of cultural authorities Young cites, including Ber-
trand Russell and Lewis Mumford, none had a more powerful impact on
Teachers College than the philosopher, psychologist, and educational
reformer John Dewey, who had been a lecturer there (although his pri-
mary appointment was at Columbia) from 1906 until his retirement in
1930. (He also figures among the thinkers cited, approvingly, in Reinhardt’s

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 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

acid, erudite cartoons.) A leading Pragmatist, along with William James

and Charles Sanders Peirce, Dewey believed, according to a history of
Teachers College, that “education should be active rather than passive; that
to prepare the child for a democratic society, the school should be social
rather than individualist; and that to enable the child to think creatively,
experimentation rather than imitation should be encouraged." Art as
Experience (1934), Dewey’s most important work on the arts, commenced
with an appeal “to restore continuity between the refined and intensified
forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings,
and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience.’
Coining a striking metaphor, he continued, “Mountain peaks do not float
unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth
in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are con-
cerned with the theory of the earth... to make this fact evident in its var-
ious implications. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine
art has a like task to accomplish.”
Dewey’s emphasis on continuity between the fine and applied arts
might have initially appealed to Martin, a practical woman to her bones.
She would have found less congenial his social ambitions for painting,
as in his claim that when “art exercises its office,” it urges “the commu-
nity in the direction of greater order and unity.”* Ultimately she became
firmly committed, like Reinhardt and others of the Abstract Expression-
ist generation, to an absolutely impermeable boundary between art and
everything else. Moreover, Dewey was not an advocate of pure abstraction:
“lines, even when we try to ignore everything and gaze upon them in
isolation, carry over the meaning of the objects of which they have been
constituent parts,” he wrote." But he did believe in the vitality of form,
and resisted simple narrative realism: “If all meanings could be adequately
expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist.”
Dewey found continuity among disciplines; indeed, he believed in a unity
of all creative impulses. Expanding on the implications of the book’s title,
he wrote, “In short, art, in its form, unites the very same relation of doing
 STUDENT / TEACHER

and undergoing, outgoing and incoming energy, that makes an experience

to be an experience.” In its affirmation of a connection between music
and painting, and, particularly, of the experiential essence of art, Dewey’s
beliefs and Martin’s coincided perfectly.
It is possible to see the legacy of Dewey’s fervor for civic action in Teach-
ers College’s strong commitment to the war effort. But the conflagration
in Europe had another, more consequential effect for fledgling artists in
New York in the early 1940s. Hostilities had been raging for two years
when Martin arrived there, and many of the Continent’s leading artists had
found their way to the city. Among the artists in New York by 1942 were the
Surrealists André Breton, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, André Masson, Roberto
Matta, and Yves Tanguy; also in the city were Piet Mondrian, high priest of
geometric abstraction, and the mercurial proto-conceptualist Marcel Duch-
amp. And there was, too, a sizable contingent of the painters who would
constitute the expressive abstractionists of the New York School: Pollock
had first arrived in 1930; also present, along with Reinhardt, Newman, and
Gottlieb, were Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and others. Cage came to New
York in 1942. Relations among these groups were not simple. Writes Lucy
Lippard, the cultural critic who was later Martin’s neighbor in New Mex-
ico, “When the Surrealist exiles arrived, around 1940, there were already
members of the struggling avant-garde who wanted nothing to do with
them on the grounds that ‘we'll work things out ourselves. Eventually such
an attitude would spawn the jubilant chauvinism that attended Abstract
Expressionism’s triumph in the mid-to-late fifties.”
There had already been considerable resistance in the United States to
European modernism in the interwar period, when regionalist painters
such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, along with more left-leaning
representational artists like Ben Shahn, gained prominence. In its support
of artists, most conspicuously through the WPA, the federal government
tended to promote distinctly American tendencies, through murals that
celebrated domestic history and achievements. On the other hand, Euro-
pean modernism’s public visibility in New York was enhanced by nascent
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

local institutions, principally the Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1929,

and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggen-
heim Museum), founded in 1939. Among exhibitions of note when Martin
was first at Teachers College was MoMA’s 1941 survey devoted to Joan Mir6:
his influence on Martin’s work in the early 1950s would be pronounced.
The progressive young dealer Sam Kootz organized a large exhibition at
Macy’s department store in January 1942; it included the early, quasi-fig-
urative work of Mark Rothko, whose later paintings would strongly affect
Martin’s work. But if the Europeans’ investigations of abstraction, and of
chance operations and unconscious processes, drove experimentation
by artists in the United States, venues for seeing the Europeans’ work
remained limited. Many of the most notable local exhibitions of the new
art, both European and American, occurred after Martin’s departure from
Teachers College in the summer of 1942. The galleries that would pick up
these artists and, eventually, provide crucial support for the New York
School painters would open only after the end of the war.
In short, New York, during Martin’s first year there, was a place of both
great ferment and manifold contradictions; like Zurich during World
War I, it sustained a level of international concourse that would dissipate
in peacetime. And like all historic cultural conjunctions, its competing
forces gain a misleading coherence in retrospect; in reality, the various
artists and their circles intersected without finding common cause. In any
case, Martin was busy with schoolwork and tied to an institution located
on the Upper West Side, miles away from the centers of artistic activity. Yet
she said that when she was a student in New York, “I saw all the paintings
in the museums.”* And again, “Before I went to New York I had very little
contact with art and then, when I got there, I mean, it seemed to me there
were so many people interested and so many museums and it just seemed
like—I thought for the first time of the possibility of being an artist, when
I went to Columbia’—this despite her declaration that she’d come to New
York to launch a career as a painter.

44
 STUDENT / TEACHER

Her reasons for leaving New York at the end of this first year of stud-
ies are similarly uncertain. Perhaps she was overwhelmed by competing
claims on her attention, or found herself outside the center of activity.
Other factors may have come into play. She has said that her younger
brother, Malcolm, whom she described as “brilliant,” was killed in bat-
tle, while fighting (as his father had done) for the British, in this case the
Royal Air Force in World War II. In one telling, Martin said of her younger
brother, “He was a pacifist. And when the British declared war, he went
straight to bed and he went to sleep. And when he woke up he went and
enlisted. The first Canadian to enlist, I think. (Pause) Then he flew over
Germany every day for three and a half years. Can you imagine? Going
to meet the enemy every day for three and a half years? (laughs).”"9 In this
recollection, her brother’s death is a fable of heroic combat, solitary and
unyielding, told with gleeful relish; little about it seems plausible. Later,
she boasted to her dealer Arne Glimcher, with characteristic gender ambi-
guity, “We Martins are military men.”° And to her late-life friend David
McIntosh, she said her younger brother, whom she talked about with great
warmth—MclIntosh believed they must have been close as children—died
of high blood pressure.” To sift through these accounts is to find a scanty
residue, with traces of pride, bafflement, and narrative ingenuity put in
the service of reshaping misfortune.

Whatever other reasons Martin had for leaving New York after the 1941-42
academic year, financial hardship was one. She later said that while she was
in school (without specifying which of her two stints at Teachers College
she was referring to), she worked three jobs at a time: “riding the school
buses as a disciplinarian, working as a disciplinarian for 45 waiters in a
big dormitory” for first-year law students, and running the elevator in the
boys’ dormitory.” With these references to serving as a disciplinarian, Mar-
tin introduces a theme. If it is not clear what this work involved—and she

45
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

always insisted that fulfilling its responsibilities involved not much more
than a raised eyebrow and stern silence—it is evident that she felt herself
well suited to it. Connecting the impulse to her working methods, to her
character, and above all to the nature of her mature work, is irresistible;
the geometries of her paintings are nothing if not firmly governed—with
the lightest possible touch and with absolutely unrelenting vigilance.
“Sounds like bragging but I think the best work I’ve done is as a disci-
plinarian,” she said. “I don’t have to be a strict disciplinarian, you know. I
think I inherited it from my mother. I’m just a natural.” In the fall of 1942
Martin took a job at the Delmare School in Delmare, Delaware, teaching
high school art. The following year, 1943-44, she was back in Washing-
ton State, teaching first grade at a school in Tacoma. In 1944-45, she was
teaching art at a school in Bremerton, Washington. In addition to working
as a teacher, Martin was, during this period, a tennis coach, a waitress, a
baker’s helper, and a dishwasher. She spoke of having cared for children
in a shipyard, where boats were built as part of the war effort.”4 “Whenever
I was really starving I always washed dishes because I got closer to the
food,” she recalled.*5
This period of itinerancy ended in 1946, when Martin arrived in New
Mexico, where she stayed—with interruptions—for more than ten years.
When she did finally settle down, it would be in this state, where she would
ultimately spend roughly forty years. And it was in New Mexico during
this decade that she made the first paintings that have survived, despite
her best efforts to suppress them. Though she would later postdate the
moment when her life as a painter commenced, her career as an artist had
unquestionably begun.
Her progress remained halting. Once again, she enrolled in school, at
the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque in 1946, and in the
summer of 1947 she was a student in its Summer Field School of Art in
Taos, a program that had been launched in 1929. Unlike the curriculum at
Teachers College, this course of study was entirely devoted to producing
art. But it was only fitfully progressive by the cosmopolitan standards of

46
 SeUs DIENT S25 EA Cl EWR

the day. Its instructors inclined toward representational work, landscape

painting in particular.*° The Field School was housed in the Harwood
Museum, founded by Lucy and Burt Harwood in 1923 (it is now part of
UNM); students lived and worked there. There was much plein air painting
(plate 5). Photographs show the young artists setting out on horseback
with canvases, paint, and brushes at their sides. Sometimes departure was
before dawn: “We got up at five o’clock in the morning and went out and
painted before breakfast,” Martin recalled.
Fellow student Earl Stroh remembers the decisive impact of seeing East-
Coast transplant Andrew Dasburg’s Cézannesque Still Life with Mandolin
and Vegetables at a gallery in Albuquerque in the spring of 1947 (he says
it was the “first real painting” he’d seen in New Mexico). Stroh further
records, “That summer at the Harwood, Dasburg was one of the Taos art-
ists who gave Saturday morning group criticisms to the students. I was
impressed by his ability to spot a student’s possibilities right through the
surface of other artists’ influences.” Martin spent that summer at the school
and, Stroh writes, “She was then working in a figurative style variously
influenced by German expressionism, very much by Rouault, and perhaps
a touch by other French post-impressionists.”** A show of student work
that summer was reviewed anonymously in the local newspaper; it noted,
“Among the more advanced students, Agnes Martin and Earl Stroh have
turned out some excellent work.
During her enrollment at UNM, Martin was in her mid-thirties, and her
seniority and experience were evidently recognized by the faculty; the
university hired her as an instructor for the year 1948-49. The teaching
was conventional: “We'd paint the Indians. And I painted flowers and land-
scapes,”° she reported. In addition to the limitations of the curriculum,
there were financial constraints; because her income from teaching was
very low, Martin took a job in the fall of 1948 at the John Marshall School
in Albuquerque, teaching writing and art to young boys considered to
have disciplinary problems.* In Martin’s account, she persuaded these
“illiterate and delinquent boys”—“criminal boys” she also called them—to
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

“act out stories that she made up for them. Later they made up stories of
their own, in one of which a donkey had a major role.” And, again, she was
a dorm monitor. In both roles, her approach was decidedly idiosyncratic.
The relative isolation of New Mexico had its drawbacks, but it also con-
tributed to the appeal of Santa Fe, Taos, and their environs, which remain
a magnet for artists and writers. No visitor fails to remark on the area’s
physical beauty; its culture, too, is distinctively rich, and still strongly
influenced by Spanish and Indian traditions (at present, less than half
the state’s population is non-Hispanic Caucasian). The high desert in the
northern part of the state features both vast open vistas and precipitous
canyons and mountains, and its surprisingly abundant vegetation bursts
into spectacular color in spring and fall. As in the prairie of Saskatchewan,
extremes of weather, from day to day and even hour to hour, are common-
place, and the light has remarkable brilliance and clarity.
“Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the
floor of the sky,’ Willa Cather wrote of the New Mexico desert in Death
Comes to the Archbishop (1927). A novel set in and around Santa Fe in
the second half of the nineteenth century—Cather had visited the area in
1925—it vividly portrays the period’s intimate exchanges among Spanish-
speaking ranchers, Catholic missionaries, Native Americans, and west-
ward-forging emigrants from the eastern United States and Europe.» D. H.
Lawrence was among the literary figures who spent time in New Mexico
early in the twentieth century; Georgia O’Keeffe arrived in 1929. The art
colony at Taos was born when two urban artists, Ernest Blumenschein and
Bert Geer Phillips, set out from Denver on a painting trip to Mexico and
foundered twenty miles north of the town, where their wagon broke down.
They arrived on horseback in Taos in September 1898 and, enchanted by
what they saw, exhorted other artists to join them. By 1915, just three years
after New Mexico gained statehood, the Taos Society of Artists had been
formed. Among those to become affiliated with it and spend time there
were the New York painters Robert Henri and John Sloan, who, in the
1910s, attracted other representatives of their style of vigorously expressive

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figuration. The Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe opened in 1917, showing

both traditional realists and modernist abstractionists (as it still does).
Modernist doyenne Mabel Dodge (later Luhan) arrived in Taos in 1917,
with painter and sculptor Maurice Sterne, to whom she was then married.
The Taos she settled in was a frontier town with roughly two thousand
residents. “From the very first day I found out that the sunshine in New
Mexico could do almost anything with one,” she later wrote. (It is not
an uncommon reaction, a century later.) In New York, Dodge’s salon had
drawn John Reed (who would later found the Communist Labor Party in
the United States), Upton Sinclair, Leo and Gertrude Stein, and Alfred
Stieglitz; painters John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and O’Keeffe became part
of Dodge’s circle too. In 1913 Dodge had been among the promoters of New
York’s Armory Show. Dasburg, a veteran of that landmark exhibition, came
to Taos at Dodge’s invitation in 1918 and stayed for more than sixty years.
Along with the European-derived modernism that reached New Mexico
through these emissaries, there was a distinctive local interest in various
nontraditional spiritual practices. In 1938 Raymond Jonson, who had come
to Santa Fe fourteen years earlier, founded the Transcendental Painting
Group there with Emil Bisttram, a Taos resident since the early 1930s. The
Taos group included Agnes Pelton, Lawren Harris, and others who, under
the influence of Vassily Kandinsky, studied the Theosophy promoted by
Helena Blavatsky, a portmanteau religious philosophy integrating vari-
ous esoteric, arcane Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. “Compared
with the art of Mondrian’s followers in New York, the paintings made by
the group in Taos appear striking spiritual-amazingly cosmic and sym-
phonic,” Maurice Tuchman wrote in the catalogue for an exhibition affirm-
ing the links between spiritualism and abstraction.** Indeed, the group's
paintings seem precociously New Age; spacey visions of sharply defined,
Deco-ish forms soaring through the cosmos, they are harbingers of an
ethos alive in Taos to do this day. Bisttram, an eager advocate of these alter-
native spiritualities, believed that the moment of creation was of surpass-
ing importance; he admired the geometry of Native American design for

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its process as much as its formal satisfactions.*° (Before dissolving in 1941,

the Transcendental Group had a period of renown that led to two New
York exhibitions in 1940, at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum
of Modern Art.) Later, Jonson invited Josef Albers to Albuquerque, and
also Dore Ashton, who came in 1950. Ashton would be one of the first New
York critics to write about Martin’s work, in the New York Times in the late
1950s, although she did not remember meeting Martin in New Mexico at
this earlier point.* Ad Reinhardt was in Taos in 1952 and did meet Martin
while there—a momentous if largely undocumented encounter.
Non-Western spiritual beliefs were also propounded by Mable Dodge
and her circle. Among her friends was the poet Witter Bynner, who settled
in Santa Fe in 1922, and who in 1944 translated and introduced an edition
of the writings of Lao Tzu that Martin is known to have admired. Bynner,
like Bisttram, made connections between Eastern mysticism and the belief
system of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico-—links that had considerable
credence among the artists in Taos. So did work by anthropologists active
in New Mexico at the time (notably, several were women), who compared
Pueblo songs to Hindu ragas; the researcher Natalie Curtis, for instance,
observed that the “rhythm of [the Indians’] grinding stones kept time with
the ‘turning of the planet,” expressing a mystical ideal.*° These interests
were far from parochial; in 1925, André Breton called attention to Native
American art of the Southwest in his magazine The Surrealist Revolution.”
It is a publication—or at least an interest—of which Dodge may well have
been aware when she wrote two years later, with a lofty presumption typi-
cal of the time, “The Indian has the gift of seeing organized form so clearly
because he has cultivated his senses instead of the faculty of analysis. His
perceptions are direct. He sees instead of thinking about what he sees.”*"
Favoring perception over analysis would become a cornerstone of Mar-
tin’s approach to painting (as would analogies between music and paint-
ing). Dodge continued, “We find that [the Indian] has discovered the law
of form which states that all life is manifest geometry, that every concrete
expression of art or nature has a determinable mathematical structure.”
 STUDENT / TEACHER

The patterns woven into Pueblo textiles reflect, in this argument, the order
and symmetry inherent in the natural world. As art historian Sharyn Udall
writes, “Plato's notion, admired by Emerson, that ‘God geometrizes’ echoes
clearly in [Dodge’s] interpretations, as it does in much painting produced
by mystically-inclined artists.” These inclinations, too, are close kin to
Martin’s and all would be reinforced by further contact with artists inter-
ested in Buddhist thought when she lived in New York in the 1960s.
Along with unconventional spirituality, the Taos community was open
to social and personal choices that were effectively prohibited elsewhere
(including in New York). Dodge, who in Taos married the Pueblo native
Tony Luhan, was among the many women in Taos (and Santa Fe) at
the time to have had romantic relationships with other women, as did
O'Keeffe. According to David Witt, a curator in the 1980s and ’90s at the
Harwood Museum and a historian of the art community in the area, “you
could be lesbian in Taos in the 1940s and 1950s and not have to hide it,
not be afraid. You could be an openly gay man and a respected member
of the community,’ as was Marsden Hartley, for instance.#? That remains
true today, although of course enormous changes in social tolerance have
made such refuges less crucial than they were then. It has been said that for
Dodge Luhan, O'Keeffe, and their friend Rebecca James, this sexual free-
dom was partly a prerogative of class—that, especially in the freewheeling
1920s when they were young, the wealthy subscribed to a different, more
lenient set of standards than everyone else.
The same could be said of Betty Parsons, the art gallery owner who was
in New Mexico several times in the 1950s, and whose 1957 visit to Taos
would prove pivotal for Martin. Parsons was born into a family of consid-
erable wealth and social prominence; even when her fortunes declined, she
continued to live among the similarly fortunate—and, before and after her
brief marriage, to enjoy frank relationships with women. Martin’s sexuality,
like much about her, was anything but open. There is conjecture that Mar-
tin had affairs with a few women in Taos in her early years there.** Unques-
tionably, she had chosen to live, not for the last time, in a community

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where single women were not uncommon, where homosexuality was more
acceptable than elsewhere, and where independent spirits were welcome.
Important in connection with the social tolerance characteristic of Taos
(and to some extent of Santa Fe) is that despite Martin’s emotional difficul-
ties, which would repeatedly lead her to choose prolonged isolation, and
despite her poverty, which would remain intractable for many years, she
had an uncanny ability to befriend people of every kind, including those
representing the full spectrum of inherited and acquired privilege. When
Martin was in Albuquerque, she became acquainted with O'Keeffe, and
visited her in her home in Abiquiu, then new and (especially by Martin’s
standards) quite lavish. Evidently, they discussed traveling around the
world on a freighter. Martin recalled that the discussion of the trip made
O'Keeffe increasingly, and finally exhaustingly, enthusiastic: “Georgia was
like that—very intense and exciting to be with, but she drained me. When
I left the room for a few minutes, I just had to lie down, right then and
there.”45 (Martin and O’Keeffe did not take this trip together, although
Martin would later take many ocean voyages, including at least one on a
freighter.)*° In another recollection of O’Keeffe, Martin said, “Once, when
I came from New York, I went to visit her in Abiquiu. The trouble with it,
when I went to visit O’Keeffe, I found her over-stimulating. ... She liked
to make fun of young men... When we left, we went to Santa Fe and we
went in the first bar we could find and we just drank. (laughing) Glass
after glass of beer. To recover.”4’ But if she remembered O’Keeffe as an
exhausting companion, she also remained grateful for her encouragement,
which continued after Martin had gone back to New York and her career
had gained traction.“

Martin's retrospective evaluation of the artwork she made during her ini-
tial years in New Mexico was categorical: “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.” Indeed, the works of the forties that escaped the annual auto-
da-fé are uneven and, by the standard of advanced art at mid-century,
 STUDENT / TEACHER

often cautious in subject matter and form. (It has been suggested that the
surviving landscapes, still lifes, and portraits include a few that were made
for classes, and for applications for scholarships or teaching positions.)
Nonetheless, these early works are fascinating, both as tantalizing precur-
sors and on their merits, which are considerable.
The oeuvre begins modestly, with several small watercolor landscapes
strongly reminiscent of John Marin; they could be among those of which
she said, “I used to paint mountains here in New Mexico and I thought
my mountains looked like ant hills.” This is not necessarily a failure of
representation. The clarity of the atmosphere in New Mexico does make
distant mountains look deceptively close, hence oddly small, and Martin’s
depictions are spritely and fresh, capturing the regal blue sky and hurrying
clouds so characteristic of the high desert. In their fidelity to the odd expe-
rience of a miniaturized, or compressed, landscape, and to the razor-sharp
details that the atmosphere in the desert produces, these landscapes evoke
the biblical quality of the terrain. New Mexico Mountain Landscape, Taos,
1947 (pl. 4), for instance, is a confident sketch of deeply shadowed moun-
tains in bright sunlight, rendered with quick, precise strokes. The subject
of Untitled (Landscape South of Santa Fe, NM), 1947 (Peters Family Art
Foundation, Santa Fe), another small watercolor, is more arid, the sparse
vegetation lending itself to staccato graphic representation. There were
also early still lifes, including a very animated example of 1948 (private
collection).** The blooms shown, all past their prime, are rendered in a
range of vivid reds, from deep, bluish rose to earthy brick, the blown petals
exposing the fecund pistils; the paint is applied loosely and energetically.
The flowers are held within a perfunctorily sketched blue vase that sits
on a green table, and both vase and table seem to be spinning; the whole
composition, crammed into the small canvas, bursts upward with great
vivacity and sensuality.
This still life’s liveliness stands in stark contrast to a handful of early por-
traits, which are guarded in execution and affect. In an undated self-por-
trait, painted in oil on canvas, and modest in size (26 by 19 inches) (pl. 3),

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Martin gives herself huge blue-gray eyes that, although downcast, dom-
inate her face; the cheeks are very ruddy and heavily worked, but the
animation they might evoke is countered by a slope-shouldered torso—so
unlike the vigorous woman shown in early photographs—and a narrowly
striped shirt that further flattens the form of her body; her hair is swept
up in an old-fashioned, businesslike style. Conventionally pretty but not
delicate (and bearing little resemblance to the young Martin), the face is
bluntly drawn. An absence of highlights and an undifferentiated, scumbled
brown background make it hard to determine the source of illumination.
It is a melancholy, implacable picture. Equally adamantine is the 1947-49
portrait of Daphne Vaughan (pl. 2), who was a friend of Martin’s; they
had lived together in Albuquerque.* Thick encaustic renders Vaughan’s
skin a lightless adobe red. Her arms are crossed over her chest, which is
thereby again neutered; flattening it too is a deep-dyed red background.
The head is shown in a three-quarters profile and the eyes are downcast
and powerfully strange: there are no irises and no whites; instead, the open
lids are carefully filled in with pencil, lending the subject something of
the look of a Greek kouros. This early appearance of pencil marks amid
paint feels like a beacon, shining (literally, as the graphite adds the faintest
glint) toward the future penciled grids.
On the other hand, a nude half-length portrait of a woman from 1947
(oil on canvas, 20 by 16 inches) (pl. 6) is frankly appealing, although also
markedly odd. Pressed close to the painting’s surface, the subject’s body
has a brassy glow, its highlights a warm ocher and shadows brick red. The
very wide shoulders, one hitched up a little defensively, span the small
canvas like a rampart; from the sunlit chest, plump breasts thrust forward,
nipples rosy. Tilted slightly to one side, the subject’s commanding head is
crowned with flowing brown hair, cut in blunt bangs across the forehead
and falling heavily behind her shoulders. Big gold hoops dangle from her
ears. The high arched eyebrows seem artfully tended, and the mouth, too,
beneath a barely indicated nose, seems cosmetically enhanced. Her eyes,
however, are again lightless voids, this time painted a pitchy black. If this

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nude does not lack sensuousness and a certain degree of deliberate exot-
icism (the sitter may have been Mexican, or perhaps Native American),
the gouged eyes are deeply sinister. (This painting was included in the
2010 exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portrai-
ture,” which took a long view of homoeroticism as a factor in American
and European art; the context promoted the sensuality of the image, but
its address could hardly be called alluring in any uncomplicated sense,
and in any case the painting, like the other portraits, may have been an
academic exercise.)
Two further paintings from this period, one known only by Martin’s
description, point in very different directions. A small untitled oil-on-
Masonite painting dated 1949 (pl. 8) anticipates a radical change to come:
it is dominated by an irregular red lozenge that serves as the ground for
three black vignettes, each bearing a cipher-like figure scratched into the
paint: they represent, in rudimentary form—as if in a code for recording
motifs that will soon be discarded—a mountain range, a tree, and a rect-
angular contour that might be a lake, or a house, or a pure abstraction.
Of a painting that won first prize at a Taos Art Fair in around 1951, the
critic Lizzie Borden reported, “Martin has indicated that the subject of
the painting is a father worrying that his son is not masculine enough,
forgetting that sons are not born manly.” It isn’t easy to picture this lost
painting, nor to reconcile it with others that exist from the period. But it
is clear that Martin had a good deal on her mind.

By the turn of the decade, Martin’s impatience—with her work, with the
Taos community, and with her professional status—again led her to move
on. In the fall of 1951 she returned to New York, spending three more
semesters at Teachers College. This time, she was not a newcomer to New
York, nor to painting. (She was also securely American, having become a
USS. citizen the year before.) And this time she succeeded easily in school,
taking a mix of academic and studio courses (including advanced painting,
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

lithography, studio problems, and figure drawing and composition), and

excelling in the studio work. Enrollment had rebounded,® but the tide of
veterans that had vastly swollen classes in the immediate postwar years had
subsided. In June 1952, shortly after she turned forty, Martin was awarded
an MA in education with a concentration in fine arts from Teachers Col-
lege. It was her final degree and for the next year she took no classes as a
matriculating student. In the fall of 1952 she taught for one semester at
Eastern Oregon College in La Grande. The following year she returned to
Teachers College for a final academic experience, taking a “Seminar in
Social Living” in 1954 at PS 125, an elementary school in Harlem.
In these years, several pivotal cultural events took place at Columbia
University, and at Teachers College as well. Daisetz Suzuki, an enormously
influential Japanese scholar of Zen Buddhism, gave three lectures at
Columbia in March 1951.°° Suzuki’s lectures drew overflowing crowds and
reached many more through hearsay. Although Martin wasn’t in New York
in time for Suzuki’s lectures, his teachings were certainly in the air and
came to be reflected in her thinking. John Cage also lectured at Teachers
College at around this time and gave two lectures at the Eighth Street
“Club,” an important forum and meeting place for New York-based artists,
on the subjects he designated “something” and “nothing”; he had spoken
at the Club more than half a dozen times by 1955.57 While Martin had
already been exposed to Eastern spiritual teachings through their currency
among the artists in Taos (and may have become aware of them in Seattle
in the 1930s), her time in New York allowed her to engage with them to a
much greater extent.
Just as Asian thinking was gaining a foothold in certain New York cul-
tural circles, European influence on the East Coast was being eclipsed by
rising American painters, the more so as most of the wartime Continental
expatriates had returned home. Pollock had made his first drip painting in
1947, Newman his first “zip” composition in 1948. Betty Parsons opened a
gallery under her name in 1947; the artists to whom she gave one-person
shows, between 1951 and 1953, included Pollock, Reinhardt, and Theodoros

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Stamos. During these years, Parsons was also representing Barnett New-
man, later a pioneer of hard-edge, big-field painting who, like Reinhardt,
would come to play a significant (if short-lived) role in Martin’s career.
Sam Kootz and Charles Egan both opened important showcases for van-
guard art in 1945, Sidney Janis in 1948, and Eleanor Ward founded the
Stable Gallery in 1953. Dorothy Miller’s “Fifteen Americans” exhibition of
1952, one in a series of pioneering shows she organized for the Museum
of Modern Art, featured work by William Baziotes, whose atmospheric
biomorphism had some relationship to Martin’s early work; by Bradley
Tomlin and Richard Lippold, whose linear abstractions would be relevant
to her as well; along with work by Pollock, Rothko, and others. The range
of art available to her in these New York years was enormous and she was
well prepared to absorb it.
Following her last stint at Teachers College, and during the time when
she was not enrolled there (nor teaching elsewhere), Martin returned to
New Mexico and stayed until 1957. During her previous residence in the
state she had alternated between Albuquerque and Taos, but this time
she remained in the latter, and “although it was hard to hide out in such a
small town,” Witt writes, she “maintained a relatively low profile.”>* Mar-
tin’s living conditions in Taos were rustic, even by local standards of the
time. For a period, she shared her small house next door to the Harwood
with the artists Kit and Ted Egri—it had neither heat (aside from a small
wood stove) nor indoor plumbing (there was an outdoor privy). “I had a
good studio behind the Harwood for fifteen dollars a month, but I almost
starved to death a couple times,” Martin said.°° And although there were
intervals when she withdrew from social contact altogether, she did not
decline companionship or opportunities for professional advancement.
Among her neighbors was Clay Spohn (who taught at the California
School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the late 1940s with Clyfford Still, a
painter of craggy abstractions born in Western Canada, and Rothko, who
was a guest faculty member in 1947 and 1949; Richard Diebenkorn was
among their students). But she was closest in the early 1950s to Beatrice
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

Mandelman and her husband Louis Ribak, who lived a block away and
had come to Taos from New York in 1944. Martin went to see them “just
about every night,” she recalled; art was a not a subject they discussed.
Also living in straitened circumstances, especially at first, but more com-
fortable than Martin, Mandelman, who was Martin’s exact contemporary
and shared many of her artistic inclinations at this time, had already been
associated with a number of the vanguard New York artists, including Stu-
art Davis, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Louis Lozowick, and Pollock.
Ribak, too, had a wide acquaintance among New York artists and had first
shown there in 1931.
Martin was included in exhibitions at Mandelman’s and Ribak’s open
studio, Gallery Ribak, including its inaugural show in 1955, which featured
only her work and theirs. “Agnes Martin, long-experienced as a teacher, is
a less-experienced painter who shows great integrity and seriousness of
purpose,” El Crepusculo, a Taos newspaper, reported. “After having taught
art in both public schools and the U. of New Mexico, Miss Martin decided
to strike out on her own for a career as an artist. Dedication to her ideals
is apparent in her work.” At least once she also showed work at the Stables
gallery in Taos—where, she said, “everybody squabbled”*'—and at the Ruins
Gallery in Ranchos de Taos, a few miles north of Taos, although she said
she had hesitated about joining it, feeling her work was “different” from
that of the other artists. In addition, she recalled, “Another boy and I
rented a storefront in Ranchos [de Taos] for nine dollars a month. We had
one-man shows there, one after another.”®
Inevitable frictions notwithstanding, relations among the Taos artists
were close and lively. “When I lived here in the fifties there were 100, 150
artists,” she said in a late interview conducted in Taos. “I knew everyone.
They had such good parties. The parties in New York were dull after that.
Parties every week, with dancing. Sometimes we'd have a program where
each one would recite or sing.”® But she does not appear in the photos (or
the records) that survive of receptions at other Taos galleries, including the
Heptagon, which had opened in the early 1930s. Determined to succeed and

WwoO
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selectively convivial, Martin was nonetheless often leery of social engage-

ment. On the other hand, her appetite for vigorous outdoor activity was
uncomplicatedly enthusiastic. Mildred Tolbert, a local photographer, wrote
that toward the end of this period in Taos, Martin’s “social circle began to
widen.... And when Joan and Erik Erikson [the psychologist] were in Taos
for a time, Agnes invited me to climb Wheeler Peak with her and Joan
Erikson. ... As we were descending the mountain beside a roaring stream,
Agnes called out, ‘like your plumbing Lord.” It’s clear why her company
was cherished.

Whatever the hesitations and hardships that marked Martin’s life during
this period, these were productive years. And although she would later be
dismissive of her efforts in Taos—“I worked hard in Taos, but in New York
I just painted and threw them away and painted and threw them away
until I got at the place where I felt I was doing what I felt I should,” she’d
say*°—the work of the early 1950s was crucial in her development. During
this time, she turned decisively toward abstraction, and there was at last
a considerable quantity of paintings that—at least for the moment—met
her expectations. In a letter of January 3, 1956, to Helene Wurlitzer, she
states that in the previous year she had painted “one hundred canvases
of which I had a good opinion and sold seven.” Her long apprenticeship
was drawing to a close.
Hovering between figuration and abstraction, the work of the second
Taos period reveals the clear influence of a number of leading modernists,
particularly Joan Mird, Arshile Gorky, Paul Klee, William Baziotes, and
Adolph Gottlieb. In some of the surviving works of the early 1950s, biomor-
phic and star-shaped figures float on, or spring across, grounds blocked out
in softened geometric shapes, as in a small untitled print of 1952 (private
collection). Two small ink drawings of the same year, executed on both
sides of a single sheet, feature sketchy, saucer-headed totems with fright-
mask eyes towering over inky vegetal forms (private collection). The title
of Personnages, a lithograph from this time, may indicate familiarity with
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

Louise Bourgeois’s totemic sculptures, shown in 1949 and 1950 in New

York; Alberto Giacometti’s influence is evident too.
More robustly narrative, Expulsion ofAdam and Eve from the Garden of
Eden, tentatively dated 1953 (pl. 11), is, at 4 by 6 feet, a véry large painting
by Martin’s standards at the time (her financial resources were limited
enough to severely restrict purchase of materials). It is executed in oil on
board, and in feeling is decidedly graphic, with delicate contours, exe-
cuted in finely drawn, ink-black lines, and vaporous washes of color. The
biblical narrative is given a sharp twist into what clearly seems, not the
exodus of two mortals fallen from a state of grace, but the escape of a ter-
rified woman from a powerful if irresolute man. Adam’s head, outlined in
profile, faces up, howling; a star shoots across the sky above him. Though
reaching forward, he seems immobilized, perhaps by the horseshoe-like
shapes that link his slightly bent knees. His upright form spans the sur-
face, an anchoring column. Eve, by contrast, is in chaotic flight. Facing
us, her arms wide in appeal, she is lifted up by a graceful, bounding leg,
and also by a spinning, propeller-shaped foot; she appears as well to be
supported by wings. Windswept green leaves adorn her back. The colors,
thinly applied, are mostly pale shades of pink, blue, and white, though a
bright red form scythes across Adam’s midsection; flying toward his chest
is what seems to be a disembodied breast. For all the inscrutability of its
symbolism, the composition is powerfully integrated; its emotional register
is of baffled panic, as in a dream from which the sleeper desperately tries,
without success, to scream herself awake.
An untitled oil painting also dated 1953 (pl. 10), slightly smaller and
on canvas, is both more frankly sensual and more abstract. A swelling,
pink form at bottom center is unmistakably a breast, centered on a brown
nipple as plain as a target. Above and to the right, an ambiguous fleshy
form has a furry brown patch of paint at its center. But the other crisply
drawn shapes that bounce around this canvas, in shades of black, white,
and gray, are hard to identify as even allusively human. The drama here is
formal. By contrast, The Bluebird, 1954 (pl. 9), is a painting that combines

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simple charm with a sense of lurking menace and evokes the quiet hum
of nocturnal activity in Klee’s nighttime gardens and seas. In a lunar, sil-
very nimbus at the lower right corner of Martin’s painting, a pert, sketchy
bluebird perches uncertainly, its thickly impastoed eye vigilantly alert;
Morris Graves’s birds seem to lurk here too. Stacked above and to the left
are various nested frames, most in a midnight range of grays and blacks,
though a white square to the left is topped with a light gray oval, echoing
the bird and its moonlit halo. Sweeping behind the bluebird is a scarcely
visible, deep blue tail, blurred with silent movement. The loosely rectilin-
ear compartments into which this painting is divided constitute, like the
penciled eyes of the early portrait, a strikingly premonitory note, point-
ing toward the grids to come. Another steady balance of naturalism and
abstraction can be found in Mid-Winter, 1954 (pl. 12), in which traces of
landscape, evocative of Milton Avery’s work, form the armature for a study
in shades of gray. A big brown cloud, ringed with black, barrels down
towards thickly scumbled fields of brownish white, sharply evocative of
well-worn snow and gripping cold.
The fairly stable and calm organization of these canvases is starkly
opposed by an untitled painting of 1954 (University of New Mexico Art
Museum, Albuquerque), its jangled, wiry lines vibrating with tension.
At top center is a pair of dotted circles—eyes? breasts? Beneath them, a
wild scrawl, drawn in black on white, frames a yawning void. At bottom is
the residue of two flattened figures, one of them vaguely boatlike, which
makes the central form appear to be a sail. The ground is brown, earthy.
Did Martin, living in the desert, miss her days of sailing off the coast
of Canada? Both playful and melancholy, Dream of Night Sailing, 1954
(private collection) sets a round-bottomed black vessel afloat in a sea of
moonlight-striped gray. There is no certain horizon. Tattered clouds, or
waves, run uphill. Paint-strokes circle a tiny boat, buoying it, provisionally.
Much more settled, and more structurally complicated, is Autumn Watch,
1954 (private collection), a substantial work in shades of black, white and
gray that feels as tightly constructed as Night Sailing is dreamy and fluid.

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Irregular flat forms are puzzled together, interlocking and overlapping:

blacks advance, grays recede, with a confident sense of rhythm. In another
substantial (33 by 53 inch) untitled painting of c. 1955 (private collection),
clearly executed by a painter with much experience of winter light and
blankets of snow, shades of white are differentiated by the merest breath.
A pale, yellowish saucer-shaped disk above is neither quite solar nor lunar;
beneath, barely visible lines, which appear to have been drawn in ink (and
possibly crayon, in places), hint at a horizon, and perhaps crude dwell-
ings. The unusual conjunctions of graphic and painterly materials; the
counterpoint of fine line and broadly washed, pale fields of paint; and,
particularly, the forms that hover at the limits of coherence and visibility,
are all features that look forward to the kinds of abstraction Martin was
feeling her way toward and would in a few years begin to inhabit fully.
These surviving early works are a tease, pointing in several directions.
Color is almost always suppressed, likewise drama, which, while not absent,
is strongly muffled; indeed the dynamism of the paintings comes largely
from the effort to resolve conflict. Throughout this second period in New
Mexico, Martin’s influences remain European and American modernism,
and also, perhaps native textiles of the Southwest. The local landscape,
its seasons and its light, are inarguably present. But by the middle 1950s,
the reference points for progressive painting in New York were shifting
radically, toward homegrown modes of both hard-edged abstraction and
figuration based in commercial imagery. As would become clear only
belatedly, both had strong European counterparts and even precedents,
although in the 1950s American painters turned their backs on the culture
that had so long dominated visual art. Visitors to Taos would have brought
this news; magazines were broadcasting it too.
However halting her progress, Martin’s work was changing radically, and
her efforts to gain attention and support in New Mexico were not without
success. She secured a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, in
Taos, in 1954, the year it was established. It was not a princely sum: as she
put it, “I was the first one to receive a Wurlitzer grant. All I asked for was

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$25 a month to buy supplies. And so they gave it to me right off”** The
references she listed in her request were the artists Lez Haas (who'd also
been a Field School student), her neighbor Clay Spohn, and Betty Parsons;
the date of Martin’s first acquaintance with Parsons, which this mention
implies, is not clear. In the application essay, she wrote, “I would like to
say that my efforts and interests as an artist are directed toward assisting
in the establishment of American Art, distinct and authentic, that I feel
we, myself and other artists, will very soon succeed in making not only a
successful but an acceptable representation of the expression of the Amer-
ican people. I feel that it is very thrilling to be ‘in’ at the beginning as we
are.”°? Her cultural patriotism is as clear in this statement as her ambition.
According to David Witt, “None of the other Taos artists then seemed to
experience the overwhelming drive to become famous” that Martin did.
In the summers of 1956 and 1957, Parsons and the Japanese-born painter
Kenzo Okada went to New Mexico, staying with Aline Porter, a friend of
Parsons (and wife of composer Eliot Porter), in Tesuque, near Santa Fe.
They’d been to Taos frequently, also visiting there with Parsons’s friend
Dorothy Brett. Parsons had seen Martin’s work in New York before 1954
and was encouraged to handle it by Okada, whom Parsons represented
and whose soft-colored, subtly biomorphic abstractions bore some resem-
blance to Martin’s at that time.” Parsons had approached Martin about
possible representation, and by the summer of 1957 Martin was ready. In
Martin’s recollection, “Betty Parsons came to visit Dorothy Brett and I knew
Dorothy Brett so I called on them and asked her to look at my work and she
did,” viewing it in the space Martin rented next to the Ruins gallery north
of Taos. Martin continued, “She bought enough of my paintings’—five—“so
that I could go to New York and she promised to show my work,”” on the
condition that Martin live there. Once more, then, Martin gathered herself
for the bracing plunge into an art world whose intensity she found both
nourishing and ultimately insupportable.

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 Chapter 3

REACHING HARBOR

artin came back East in 1957, beginning a period—at the age of

forty-five—when she at last embraced the vocabulary she would
work with for the rest of her life. Indeed, nothing she made
before this time ultimately qualified, in her mind, as art at all.
Martin could hardly have chosen a more transformative decade to be in
New York, her first and last as a resident member of a major city’s cultural
community. When she had left the city a scant five years earlier, Abstract
Expressionism was still headline news; by the time she returned, Pollock
had been dead for a year, and while most of the painters with whom he
was associated remained active—at least for a few years more, as this gen-
eration was notoriously short-lived—and highly visible, the tide was turn-
ing against the highly expressive forms of painterly abstraction they had
pioneered. Pop art, on the one hand, was elevating everyday objects and
images into art. On the other, and more important for Martin, a handful of
New York School painters, including Reinhardt, Newman, and Ellsworth
Kelly, were picking up a trail left by Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers to help
forge a movement toward hard-edged abstraction.
Martin would be recognized as a progenitor—however reluctant—of
this movement, which came to be called Minimalism, and which helped
cement New York’s central place in an explosively active new art world. By
the time she left the city in 1967, the small, insular, and deeply introspective

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cultural scene of the 1950s had given way to the stunningly centripetal
and famously uninhibited sixties, with its celebrated art stars and roaring
market, all avidly tracked by news media happy to find parallels between
commercial and highbrow culture.
Betty Parsons’s support for Martin when she arrived was crucial. When
Martin first arrived in the city, she briefly lived with Parsons in her stu-
dio at 143 East Fortieth Street. Parsons would present Martin's first New
York exhibition in 1958 and introduce her to the artists among whom she
would soon be living in lower Manhattan. But Martin didn’t stay long
at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and her daily life, as always dominated by
work, was quickly caught up in the distinctive rhythms of the Coenties
Slip community in lower Manhattan where she settled.
Dating to 1699, Coenties Slip—the term “slip” refers to an inlet created
as a boat landing—originally extended from the East River as far inland
as Front Street, several blocks from the current edge of the island. It lent
its name to a section of the oldest and once the busiest waterfront in Man-
hattan. By the 1880s it had been filled in, and during the late nineteenth
century, the neighborhood’s buildings served as warehouses, gas works,
and ship supply shops, including stores for ropes, tackle, and netting.’
Many of the buildings retained pulley systems for hauling up goods, and
many remained unchanged through the middle of the twentieth century,
when activity in the area centered on the seaport’s wholesale Fulton Fish
Market. But this part of New York had once been a cultural and, particu-
larly, a literary center too, drawing Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and
Edgar Allan Poe to its streets and providing subjects for their writing.
New York, which prides itself on being a forward-looking city, has not
celebrated (nor marketed) its history as aggressively as have other East
Coast cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and the com-
mercial development of the South Street Seaport, which dates to the early
1980s, has been less ambitious (and less successful) than other urban water-
front restoration projects. Nonetheless, the area’s current chain stores and
tourist sites successfully obscure the outlines of the old, pre-development

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seaport. When visual artists began to congregate there in the 1950s, it was
profoundly isolated from the rest of the city; the disjunction between the
towers of the adjacent financial district and the waterfront’s tumbledown
nineteenth-century buildings was a visual, cultural, and economic contrast
so jarring as to be uncanny. In one of a series of long articles that Joseph
Mitchell wrote about the seaport at midcentury for the New Yorker, he
described with great relish “the fish smell, the general gone-to-pot look, the
trading that goes on in the streets, the roofs over the sidewalks, the cats in
corners gnawing on fish heads, the gulls in the gutters, the way everybody’s
on to everybody else, the quarreling and the arguing.”
If the narrow, crooked, windswept byways of Wall Street, so often
described as canyons, were utterly deserted at night, the small riverfront
enclave to the east, where the smell of the sea is strong, was hardly less
desolate. It offered nothing like the fractious conviviality of the Abstract
Expressionists’ “Club” on Eighth Street, which hosted lectures and dis-
cussions (including Cage’s, mentioned earlier); the Waldorf Cafeteria,
where they often met in the early days for coffee; or the Cedar Bar, where
they convened later, for more fortifying beverages—and more aggressive
exchanges. (In fact, from the perspective of Coenties Slip, there were sev-
eral uptowns, including the Greenwich Village and Union Square areas, the
blocks around Fifty-seventh Street where the major galleries were situated,
and, for the more successful artists, the apartment buildings on the Upper
East and West Sides of Manhattan.)
Painter Jack Youngerman, who moved to the seaport in 1957—like
Martin, he came to New York at the urging of Betty Parsons—recalls an
aversion to those now legendary Abstract Expressionist meeting places,
and he refers fondly to a local spirit that was both warmly congenial and
decidedly less collective than the one prevailing a little further north.
“The Tenth Street crowd, and the influence of Greenberg, was oppres-
sive,” he said, referring to Clement Greenberg, the pugnacious critic who
championed Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and other artists of the New
York School's first generation. “No one on Coenties Slip went to the Tenth

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Street meetings,” he has said. “We all knew that we weren't part of the de
Kooning/Pollock legacy in art which was centered around Tenth Street.”3
While the Slip produced a powerful and distinctive sense of commu-
nity, which transcended differences between abstractionists such as Mar-
tin—who vigorously maintained that her work was close in spirit to the
Abstract Expressionists, whatever her social distance from them—and
Ellsworth Kelly on the one hand, and figurative artists like Johns and
Rauschenberg on the other, it was hard to define its character. “Crowd’ and
‘scene’ don’t quite describe what I remember about living there,” Young-
erman recalls.‘ It was, perhaps more accurately, a group of artists who’d
washed ashore and were glad to find others similarly bivouacked, but who
shared most of all a profound respect for privacy.
The buildings surrounding the seaport, with floors that tilted and splin-
tered, and walls that didn’t always meet ceilings, offered big, river-facing
lofts that lacked not just kitchen fixtures but often heat and hot water;
the great majority were not legal residences, so beds were hidden, and
unwelcome visits from the housing authority were routine. But there were
distinctive comforts and rewards. Youngerman, who, like Kelly, arrived
from Paris (they’d become friends there), said the two cities, as viewed from
the perspective of New York’s seaport, shared a comfortingly melancholy
tonality that he remembers as “pigeon gray.’> The Seamen’s Church Insti-
tute, then located at 25 South Street, provided a much-needed cafeteria
with mounds of cheap food and, just as welcome, hot showers.° Occasion-
ally, the artists would meet at Sloppy Louie's, an inexpensive local restau-
rant, and at each other’s openings. But the feeling of the neighborhood
was curiously non-urban. Charles Hinman, who arrived on the Slip in 1960,
recalls, “It was, on the weekend, like a country village.”’ Ann Wilson, who,
like Martin, settled there in 1957, remembers Coenties Slip at the time as
“a very tender place.”* For a brief—and now legendary—time, it wove a
powerful spell.
Indeed, by 1958, a year after Martin arrived, the community was the
subject of a feature article in Cue, which billed itself as “The Magazine of
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New York Living.” Titled “Bohemia on the Waterfront,” it hailed “A New

Shangri-La” being created at the East River’s edge. Explaining that Green-
wich Village had become “fashionably expensive and self-consciously
‘arty,” the article noted that, by contrast, “Seriousness is the keynote of
the waterfront group” of painters, poets, actors, and weavers, who favored
the area despite—or because of-—its lack of bars or restaurants; in fact, there
was “nary a coffee shop in sight.”
Of the handful of artists named in the article, only a few were quoted,
and among those, Martin’s voice predominates—a considerable surprise,
since she was a newcomer, and never known for seeking media attention.
“Being down here reminds me of Taos,” she told the author, Faye Hammel.
“You feel as if you’ve climbed a mountain above the confusion.” Hammel
notes that Martin was preparing for a show at Betty Parsons Gallery “some-
time in 1959”; in the event, it opened in December 1958: Martin hit the
ground running. And she emphasized, in these first published comments, a
commitment to work, and to solitude. “Painters must live together because
other social contacts are barred to them,’ Martin said, but “when you paint,
you don’t have time to get involved with people, everything must fall
before work. That’s what’s wonderful about the Slip—we all respect each
other’s need to work. The rest of New York? Everybody groans about going
into the city and sings when he comes back home.” The reference to “the
city” as a place apart is striking (Youngerman used the same locution in
this article); so are Martin’s rather formal and poetic habits of speech, dis-
cernible in an unattributed quote that seems unmistakably hers: “You can
shut yourself up in your studio for three days,” Hammel says “a painter”
told her, “and when you come out again into the Slip it’s like stepping
into cool water.”
Later, Martin expanded on this picture. “We all did the same thing,
like we went to Prospect Park, and rode on the ferry, and things like that,”
she said, “but we went alone, we didn’t go together... . Because it’s better
not to get involved and argue and talk if you're really seriously moving
ahead. ... The best thing to do when you stop painting... is cross the

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Brooklyn Bridge.” Another thing that made it “a great place to live” was
that “you could go on the Staten Island Ferry before breakfast”—the ter-
minal was just a block away." But again, she added, “We all knew enough
to mind our own business—even when we stopped painting. If, when you
stop painting, you go and meet people and try to have a good time and
everything, you get off the track. When you're really painting, you don’t
want to interrupt yourself.”” To the era’s preeminent art historian, Irving
Sandler, she recalled, “We all lived the same kind of life and we all had
the same kind of velocity, you might say.” Completing the portrait of this
heterogeneous but harmonious community, Martin concludes, “There was
no resistance, there was no competition.”
Among the earliest to settle in the seaport area were Rauschenberg and
Johns; they were on Pearl Street by 1954. They were the most successful,
in the 1950s, of the local artists, but Robert Indiana remembers them as
also being among the more aloof.* (Indiana arrived in 1956, living first at
31 Coenties Slip and then at 25.) Newman had a studio nearby, on Wall
Street (although he didn’t live there). When Kelly returned to the United
States in 1954 from France, where he had lived since 1948—he came back,
he said, because he'd seen a reproduction of a very reductive painting by
Reinhardt in Art News and felt his own then grid-based work might find
a warm reception in New York—he visited Fred Mitchell, a Mississippi
artist who was the Slip’s pathfinder. Mitchell had taken a place at 26 Water
Street in 1951, and he helped Kelly find his first loft, at 109 Broad Street,
near the Seamen’s Institute.
There was a good deal of movement within the seaport, as personal
circumstances changed and buildings were demolished to make way for
development. When Youngerman arrived, he took up residence at 27 Coen-
ties Slip, where Martin lived until 1960 as his tenant. Youngerman also
rented space to artists Ann Wilson and Lenore Tawney, with both of whom
Martin formed strong attachments. It was because number 27 was torn
down that Wilson and Martin relocated to 3-5 Coenties Slip, joining Kelly,
who had moved there by 1957 (James Rosenquist and Charles Hinman

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would live there later). Martin took the second floor, Kelly was on the top
floor, and Wilson was on the first, above a bar at street level. (Because 3-5
Coenties Slip shares a block with the historic and landmarked Fraunces
Tavern, it still stands; the other buildings in which artists lived have mostly
been replaced with corporate towers.) Martin’s final loft at the seaport was
at 28 South Street, directly facing the river.
Ann Wilson says, “Agnes had an old Acorn cast-iron kitchen stove
on which she made marvelous muffins”;® her homemade muffins and
other baked goods, and a similar stove, would turn up throughout her
life. Similarly, the sparse furnishings included, always, a rocking chair. “I
had a hundred-foot-long loft,’ Martin reported. “It had two skylights and
fourteen-foot ceilings with great beams, and at the end of every beam
you could see daylight.” As a result, of course, it was cold. “So I had a big
heater blowing that used to be in a garage. It was quite economical. When
you moved into a loft, you had to put everything in—the plumbing, the
kitchen stove. But on the Lower East Side you could buy anything you
needed real cheap, because it’s so hard to throw things away in New York.
I found a bathtub with long legs and claws. I had to put it somewhere so
I put it in the bedroom.”
Among the activities at 27 Coenties Slip was, briefly, an art school on
the first floor, run by Indiana and Youngerman in an attempt to earn a
little money; life drawing was offered but, Indiana said, it was impossible
to heat adequately for nude models; in any case they often took their
drawing materials out of doors. Cue described the students as “a polyglot
group ranging from a barge captain to a businessman from Wall Street,”
and the article said in good weather they sketched river traffic. Ann Wilson
remembers that events at the drawing school included artists’ slide shows
of places they’d been, like Machu Picchu—a homier version, perhaps, of the
evening lectures “uptown” on Eighth Street, which similarly often included
firsthand encounters with non-Western art.
Martin found sympathetic company among this varied group of artists,
and her inclination to solitude distinguished her perhaps more in degree

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than kind. Like Martin, Kelly (born in 1923) has Scottish-Irish forebears
(his on his father’s side), and like her, too, he is inclined to quiet discipline
and renowned for incisive intelligence. Mildred Glimcher, who organized
an exhibition of the seaport artists in 1993, writes, “Although intensely pri-
vate while making his work, Kelly’s presence on the Slip was important for
many other artists there.”"’ Also like Martin, Kelly hesitated before settling
briefly in New York and has long kept a wary distance, having left the city
for rural Spencertown, New York, in 1970. At a formative stage for both,
they exchanged ideas and support. Martin said Kelly was the person she
was “closest to” on the Slip,?? and remembered that he “used to come for
breakfast. He came every day for a year and a half to have breakfast. Then
he stopped all of a sudden. Didn’t come back.” (The abrupt break is in all
likelihood attributable to Martin, in whose friendships it was a recurrent
feature—or, more often, a terminal point.)
Their regard was mutual. Kelly recalled, “My early work—no one else,
except Parsons, could appreciate what I was doing then. Agnes appreciated
it right away.” He explained that they shared a “love of the anonymous, of
doing the work. The work itself is what’s important. We don’t want our per-
sonality in the art.” Unlike Picasso, or the gestural Abstract Expressionist
painters, he continued, “we were trying to get away from the ‘I; as in ‘Look
how well I do it’ Then, there’s a stillness that we appreciate in each other’s
work, as in a common destiny.” Kelly’s first freestanding sculptures, made
while he was living at the seaport, resulted directly from a conversation
with Martin. He has recalled, “When I thought of the first piece, Ihappened
to be having breakfast with Agnes Martin in her studio... Imade a model
for the piece called Pony [1959] from the top of a coftee container we used
at breakfast. ... Another piece was a sketch from an envelope. It still has
her name on it. It’s called Gate [1959].”?3
Like many artists at Coenties Slip, Kelly considered Martin a source of
comfort and good counsel. “Agnes was always the earth mother, a kind of
sage,” he said. “When you're in your creative period, between twenty and
thirty-five, you go through a lot of crises. She was very much a healer. You'd

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go to talk to her and she’d soothe things. Sometimes she would correct us
because of our follies, like a parent would in a way.”*4 He was impressed
by her courage—or, perhaps more accurately, her imperturbability. “I was
struck by the way she never locked her door,” he told Benita Eisler. “The
Seamen’s Church Institute was on the Slip. There were lots of drunken
sailors around at night—many of them weren't working. It wasn’t that safe. I
remember thinking, Boy, she’s very brave, never to lock her door.” Kelly was
drawn as well to Martin’s cool-headedness. “Artists can be very aggressive
and competitive, and they can be loners—hard to get close to—except for
confrontational occasions. Bob Indiana, for example was a good friend,
and amusing, but he could be very caustic. Agnes wasn’t like that.” Their
shared need for escape from urban life led them to take occasional excur-
sions together. “She was a nature lover, and I was, too. So we went around
together. With the first pictures I sold, I bought a little VW, and we would
go to Jacob Riis Park,” which is on the Brooklyn shorefront. Another favor-
ite destination was the Jersey shore, where several of the artists, Martin and
Kelly included, sometimes slept in tents or on the beach.»
Kelly was also struck by a quality of Martin’s personality that he termed
spiritual, and that others have noted as well, with more specificity. In
Youngerman’s words, “We were all a bunch of Protestants from the hin-
terlands, as opposed to warm New York Jewish people, like Rothko and
Newman” and the rest of the garrulous “uptown” crowd. Youngerman
believes that Martin’s connection with Parsons was strengthened by the
similarity of their religious backgrounds, describing Parsons as having a
“kind of upper-class Protestantism which she shared with some of us. In
the case of Agnes it was an important factor.” Youngerman later elaborated,
“I think of Agnes as the ultimate Protestant. That’s not a put down at all.
What Betty and she had in common was a Protestant soul. That’s a very
particular thing. I think of [Richard] Tuttle,” a younger artist whom Mar-
tin befriended while at the seaport—and with whom she maintained an
unusual lifetime connection—“in that sense.””” Taking a slightly different
perspective, David Witt, the Taos curator and resident who knew Martin

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later in her life, described her as a fundamentalist, “Not a religious per-

son, but strict with herself in an unforgiving way.” He continues, “Agnes’s
relationship to art was along Calvinist lines of being absolute. Her friends
were secondary.” At the seaport, these priorities seem to have been widely
shared, or at least accepted.
In addition to this rather loose but notable affinity, the Slip, like Taos,
was distinguished as a place where homosexual men and women could
be comfortable, even if the constraints of the time prohibited the open-
ness acceptable today. In fact the tension between gay and straight artists
during the years Martin was in New York erupted, at times, into open
hostility. Morton Feldman, a musician who was a close associate of John
Cage, “recalled the ‘raving heterosexual’ Pollock’s verbal assaults on Cage
for being gay... Feldman thought... ‘there was an anti-homosexual bias’
against not only Cage but also Rauschenberg, Johns, poets John Ashbery
and Frank O’Hara, and the painter Cy Twombly, among others.””? Friends
of Martin’s whose homosexuality has been acknowledged also include
Indiana and Kelly; during her New York decade, Martin is said to have
had romantic relationships with two women artists: Chryssa (who used a
single name) and Lenore Tawney. Indisputably, she had close associations
with both.
A weaver, fabric artist, and collagist, Tawney had moved to the Slip from
Chicago, arriving shortly before Martin. She was five years older than Mar-
tin (and thus among the senior artists at Coenties Slip) and, like Martin,
had gotten a late start. Before coming to New York, she’d been married (to a
psychologist who died within two years of their wedding), traveled widely,
and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; her instructors
had included the Ukrainian Cubist Alexander Archipenko, from whom she
also received instruction at a school in Woodstock, New York, and at whose
encouragement she went on to the Penland School of Crafts in North Caro-
lina. Unlike Martin, Tawney embraced the seaport’s austerity by choice—“T
know I’m more fortunate than many because I didn’t have to think about
making my living out of [art],” she said’ -and her commitment to the

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seaport’s material hardships had some qualifications. She’d driven from

Chicago in her Daimler, she reported, with sufficient funds that she was
able to help Martin by buying her work in the 1960s.™
As photographs make clear (and friends affirmed), the attractive and
stylish Tawney had a gift for creating gracious interiors, a disposition that
Martin didn’t share. Says Kristina Wilson, a friend from Taos who visited
Martin in New York and met Tawney there, “Lenore was a sprite, very
sophisticated and beautiful, and her loft was perfect, orderly and elegant.
Utterly different from Agnes’s.”» Finding that the first space she took, at
27 Coenties Slip, was “oh, a terrible loft,”3 and “needed everything—paint-
ing, heating, but first, cleaning out,’4 Tawney moved around the corner
eight months later to 27 South Street, where she occupied three 25-by-80-
foot floors of a sailmaker’s loft, with cathedral ceilings, a skylight on the
top story and a view of the river—and with hot and cold running water,
amenities Martin’s several residences lacked. The floors were sanded so
they “were like a dance floor.”3> Tawney recalled the South Street loft as
“an island, really, with the water always,” and, at night, boats that “were
like Venetian glass.” Applying her gift for composing graceful spaces,
Tawney presented her work in dramatic installations that were ground-
breaking in their challenge to the boundary between art and craft. The
best-known examples are majestic hangings of open-weave textiles, often
totemic in configuration although fundamentally abstract. Tawney also
created a significant body of collages, assemblages, and small works on
paper, including hand-worked postcards, in which personal mementos are
integrated into formal schemes of great delicacy and wit.
Of Irish descent and raised a Catholic, Tawney was well educated and
erudite, and she shared her interests with Martin. Together they read Alban
Butler’s The Lives of the Saints, as well as the writings of Saint John of the
Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila. “Of course, we couldn't hope to emu-
late them,” she said, “but we could be inspired.”27 One testament to their
friendship is the statement Martin wrote for Tawney’s 1961 exhibition at
the Staten Island Museum, her first major solo show—and Martin’s first
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published text. Clearly choosing her words carefully, she praised the work’s
“directness and clarity” and its “complete certainty of image, beyond prim-
itive determination or any other aggressiveness, sensitive and accurate
down to the last twist of the smallest thread.” Gathering steam, Martin
wrote, “the expression in one square foot of any piece cannot be hinted
at. But it can be said that trembling and sensitive images are as though
brought before our eyes even as we look at them; and also that deep, and
sometimes dark and unrealized feelings are stirred in us.” The text ends
with three sentences separated by line spaces: “There is penetration. / There
is an urgency that sweeps us up, an originality and success that hold us
in wonder. / Art treasures indeed, this work is wholly done and we can all
be proud.” It was signed, with some satisfaction, “Agnes Martin, Painter,
Parsons Gallery, New York.”3*
Borrowing equally from the rhythms of the Bible and Gertrude Stein,
this statement has a fervor and lyricism that would be developed and
sustained in Martin’s later substantial body of published writing and
public lectures. But this brief essay’s fulsome acclamation of collective
accomplishment—“we can all be proud”—would not be repeated. Nor was
a return favor welcome. Martin avoided catalogues and their attendant
critical essays whenever she could and would always remain suspicious, if
tactically tolerant, of critics. In an undated letter to Arne Glimcher, Martin
cited a Zen koan on the deceptions of words as her reason for prohibit-
ing the production of catalogues for her exhibitions;* it was a theme to
which she would return often. It has been stated that Tawney titled some
of Martin’s paintings at the time. But when asked about it many years
later, Martin replied, “No. I had one show when I was ill, and Lenore put
it on, and she named the drawings.” And when the interviewer suggested
that the grid works have an affinity with weaving, Martin became angry:
“Oh, don’t give me that,” she retorted.*° Obviously it was not a subject on
which she chose to dwell.
While Martin maintained some contact with Tawney after leaving New
York, in 1967 she severed relations with Chryssa, who by all accounts had a
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stormier personality. “She arrived in New York in 1955, an ambitious and

beautiful twenty-two-year old Greek girl stunned by the electric energy
and visual stimulation of Manhattan?” Critic Barbara Rose gushed (rather
uncharacteristically) in a recent appreciation. “Chryssa’s imagination is
like a ouija board: she is a transmitter of signals from another realm of
consciousness.” Others, writing earlier, paint a less rosy picture. The his-
torian Sam Hunter begins a 1974 monograph by declaiming, “The artist
Chryssa is a dark and mercurial woman,’ and says it is difficult “to reconcile
her theatrical personal style with the cool, controlled objectivism” of her
work.‘ He goes on to say that she “can make strong workmen and artisan
assistants blanch by her eruptions of cold fury... apocrypha and legend
seem to collect around her name.” Similarly, the prominent French critic
Pierre Restany writes, “Chryssa is famous in New York for her towering cold
rages”;45 he, too, mentions technicians who disappoint her. Even allowing
for the conspicuousness, at the time—plainly galling to some—of a woman
ordering men around, Chryssa stood out.
Born in Athens, Greece, in 1933, Chryssa, like Martin, grew up with a
widowed mother, her father having died shortly before Chryssa’s birth;
she reported that his death sent her mother into months of wailing.*° She
left Greece at the age of twenty for Paris, where she studied briefly at the
Académie de la Grande Chaumiére and said she met Surrealists André
Breton and Max Ernst. Chryssa spent a brief period in California, which she
recalled dimly and reluctantly: “I don’t really want to remember my time
there. Ido remember I drove my Austin every day across the Golden Gate
from Sausalito, where I shared the houseboat of [Agnes] Varda. The best
part about being there is the decision I took to go to NY.” The reference
to the flashy car is strikingly like Tawney’s to her Daimler. Martin, too,
loved to drive—“like a race-car driver,’ says the artist Pat Steir, who later
knew her well—and, after she became successful, also favored expensive
automobiles. Her last was a white Mercedes, which she piloted herself
until very near the end. There was no stronger emblem of independence,
power, and prestige in postwar America than the car, and all three of these
 REACHING HARBOR

women took possession of it with gusto. Although it would be some time

before Martin could match their brands for luxury, driving great distances
on short notice for sheer pleasure—or powerful need—was a leitmotif in
her life from very early on.
By the mid-fifties, Chryssa was in New York, taking up relatively com-
fortable residences in neighborhoods ranging from Gramercy Park to the
Union Square area to the Upper East Side—where she lived in what has
been described as “a minor temple,” which suited her beautifully*—and
winding up, in the late seventies, in SoHo; she never resided at Coen-
ties Slip. An associate of her later years writes in an e-mail, “she seems to
have been a loner for a lot of the time she was working [in New York]. But
Agnes Martin was a close friend,’ as was Ursula von Rydingsvard.*° Von
Rydingsvard, a sculptor who met Chryssa when she arrived in New York
in the mid-1970s, notes that Chryssa, like Martin, was deeply troubled
and hospitalized several times, and, also like Martin, she resisted mightily
talking about those experiences. But, as von Rydingsvard observes as well,
an equally important bond between Chryssa and Martin, and one they
shared with Tawney, was the challenge of succeeding as a woman in an
art world dominated by men. Martin and Chryssa, von Rydingsvard says,
“were in kind of the same boat—in this huge city that could devour any
sort of aspiring artist, especially women, in those days.”™
In that respect, Martin, twenty years Chryssa’s senior and by the late
1950s well into her development of a radically reductive way of paint-
ing—and established among a very lively community of groundbreaking
artists—likely commanded considerable professional as well as personal
attention (at least initially) from the younger artist, who was not shy about
seeking out successful mentors. In later reminiscence, Chryssa says that
on her arrival in New York she met with such iconic figures as Pollock
and de Kooning;® she also pursued connections with Rauschenberg and
Warhol. Martin evidently fell into that category. Sam Hunter, seeing an
affinity between Chryssa’s sensibility and Martin’s, writes, “Chryssa herself
brings up the name of the painter Agnes Martin as one of the first New
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

York artists whom she knew and respected.” And if, as von Rydingsvard
believes, Chryssa wasn’t capable of true friendship, Martin’s relationship
with her (as with Tawney) surely involved mutual professional support.
Chryssa’s ascent was meteoric. Dorothy Miller, the influential curator
at the Museum of Modern Art, acquired her work for the museum and
included it in a “Recent Acquisitions” exhibition of 1960-61; in late 1961,
Chryssa had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum. She was still in
her twenties. But her first solo show, at the Betty Parsons Gallery, earlier in
1961, resulted from an introduction by Martin. Says Chryssa of Parsons, “I
met her thru Agnes Martin who had spoken to Betty about my work. Betty
then came to visit my studio and immediately gave me an exhibition.”
On the other hand, Chryssa continues, “When I had my one man show at
Guggenheim, Arnold Glimpser [sic] visited the show and then came to my
studio and asked me to work with Pace.” (She had solo shows there in 1966
and 1968.) Notably, Glimcher does not credit Chryssa with his introduction
to Martin, who joined his Pace Gallery in 1974; the gallery continues to
represent Martin’s estate. He relates in a monograph, “it was at one of the
parties in Jack Youngerman’s loft that I met Agnes Martin [in 1963]. Ells-
worth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, Sam Green and Sam Wagstaff
were also there.” But Glimcher does note, “Agnes had a close friendship
with the Greek artist Chryssa.” He continues, “Agnes had always suffered
from schizophrenia and from time to time required hospitalization, yet
Chryssa was much more violently psychotic than Agnes.” He means this
literally; rumor has it, Glimcher reports, that during an argument Chryssa
broke Parsons’s arm.>
Parsons, of course, was a powerful force herself. Because her privileged
social circle was strongly at odds with Martin’s, some who knew Martin feel
that a liaison between them is unlikely. “My grandfather was a business-
man,” Parsons said by way of explaining her background. “He made quite
a lot of money.’ And, she hastened to add, “My father spent his life losing
money. He had a gift for that.” But she stressed the blueblood nature of her
background, noting that she was a descendent of Alexander Hamilton, and
 REACHING HARBOR

concluding that “nobody could be more American” than she.®

Jack Tilton, a gallery owner who was Parsons’s longtime assistant and
then gallery director, has said that “everyone” knew that she and Martin
were lovers briefly in the fifties. Parsons had property in Southold, on the
south shore of Long Island, and, Tilton says, “They spent time there. There
was a house and a tent on the property. Agnes cut a trail through the brush
and Betty called it the Agnes Martin trail.” And if their backgrounds were
worlds apart, Tilton says, they shared a love of nature that helped cement
a relatively enduring friendship.” During the unsettled years after Martin’s
departure from New York, Parsons is one of the people with whom Martin
spent time and corresponded. Ann Wilson also believes that “Lesbianism
played a part in her [Martin's] relationship with Betty Parsons.” Yet in the
long interview conducted with Parsons for the Archives of American Art
in 1969, Agnes Martin’s name does not come up.
Thus even among the artists on the Slip, with whom she had so many
affinities, Martin was an outlier. Older by ten years or more than almost
all the other artists there, Martin differed from them, too, in her prefer-
ence for being associated with the Abstract Expressionists, who were her
coevals, and whose passionate commitment to achieving transcendent
expression matched her own. But in many ways the seaport, as a physical,
social, and professional environment, seems to have been ideally suited
to her disposition and her artistic interests.
In 1958 the photographer Hans Namuth, perhaps best known for his
portrayals of Pollock, was commissioned to photograph Kelly as part of
a pictorial essay about the artists who were to participate in the Brussels
World’s Fair,® and of the pictures that resulted, one has become iconic. It
shows Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Youngerman, Delphine Seyrig (an actor and
Youngerman’s wife), and their young son Duncan, on the roof of 3-5 Coen-
ties Slip. The gray masonry of old office towers is massed behind them; the
tar-papered rooftop they share is by comparison low and old-fashioned. At
the center of the image, the three men form an attentive group around the
child, who alone looks at the camera. Seyrig sits off to one side. Opposite
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

her is Martin, hands in her coat pockets, perched atop the inside slope of
the roof’s cornice. Smiling serenely down on the scene, she seems a cross
between the dorm matron she so often had been and a local deity, and in
either case both integral to the group and distinctly apart from it.

In New York, Martin’s work evolved rapidly, and if the influence of other
artists is evident, in it her own voice at last becomes fully, resoundingly
clear. During the first few years, there are soft-edged rectangular fields
strongly evocative of Rothko, though Martin minimizes color in favor of
pure light and the infinitely variable ways it can be muted and veiled. In
The Spring, 1957 (pl. 17), two horizontal rectangles in shades of grayish
light brown, the one on top lighter, occupy a canvas that, at 70 inches
square, is very close to the 6-foot-square format she would use for the
great majority of her mature work. The painting’s simplicity, symmetry,
and rectilinear organization are also templates for what would follow:
a tightly controlled sensuality, pulsing with a quiet, luminous force. All
appear again in Window, 1957 (Dia Art Foundation), a smaller (38 inches
square) painting featuring a quartet of vertical rectangles, the two above a
cool, bluish dark gray, and the pair below warmer and lighter; the ground
is nearly white. Here, the penciled edges of the rectangles are visible, ifjust
barely, pointing to the characteristic penciled scaffolding of later, more
insistently abstract paintings, while the title pulls this image toward rep-
resentation, and a specific condition of daylight.
The Spring, 1958 (Dia Art Foundation), 50 inches square, is a more com-
plicated composition than The Spring of the previous year. Its two open
horizontal rectangles rest near the canvas’s top and bottom; between are
three horizontal bands, and their relationships establish a subtle tension
between planes that slip fractionally under and over each other. A small
(25-inch-square) untitled painting (Dia Art Foundation), possibly made the
following year is more atmospheric: its two vertical rectangles, which don’t
quite meet at the center, are each layered in soft triads of brownish gray, the

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contours all yielding and slightly irregular, with forms running together
at their borders and tilting a little up to the right. The effect is of faintly
illuminated fog. As in much of the work of the early New York period, it
is hard not to see harbor light, morning damp, and the saline, gray-green
mists of the seaport. The same inclinations can be felt in Harbor I, also
painted in about 1959 (pl. 15), a portrait-format (rather than her by then
more commonly square) canvas, whose asymmetrical composition looks
back to earlier work, with circular forms and a single diamond-shaped
quadrilateral all bouncing gently around a bent and forked band that juts
across the gray field. The round shapes anticipate compositions soon to
come in which circles fall into regular rows; here, with shadowed contours
lending them a subtle volumetric presence, they strongly evoke the gently
jostling forms of piers, buoys and water, and the cool, drizzly atmosphere
of Manhattan’s southern tip.
At the same time, Martin produced a handful of canvases that recall the
prairie and her earliest, inland life. In Wheat, 1957 (Dia Art Foundation), 49
inches square, fields of grain are evoked by a pair of stacked rectangles in
subdued gold, just slightly deeper on top, fractionally more lemony below;
they are framed by a gray perimeter, while a band of neutral pale brown
bisects the canvas vertically. Desert Rain (private collection), a smaller
painting of the same year, shares Wheat’s gray/yellow color scheme, with
even subtler distinctions between yellows and bordering grays and whites.
Cow, a bigger (69-inch-square) painting of 1960 (pl. 18), is centered on a
large, brushy brown disc, which is held within nested, Josef Albers-style
squares of pale grayed browns. The sense of bovine steadiness and impla-
cability is strong. (So, for some viewers, is an association with Buddhist
symbolism, as will become clear.)
Yet it is perhaps more appropriate to accept this painting—and all the
others of this period—as fully non-referential. Tempting though it may
be to rely on titles to suggest the associations Martin intended, she often
reused them, and the willingness with which she accepted ones proposed
by friends and colleagues suggests a certain amount of indecision—or,
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

perhaps, indifference. Without question she would come to resist, in the

most vigorous terms, any suggestion that her work represented landscape,
water, weather, light, or any other natural conditions or forms. But the
natural allusions in titles persist for some time, ultimately to be replaced
by the nomination of universal experiences (innocence, happiness). What
is arguably clearest, in these works of the late 1950s and early ’60s, is the
difficulty of giving up such references to landscape and water, of turning
away from the kind of natural beauty to which she was so clearly alive, and
which offered so much in the way of painterly, and emotional, resources.
In any case, the progression was not steady and had its share of digres-
sions and reversals. There were ongoing Surrealist drawings, such as
Night and Day, 1958 (private collection), a small casein work featuring
a bright yellow, egg-shaped form that is encroached upon by a sperm-
like brown element, while a pair of bouncy Miré-esque forms—a star and
pink kite—hover above. At the same time, Martin was experimenting with
reliefs and fully three-dimensional constructions made from materials
found around the seaport. Kali, 1958 (private collection), is a small (11-inch-
square) wooden object into which wooden boat spikes are driven in a
checkerboard pattern, their heads painted alternately black and white.
The Laws, 1958 (pl. 16), consists of a tall, narrow, wooden board (it is 93%
by 18 by 2 inches) that is painted gray below and black on top; a gridded
pattern of boat spikes is driven into the black field. In the small (roughly
10-inch-square) Little Sister, 1962 (pl. 19), each rectangular unit of a grid
lightly inked onto the white-painted canvas is occupied by two brass nail
heads; these glistening points of punctuation form vertical columns, as of a
patiently kept ledger. Similarly, in The Wall #2, of the same year (National
Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC), the heads of hundreds
of tacking nails foreshadow the glint of the graphite grid. These seem not
only to echo the glint of the graphite line, but also to satisfyingly integrate
texture and line in their own right. One can’t help mourning other, evi-
dently grander, examples that do not survive; ina letter of the early 1970s,
Martin wrote of her constructions, “The best ones made with thousands of
 REACHING HARBOR

nails (heads out) were destroyed.” Despite her use of the passive voice,
she surely disposed of them herself. The ambition—and labor—these lost
works reflect, and the fierce discipline involved in destroying them, are
as striking as her later assessment of their merit.
An anomalous construction that did survive, The Wave, 1963 (private
collection), is a small board-game-like object in which a few dozen wooden
beads are distributed on a grooved wooden surface beneath a Plexiglas
lid; they are meant to be reconfigured by viewers tilting the object from
side to side." While The Wave’s closest link is to the kinds of game boards
constructed in the 1920s by such Surrealists as Jean Arp and Alberto Gia-
cometti, the time-based element of this work, meant perhaps to evoke
marine movement, also hints (if distantly) at Martin’s later experiments
with film. And if, as sculptural objects, these works represent roads not
taken, the invitation to active viewer involvement would remain on offer,
if less openly, throughout her career. “The life of the work depends upon
the observer, according to his own awareness of perfection and inspira-
tion,’ she wrote. And, “if we can know our response, see in ourselves what
we have received from a work, that is the way to the understanding of
truth and all beauty.’ And, most simply, “The observer makes the paint-
ing.”** Though she would not again make physically interactive work, she
remained deeply concerned with the viewer’s response.
Another line of inquiry Martin undertook at this time—one that led
directly to the later, grid-based paintings—was a small series of untitled
white paintings of 1959 that are scored with pencil marks. Digging deep
into heavy applications of oil paint on medium-sized canvases (two such
paintings are 4712 by 23%4 inches), she inscribed rows of small triangles sep-
arated by horizontal lines or, even more significantly, for succeeding devel-
opments, grids with slightly wavering lines on horizontal canvases. The
deliberate effort of pushing the pencil through the paint is evident. Simi-
larly, in an untitled painting of 1959 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York), four vertical rectangles occupy a waxy white surface, their
lightly penciled outlines stopping short of some corners and exceeding
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

others; the interiors of these rectangles are a little (very little) lighter and
brighter than their ground. During this period, Martin also executed a
number of black and dark gray paintings, a palette to which she would
repeatedly return throughout her career. Lamp (private collection) and
Earth (Dia Art Foundation), both 1959, are square paintings composed
of evenly spaced rows of circles, in the former gray on black, in the latter
black on black. From the same year are dark canvases featuring gray rect-
angles or nested circles of white. But there are also such single-motif works
as a 34-inch-square painting of a black diamond vertically bisected by a
pale gray stripe, of about 1957, which is as bold and graphic as a stop sign.
A few works of the following year appear to look back to the landscape,
as in two paintings featuring paired circles, centered at top and bottom
of the canvas and separated by horizontal bands; both paintings strongly
evoke a sinking sun or rising moon, hovering above a distant horizon and
reflected in still water.
This period of experimentation with format and composition was soon
to end. The rectilinear grid that would become Martin’s best-known for-
mat had appeared by 1958. At this time, she also made a commitment to
the square canvas internally organized by straight lines, from which she
would not depart, though the variations she would strike on this simple
paradigm were prodigious. Sometimes there were parallel horizontal lines
rather than grids; as an almost unvarying rule, the grids formed rectangles,
not squares. (After 1974, the grids were generally replaced by stripes.) In
1958 she was four years shy of 50 and had been, as she saw it, an appren-
tice for two decades, a span more common in monastic traditions than in
what was becoming an increasingly youth-centered world of contempo-
rary art.
The skeletons of the grids that had appeared in the incised white
paintings were also prefigured in numerous drawings. In these works on
paper, Martin explored variations on the weight of closely spaced parallel
or gridded lines and the distances between them. Sometimes the lines
were bounded by regular forms, such as the rhombus of the distinctly

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mesa-shaped Mountain, 1960 (pl. 21) or the simple squares of Stone and
Wood, both 1964 and both ink, roughly 10 inches square. A small, untitled
ink drawing of 1960 features little semicircular humps rising in regular
repetition along the delicate horizontal lines; this skeleton of penman-
ship is telling. Red Bird, 1964 (pl. 27), is a drawing in pale red ink of only
horizontal lines, so faint they register not much more strongly than the air
stirred by a bird’s wing, although in her note on the museum’s acquisition
form for this work Martin cautioned that it is “a bird in the mind, just by
itself. A personal experience not about attributes.”® The colorless drawing
The City, 1966 (The Cleveland Museum of Art), was executed with gum
arabic (the medium in which the pigments of watercolor are suspended),
which Martin used to create a grid of relatively open rectangles that pucker
the paper like a quilt, or seersucker—or like urban streets.
In some drawings, the close, parallel lines extend past the grid in irregu-
lar patterns, as in fringed rugs, and occasionally the lines are doubled.
All these works were drawn with straight-edged guides whose placement
occasionally seems to have been guided by sight: at one point in working
her way through the fine, closely drawn horizontals of Mountain, Martin
let the lines begin to drift slightly up; she corrected this asymmetry as
she went. But as in the paintings, she generally worked with guide marks
beyond the field of the finished work—ink or pencil dots that she did not
intend to be seen.
Martin’s method for executing the grid paintings, once established, did
not vary. Two tapes would be measured off in the increments separating
the lines to be drawn, and they would be attached vertically to the canvas.
Then she would use a short—generally eighteen-inch—T-square ruler or
other straight-edge, placed across the marked tapes, to guide her pencil
or brush; on her 6-foot-square canvases a longer line would be impos-
sible to control, she explained, because the pressure of the drawing tool
would cause the fabric to give a little and hence cause the line to curve.
The tapes were repositioned as she proceeded. Graphite, colored pencils,
and paint were the mediums for executing the lines. Having long used
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

oil paint, Martin switched to acrylic by the middle of the 1960s, and in
succeeding work its amenability to dilution, as well its relative flexibility
(because its medium is a plastic, it doesn’t tend to crack when it dries),
would add to its appeal for her. In the first grids on canvas, the delineated
fields are centered on the supports and bordered with internal frames and/
or unmarked fields. In works made in 1963 and 1964, the grids extend to
the edges, “making a single undifferentiated tremor of form, or a plateau of
non-form, across the whole surface,” as Lawrence Alloway wrote in 1973.
Among the earliest grids is White Flower, 1960 (plates 22 and 23).°” Ona
ground of dilute gray-brown paint, which imbues the canvas like stain and
gives it the appearance of menswear fabric, a grid is drawn in thin white
lines; the medium is oil paint, though the lines are controlled enough to
suggest chalk or ink. Inside each of the horizontal rectangles created by
the grid are two pairs of white telegraphic paint strokes, exactingly exe-
cuted, as any error would be apparent: viewed closely, it is possible to see
the rounded points where the brush touched down, and the tails, pointed
inward, of the stroke that followed. The grid extends beyond this marked
field, creating a border of empty rectangles framing the central image: an
incremental bloom, a field of petals.
White Flower is similar to The Islands, ca. 1961 (private collection), an
acrylic and graphite painting, 72 inches square, in which a penciled grid
is centered on a square canvas. The regularly spaced horizontal lines are
closer together than half the vertical ones, making the units alternately
square and rectangular. Each rectangle is again occupied by two dashes of
white paint, which form columns. The canvas is stained a rich brown, as
in White Flower, and this grid too extends several inches beyond the field
of dashes, forming a net within which they are held. Up close, they forma
code, a community, a hive. From a distance, the effect is of diffuse, atmo-
spheric presence. The penciled net gives the white field at its center the
slightest degree of play. The whole is chaste, pure; it has a devotional feel,
and the sense of an ordering: a book of hours, a map of a perfectly ordered
world, each island in its place. A white line that frames the painting near

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its edges forms a rather formal, almost heraldic border around the whole,
which exudes quiet triumph—an announcement, perhaps, of a problem
distinctly apprehended, if never conclusively resolved.
The primed and painted field that grounds the oil painting Milk River,
1963 (pl. 26), stops short of the canvas’s border, leaving a margin of raw
linen—a field within a field. And there is a further internal border: a frame
roughly 3 inches wide of paint just a little more pink than the white that
grounds the field of horizontal lines (this is not a grid) drawn in red pencil
and quite close together (roughly one-quarter of an inch apart), as if the
ground has been raked, or combed. Most of them seem to double a very
faintly applied first draft, and some waver slightly, lending a very gen-
tle billow to the field. And most pick up the weave of the canvas, which
turns some into minutely dotted lines; viewed very closely, these blood-red
beads are slightly menacing. From a few feet away some lines disappear,
and from around six feet, the whole becomes a shimmering field, the pink-
ish border seeming more beige; the blush of the central field, which now
seems a tender pink, leaches the frame’s color and restores the sense of
unblemished innocence. But there is nothing saccharine about this paint-
ing and, if “milky” (as the title suggests), it seems, from certain angles,
just faintly soured. Indeed, the instability of the impression Milk River
makes—the viewer’s sense of never quite capturing its essence, of no one
viewing position being summary—is an important and much-remarked
component of all of Martin’s painting.
Friendship, 1963 (pl. 24), is a grid of horizontal rectangles incised into
gold leaf. Another painting of this year, Night Sea (The Doris and Donald
Fisher Collection, San Francisco), also features gold leaf, but Friendship
is alone in presenting an entire field of gold, and the impression it makes
is of dazzling—and, for Martin, anomalous—opulence. The grid is scored
into the leaf, the horizontal lines heavier, going to the whitish ground; the
vertical scoring is freer, and seem to reveal a reddish underlying layer of
paint. Friendship’s luster evokes the gold of saris, of shantung silk, of—pow-
erfully and surprisingly—the sixties; it participates in the era of Kennedy’s
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

Camelot and of the shimmery gold-brown fagade of the then new Seagram
building.®* Gold is also a symbol of transcendence in many cultures; it is
central to Greek Orthodox icons and to pre-Renaissance Western Christian
imagery as well. Any of these connections might have been in Martin's
mind. But perhaps, as the title suggests, this painting’s gold is simply the
coin of personal affection. Friendship offers something of a slant perspec-
tive on the many experiments in which Martin engaged at this time."
Gold leaf is devilishly tricky to apply and even more unforgiving than her
usual mediums. The challenge may itself have been part of its appeal. A
never-repeated trial, it is nevertheless fascinating and instructive, not least
because, in its extravagance, it goes against the grain of Martin’s reputation
for unyielding modesty.
And in fact, a mineral, faintly metallic gleam would also be a recurrent
element in Martin’s succeeding works. More predictive of what would
follow, and among Martin’s most breathtaking and best-known paintings,
are the penciled grids on white grounds that soon followed Friendship
and its counterparts. The penciled line is refractory, in the sense that it
is visibly hard—it requires from the viewer the effort, at the very least, of
steady concentration—and also in the sense that it creates, barely visibly, a
chromatic shimmer under strong illumination. Even in Martin’s very late
paintings this mineral glint is there, guiding the broad bands of lightly
stroked layers of color, so habitual it scarcely registers.
Although all of the gridded compositions described above (and others
of the early 1960s) preceded The Tree, 1964 (pl. 25), it is this painting, in
the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, that Martin more than once
described as her first grid, the origin for all that followed. Her initial state-
ment about it, made for the museum’s Collection Record of 1965, was fairly
cautious. Answering a final question about its general “significance,” she
replied, “All my paintings are about joyful experiences”; in response to a
previous question, “Has the subject any special personal, topical or sym-
bolic significance?” she replied, with scrupulous honesty, “I don’t know”
And to the question of whether it was “a representative example of your

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work in this medium and of this period,” she replied, “Yes.” But in 1989,
she proclaimed, “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of
the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought
it represented innocence. And so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I
thought, this is my vision.” By 2000, she had described it as “the first really
abstract painting,’ and said, proudly, that she gave it to the Museum of
Modern Art and they accepted it.” (In fact, it was acquired from the Elkon
Gallery with funds from the Larry Aldrich Foundation.)
The Tree is composed of twenty-four horizontal bands of narrow, vertical
penciled rectangles, drawn over washes of white oil paint; bands of empty
rectangles alternate with those occupied by quartets of faintly tingling
vertical lines. At the bottom, the canvas rests on a band of empty rectan-
gles; the topmost band is filled. The main vertical lines of Martin’s Tree are
slightly heavier than the horizontal ones and the more so when the small
rectangles’ internal verticals overlap the canvas-spanning ones, which they
do irregularly—this is visible only on very close inspection—adding to the
perceived vitality of the whole. This variety in the drawn elements’ weight
contributes, perhaps, to its grid’s faintly prismatic character, perceptible
only as a kind of optical ghost. And in the simple rhythm of the alternating
bands, there is something of the beat of respiration, an evocation, perhaps,
of the upward-flowing sap of a growing tree. Its roots—as, arguably, in all
of the grids, but more explicitly here—are in Mondrian’s progressively
abstracted trees, and in his pier and ocean series. But Martin insists that
her Tree is about joy and innocence, the latter especially a key term in the
vocabulary she was to develop in the extensive body of writing that began
in the mid-1970s; often, she misspelled it as “innosense.” (It is tempting to
see this spelling as expressing a rejection of reasoned logic—a rejection
that she would later formulate in her lectures and published texts.) In this
key painting, she bases her intuited geometry in the architecture of trees,
which is, as her own use of the grid would prove to be, both fundamentally
stable and infinitely variable.
The penciled grids on white grounds vary in size, emphasis, and effect.

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In The Beach, 1964 (Lannan Foundation), a very small-bore grid, in hard

pencil, causes the white ground to appear slightly shadowed. Its fine net-
work of lines goes wonky if viewed too closely; at this range, the graphite
wavers; as one steps back, it disappears quite quickly into a glary haze,
like the white sky of a summer day near the ocean. In White Stone, 1964
(Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), another close-knit grid
appears to be a violation of Martin’s prohibition against grids that produce
squares, although in fact the interval between vertical lines is fractionally
smaller. As with The Beach, this grid dissolves quickly, as one steps back,
to a gray veil shadowing—or, as in stone, veining—a slightly uneven, milky
surface. In several other paintings of this period, including Garden, 1964
(Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC), the grid is
drawn in colored pencil, here red and green, on a white-painted canvas
that has a fair amount of tooth (that is, the weave of the canvas is evident).
The grid forms narrow vertical rectangles (34 by 2% inches) and is very
delicately drawn; its component lines are all doubled, with the red lying
infinitesimally to the top and left of the green. A subtle emphasis occurs
in places where lines (accidentally, one presumes) overlap, which causes
some rectangles to seem to aggregate into blocks; the adjacency of the lines
also lends the surface the faintest bloom. If this painting is a garden in the
sense of floral profusion, it is so only remotely; more resonant is the faint
but insistent buzz it generates, as of heat rising from a field in sunshine.
Garden’s combination of colors gives the white ground, at a distance,
a slight creaminess. As with Milk River, the colored pencil substitutes a
warm glow for the fractional glitter of graphite. There are several other
paintings of the mid-1960s in which Martin dispensed with the penciled
lines she would favor for the rest of her career. In Play, 1966 (Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC), the vertical rectangles,
in two sizes, are painted in cool white over a neutral, light tan ground that
suggests balsa wood. This white net goes to the canvas edge but falters in
some places, slightly, making it seem to hover above the ground. Its vertical
lines appear to be freehand and, at points of intersection with horizontal

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ones, what may have been occasional pauses of the brush produce very
small pools of white. Gossamer and spidery, this grid is, within the param-
eters of Martin’s mature work, surprisingly irregular—perhaps that is the
playfulness of the title.
The grid-based paintings and drawings of the 1960s constitute a discrete
body of work and are still bracingly radical, as gripping today as they were
more than half a century ago. By the end of this period, Martin was already
reaching toward later preferences, for instance, stripes rather than grids.
Amply evident in the paintings of the sixties is the formidable discipline
that ran so deep in her temperament, now implicit not just in her work hab-
its but also in the very structure of her work. Also foregrounded is Martin’s
willingness to risk failure. In distinction to the Abstract Expressionists with
whom she identified, who agonized over the decision to say work could be
called finished and whose works were often visibly painted and repainted,
Martin’s methods were like scripted performances (athletics might also
serve as a comparison): each undertaking involved the execution of a
predestined program from which there was no turning back, and no sal-
vaging unsatisfactory efforts. Each canvas was a new test. Many—possibly
most—paintings didn’t succeed and were discarded. It is hard to imagine
any of them, whether the sparest small drawing or most lavish gold-leaf
painting, emerging from the rough and haphazardly appointed studios
in which Martin worked and lived.
But stubbornness, sheer persistent determination, is perhaps the single
essential characteristic of a groundbreaking artist. And for Martin, that
necessary conviction in having one’s way was balanced by an absolute
refusal to be concerned with her inner self: Of the many paradoxes inher-
ent to her work, this one is central: she was unyieldingly committed to her
vision and, with equal fervor, to refusing the claims of personal experience.
Ultimately she was able to formulate a way of regarding the two as com-
fortably separable. It took her a long time to reach the point of allowing
these contradictory impulses to coexist.

gi
 Chapter 4

LINES OF THOUGHT

he question of how Martin arrived at the grid, and what she drew
from those around her, seems easy to answer: several pioneers
of pared down, rectilinear abstraction were near at hand, and
ideas were exchanged freely. But to get at the particular quality of Martin’s
paintings from the 1960s on, it is necessary to look beyond her neighbors
at the seaport—and, at the same time, more deeply at what they shared.
Martin’s work compels attention because it reflects impulses that were
as irresistible to her as her paintings are to so many viewers. She said
she composed her work following the dictates of inner visions, which
arrived as complete images that she executed just as she saw them, but
bigger. To take her at her word is to call her creative process a kind of
psychic automatism—that is, to see a link between the kind of geometric
abstraction she developed and the Surrealism with which so many of her
Abstract Expressionist peers (and Martin herself) wrestled early on.' See-
ing a connection between Martin’s creative process and earlier literary as
well as visual stream-of-consciousness production helps us see, as well,
that the hand-drawn lines in her paintings are tied to handwriting and
to verbal language. The grids and later works do not so much represent
conditions in the material world—light, shape, form—as states of mind
or, more precisely, lines of thought. Various spiritual teachings shaped
Martin’s thinking, and her immersion in both Eastern spiritual teachings

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and mystical Christianity deepened when she was in New York. They sig-
nificantly affected the way she approached painting and also how she
conducted her life (though she would sometimes later deny these influ-
ences). But mostly, she tuned in to the harmonics of an inner voice and to
the visions appearing before her mind’s eye.
In the many accounts she gave of her working process, Martin invariably
used the word “inspiration.” She had visions of paintings, which appeared
to her fully formed and exactingly precise in composition and, in later
works, in color. At first, they were a challenge and a surprise: “When I had
the inspiration for the grids, I was thinking of innocence and the image
was a grid. That was it. I thought, ‘My god, am I supposed to paint that?”
While her transcriptions sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed, the
visions themselves were unerring in every detail, requiring no internal
adjustments. As she explained it, “I have a vision in my mind about what
I’m going to paint before I start... When I make a mistake, I make a mistake
in scale, then it’s no good at all.... See, I have a little picture in my mind
and I have to make it into a six-foot canvas.”
Often she referred to inspiration as a gentle spirit: “That which takes us
by surprise—moments of happiness—that is inspiration.”> At other times,
she experienced it as more peremptory: “Inspiration is acommand. While
you have choice that is not inspiration. If a decision is required that is
not inspiration and you should not do anything by decision. It is simply
a waste of time.”® Infallible though the visions were, they didn’t always
arrive punctually. “I don’t get up in the morning until I know exactly what
I’m going to do. Sometimes, I stay in bed until about three the afternoon,
without any breakfast. You see, I have a visual image. But then to actually
accurately put it down, is a long, long ways from just knowing what you're
going to do.... First, I have the experience of happiness and innocence.
Then, if I can keep from being distracted, I will have an image to paint,’ she
reported.’ Discriminating visions from wayward thoughts wasn’t always
easy. “When you look in your mind you find it covered with a lot of rub-
bishy thoughts. You have to penetrate these and hear what your mind is
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

telling you to do.”* At the same time, inspiration required a certain relax-
ation of control. “At night the intellect goes to sleep and gives inspiration
a chance. When people have a decision to make, they say they will sleep
on it; that is the part of the mind that’s responsible for artwork. It’s not an
intellectual process,” Martin told Irving Sandler. When he noted that she
often discarded paintings, she continued, using one of her more home-
spun analogies, “Well, inspiration doesn’t always turn out because, even
if inspiration is the black corn in the bottom forty, the weather has a lot
to do with it!”9
Finally, inspiration, as Martin saw it, is not unique to gifted artists; on
the contrary, it is a universal faculty:

Inspiration is there all the time.

For everyone whose mind is not clouded over with thoughts, whether
they realize it or not...
Inspiration is pervasive but not a power.
It is a peaceful thing.
It is a consolation even to plants and animals.”

Such statements may sound uncomfortably mystical. But Martin also

spoke of inspiration as an altogether pragmatic tool, handy in avoiding
the trap of overthinking a problem. To a student audience, she offered
this advice: “I used to be pretty intellectual... But I think I’ve got it out of
my system. You don’t have to worry about your inner eye. It is working.
It’s on the job.”"
These descriptions of her work’s source, which she began to offer in
the mid-1970s, leave much unaccounted for and not a little that invites
skepticism (as do most artists’ accounts of their work’s development): her
reported experience acknowledges no connection with other artists pursu-
ing similar goals with similar means. Considering Martin's “inspirations” to
be a kind of automatism—a channeling of an impulse over which she ceded
(or suppressed) conscious control—helps place them in an art-historical

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lineage. It could be said that she did so herself by finding merit in Pollock’s
work, which she deemed “terrific. I think he freed himself of all kinds of
worry about this world” and “managed to express ecstasy.” (For de Koon-
ing, on the other hand, she had no use at all.) But to invoke automatism
is also to introduce associations Martin rejected. In fact, there is a sharp
distinction between the extra-conscious mental states that produced her
visions and the personal, subjective experiences most automatists sought
to express. “Personal emotions are emotions that apply to a person—like
the soap opera,” she responded to a question from the audience following
a 1989 lecture. “They are anti-art.... I hope that’s clear—personal emotions
as against other kinds of emotions.... Happiness is not a personal emotion,
it is a universal.” Martin’s subjects are states that transcend the particular
conditions of an individual life.
On the face of it, no simple connection can be made between Martin’s
painstakingly ruled penciled lines and automatism as it is commonly
understood: a kind of cursive, meandering script that has served, in the
hands of such artists as André Masson, Henri Michaux, Roberto Matta,
and (most famously) Pollock as a visualization of the term “stream of con-
sciousness.” This liquid metaphor for the spontaneous expression of men-
tal activity that originates unconsciously, coined in 1890 by the American
psychologist William James, is strongly associated with the literature first
written with its assistance, including that of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,
and Gertrude Stein. Also undertaken in its name are the departures from
narrative logic sought in literary exercises by the Surrealists André Breton
and Philippe Soupault, who made “pure psychic automatism” the corner-
stone of the First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924.4 (Under the influence of
Freud, they expected the unconscious creative voices thus liberated to
speak largely of sex.) Automatism is strongly associated as well with the
irrational figuration and dreamlike narrative that Surrealist visual artists
produced.
But there is another way of thinking about automatism, in which
there is a perhaps surprising link with Ellsworth Kelly, who entered into

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consciousness-evading experiments while in France (where he lived from

1948 to 1954), experiments that led to his color grids of the early 1950s. In
1949 Kelly had spent two weeks vacationing in France with an American
friend, Ralph Coburn, an excursion on which they engaged in various
kinds of automatism, including, as described by art historian Yve-Alain
Bois, “scrawls and cadavre exquis: Coburn was well up on Surrealist proce-
dures.” The same year, in the spring, Kelly made several visits to Jean Arp,
a founding Surrealist who had long been engaged with chance procedures.
During this period, Kelly also tried drawing various subjects—trees, for
instance—without looking at the paper, and made drawings with his eyes
closed. The use to which Kelly put his automatist “scrawls” has led later
observers to challenge their claims to psychic immediacy. Notes fellow art
historian E. C. Goossen, in an earlier discussion of Kelly’s work, generally
such efforts achieve “results which are often very startling to the drawer,
but which, more often than not, are similar in character to all other such
drawings.” Yet the finished works that followed Kelly’s automatist exer-
cises departed vigorously from the technique’s conventions. While one is
a loosely meandering composition, and another exploits serendipitous
little blooms of ink atop vertical strokes leaning this way and that, several
of Kelly’s automatist exercises, including those executed on graph paper,
led to linear compositions. Jack Cowart writes, “The artist made doodles,
connecting random lines into rectilinear constructions, and in Paris Sketch-
books 11 and 14 [1949], produced a number of ‘automatic’ drawings made
with a ruler for random straight lines, but with his eyes closed. Curiously,
some of the resulting drawings still arrange themselves in gridded patterns,
proving the point that the grid remained for him a ubiquitous subcon-
scious design.”” The parallel with Martin’s work is powerful.
There is also a strong connection between Kelly and Martin in their
shared reluctance to let go of the landscape—and, to a lesser extent, the
cityscape—as creative touchstones, even when their paintings became fully
abstract. During the same period that Kelly was investigating various ways
to circumvent expressive intent, he traveled with Ralph Coburn to Monet’s

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home and garden at Giverny, which they found shockingly rundown.

The return of cultivated flora to the chaos of unregulated growth, like the
nearly, but never entirely, abandoned dispersion of paint across a canvas
in the leading Impressionist’s late paintings, both had lessons for Kelly
(as they did for many of his Abstract Expressionist elders). Back in Paris,
Kelly made grid-based paintings involving relatively large blocks of vivid
colors, in sequences that appear random. In fact, they are derived, however
distantly, from observation, including light skittering across water, which
lent itself first to a small black-and-white ink drawing of 1950 that was in
turn “subsumed and redeployed” across the grid-like surface of Spectrum
Colors Arranged by Chance I, 1951 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), “using
a preconceived and arbitrary distribution system.”" As its title indicates,
the pixelated black-and-white Seine, 1951 (also in Philadelphia), is similarly
drawn from observing light on water;*? other sources for the grids included,
more predictably, window mullions and floor tiles.
Even while creating these sharp-edged geometric abstractions, Kelly
has depicted plant life throughout his career, often in contour drawings
that trace stem, leaf, and bloom with an immediacy and concision that
has made them legendary. Sometimes bordering on abstraction in their
simplicity, and revealing awareness of Asian calligraphy in their graceful
shorthand, these drawings find order in nature’s complexity, and tremen-
dous richness in a single line, the subtlest turn of which creates the volume
of a furled leaf, or suggests the surface tension of water, or the lift of breeze.
And although these drawings are not at the center of Kelly’s practice, even
the most reductive of his abstractions are grounded in observed shapes:
the silhouettes of forms both natural and man-made. Thus during the
1950s and ’60s, both Kelly and Martin were actively negotiating the rela-
tions between natural, urban, and abstract form, and exploring ways to
relinquish figurative painting without forgoing expressive depth.
Martin continued to channel geometry as inspiration—and resist the
appeals of landscape—throughout the period when she was distilling her
vision of a grid from the entirety of the visible world. But however appealing

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Martin may have been found Kelly’s reconciliation of plane geometry with
spontaneous mark-making, and despite her early work’s wealth of Surre-
alist-influenced imagery, automatism was not a term she embraced. It was
freighted with what seemed to her self-indulgent introspection.
In her effort to enforce boundaries between art and personal expres-
sion—to maintain a firm line between art and everything else—she could
have found no better guide than Ad Reinhardt. Like Kelly, Reinhardt (born
in 1907 and thus closer in age to Martin) was a bridge between the genera-
tion of the Abstract Expressionists and the younger Minimalists who drew
so much from his example. Reinhardt was not a Coenties Slip resident, but
he was a gallery mate of Martin’s at Betty Parsons, first showing there in
1947 and every year thereafter until 1960, with a final show in 1965. (Unlike
most of her artists, he remained with Parsons, although not exclusively,
nearly until his death, in 1967.)
There are other points of biographical connection with Martin: Rein-
hardt attended Columbia University, on a scholarship, from 1932 to 1935;
he, too was from a working-class background, a circumstance that helped
to shape his deep and abiding political commitments.” While at Colum-
bia, Reinhardt enrolled in painting classes at Teachers College and, as
noted above, both he and Martin—who arrived five years after Reinhardt
left—studied with Elise Ruffini. Among Reinhardt’s first exhibitions were
two at the Teachers College gallery, in 1943 and’44, by which time Martin
was in New Mexico, where they met briefly in 1951. When asked whether
she was good friends with him during her seaport years, Martin replied,
“Yes,” adding that they didn’t talk about painting together, but they “sup-
ported each other.... He thought I was a good painter, and I thought he
was a good painter.”
Although Reinhardt’s work of the 1940s was calligraphic, grid-like arma-
tures structured its allover weave, and he was scathing in his judgment
of Surrealist automatism. “Artists who peddle wiggly lines and colors as
representing emotion,” he said in 1960, “should be run off the streets”? In
1943 Reinhardt wrote, “the main current of Surrealism is chaos, confusion,

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individual anguish, terror, horror... an abstract painting stands as a chal-

lenge to disorder and disintegration.”” Later he revisited this judgment
in more colloquial terms, claiming that the Surrealists “were anti-art.
They were involved in, I don’t know, life or love or sex or I don’t know
what.... Well, the abstract painters were always dull in that sense.” It was
a dullness—and also, implicitly, a devotion to higher, better things—that
he endorsed.
Some of Reinhardt’s antipathy to Surrealism was simply a symptom of
the widespread resistance, among postwar American painters, to European
influence.*5 As Dore Ashton writes, in connection with Rothko, “For most
artists who would become New York School abstract painters, the Surrealist
lunge into the unconscious was somehow shameless”; instead, they pur-
sued grand, transpersonal themes.”° Martin’s 1957 Wurlitzer Foundation
application had reflected the same anti-European, universalizing enthusi-
asms. While Reinhardt deplored the “sublime,” he too embraced—in what is
arguably a hair-splitting distinction—the conception of art as an expression
of absolute emotions. Martin made the same distinction when she wrote,
“T think that personal feelings, sentimentality and those sorts of emotions,
are not art but... universal emotions like happiness are art.”?’
Equally close in spirit to Martin’s thinking was much of the aesthetic
program that was so forcefully defined by Reinhardt. In the spring of
1958, in It Is, he wrote a “Statement” called “25 Lines of Words on Art.”
Written entirely in capitals, it included these pronouncements: “1. Art is
art. Everything else is everything else. / 2. Art-as-art. Art from art. Art on
art. Art for art. Art beyond art. /.../ 6. Painting as ‘not as a likeness of
anything on earth’ /.../ 10. Painting as absolute symmetry, pure reason,
rightness. 11. Painting as central, frontal, regular, repetitive. 12. Preformula-
tion, preformalization, formalism, repainting.”* In her newly symmetrical,
frontal, regular, repetitive, preformulated, and purified painting, Martin
subscribed to—or possibly helped shape—many of Reinhardt’s tenets.
Ideology aside, their work also shared formal features. By the late 1950s
Reinhardt was making monochrome paintings, including entirely white

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ones which, Thomas Hess wrote, had an effect like “the sound snow makes
falling on snow.”? The description would perfectly suit much of Martin’s
work of the late 1950s. And by 1960 Reinhardt had committed himself
conclusively to what are generally called his “black” paintings: the square
canvases, 5 feet on a side, trisected into nine squares of close-valued, very
dark gray. “No other American painter was interested in a combination
of invisibility, purity, and the end of painting until at least 1960,” Lucy
Lippard claimed. Similarly, Michael Corris writes, “In Reinhardt’s post-his-
toric universe, 1960 symbolizes year zero of the project to construct an
artistic practice that embodies the performance of negation in modern
art.” The timing is almost exactly coincident with Martin’s commitment
to her own unvarying format, the 6-foot square canvas organized by
horizontal and vertical lines, and to her own pursuit of near invisibility.
Reinhardt described his black paintings in 1966 as “squares of time, color-
less intersection [between] memory, forgetfulness; signals from the void,
grid-lines between future [and] past.” Achieving these voided images
required that Reinhardt make ruthless denials—of subjects, of subjectivity,
of visibility itself: “Only a standardized, prescribed form can be imageless,
only a stereotyped image can be formless, only a formula-ized art can be
formula-less. ... Everything into irreducibility, unreproducibility, imper-
ceptibility.”
Like Reinhardt’s black squares, the lineaments of Martin’s grids are
only visible at close range and can disappear entirely when photographed.
And their execution requires similar feats of patience and care. “The work
of producing a ‘black’ painting was painstaking, delicate and, above all,
tedious,”*4 writes Corris, who also says, “Reinhardt favoured labour-inten-
sive studio methods, which he described in various manifestos as a kind of
ritual.”>> This involvement in process, in repetitive and demanding-or, it
could also be said, meditative—work for its own sake, characterizes Martin’s
paintings as well.
Even equating the scale of the painting and the artist is an interest Rein-
hardt and Martin shared. The “black” paintings, it is often said, conformed

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to the span of Reinhardt’s outstretched arms—limbs that are implicit in

the equal-armed cross that divides each canvas—and had the advantage as
well of being easily moved around the studio. The same is true of Martin’s
paintings (although, until near the end of her life, they were a foot bigger
than Reinhardt’s; her physical strength was considerable and her rejection
of assistants adamant). For her part, Martin said of the scale she committed
to at this time, “It’s a good size [when] you can just feel like stepping into
it. It has to do with being the full size of the human body.”3°
Martin’s paintings differ from Reinhardt’s in essential ways. The dis-
tinction is not mainly between paintings that tend more often to fade to
white than black—in 1955 Reinhardt, like several of his peers, including
Newman and Kelly, and also Robert Rauschenberg, had made white-on-
white paintings, and Martin’s paintings could be quite dark—but between
Reinhardt’s many renunciations and Martin’s abiding spirit of affirmation;
he chose not to promote the universal emotions of joy and innocence that
she celebrated. Just as important, Martin parted company with Reinhardt
on the issue of political engagement. (Reinhardt, who had been a member
of the Communist party in the 1930s, remained a lifelong activist—perhaps
surprisingly, he was Vice President of the Student Non-Violent Coordinat-
ing Committee in 1963, a group associated with student protests of the
sixties. These affiliations had led early on to FBI surveillance and to habits
of wariness that conformed with Martin’s own.)
But the differences between Martin and Reinhardt are outweighed by
shared commitments, primary among them the defeat of ego. While Mar-
tin did not faithfully practice any organized religion (“I quote from the
Bible because it’s so poetic, though I’m not a Christian,” she once said”),
she, like Reinhardt, was drawn to several varieties of quietism. While at
Columbia, Reinhardt began a lifelong friendship with Thomas Merton,
who would become a Trappist monk and scholar of both Buddhism and
Christian mysticism; Merton encouraged these interests in his friend and
called Reinhardt the “dean of the Great Quiet.”3* In something of the same
spirit, Lippard calls Reinhardt a moralizing art-for-art Protestant.” The

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Protestant ethos that Martin shared with Betty Parsons has already been
noted, although the character of Parsons’s religious identity was more
social than spiritual. On the other hand, both Lenore Tawney and Ann
Wilson encouraged in Martin a searching interest in Christian mysticism.
Like Tawney, Wilson, who in 1977 would produce an operatic perfor-
mance based in part on Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, read the eigh-
teenth-century volume with Martin during their seaport years, along with
the life and teachings of Saint Teresa of Avila.
Saint Teresa’s appeal to Martin was manifold, and the artist would have
had no trouble heeding her advice, “The necessities of the body should
be disregarded,” and at times she accepted (if only by necessity) “the
good that comes from poverty.” Even Teresa’s praise of “the great blessing
that shunning their relatives brings to those who have left the world”?
would have resonated with Martin, whose relations with her family were
strained at best. But it was Teresa’s visions that must have attracted Martin
most, both as a model for her own inspiration and, perhaps, for affirming
psychological experiences that could be isolating and frightening. The
sixteenth-century Teresa, by her own description “too giddy and careless to
be trusted at home,’ was sent to be educated by Augustinian nuns, but she
challenged Church authority by embracing the visions that began visiting
her in early adulthood." In “The Prayer of God,” Teresa’s most influential
writing, she explained to her “daughters” that there is “a supernatural state”
in which “all the faculties are stilled.” Those who achieve this state, doing
so by grace rather than by effort, “seem not to be in the world, and have
no wish to see or hear anything but their God; nothing distresses them,
nor does it seem that anything can possibly do so.”
Parallels have often been noted between such mystical states and the
internal experiences of individuals who, like Martin, have a history of
breaking from reality. And Teresa used a striking metaphor for this state
of sublimity: “The soul is like an infant still at its mother’s breast: such is
the mother’s care for it that she gives it its milk without its having to ask
for it so much as by moving its lips. That is what happens here. The will

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simply loves, and no effort needs to be made by the understanding” There

is a connection here to Martin’s curiously staunch belief that mothers
know instinctively just how to best serve their infants and do so without
doubt or exception: “Our most heartfelt and anxious obedience is a moth-
er’s obedience to the infant, and her slavish obedience to her children as
long as they are in her care,” she wrote. The child, reciprocally, is perfectly
obedient to the mother; this “authority-obedience state” is “a continuous
state of being.” But, Martin goes on to say, “the obedience of children
is generally worthless because they are inattentive and desultory.’* The
oblique perspective such statements throw on Martin’s childhood, and on
her experience as a teacher, is tantalizing, not least for its final touch of
mordant humor. But most salient, for Martin, in Saint Teresa’s advice is
her celebration of a state of rapture, her affirmation of vision as a creative
resource, and, not least, her recommendation to disregard thought—which,
Teresa says, is to be laughed away, a recommendation Martin took to heart.
Martin also drew on Old Testament prophets, as is clear from such pas-
sages in her writing as, “From Isaiah, about inspiration / Surely the people
is grass.” The biblical passage in question reads, “The grass withers, the
flower fades; because the spirit of the Lord blows upon it: surely the people
is grass” (Isaiah 40:7). Martin’s association from this citation to inspiration
is elliptical; Isaiah is speaking of mortality. Generally, though, the teach-
ings of the prophets, like Teresa’s, are concerned with humility, devotion,
and modesty. And perhaps Isaiah (or Second Isaiah, as the author of this
section of the book is generally identified) appealed to Martin as well by
twice having God compare himself to a woman: “Now I will cry out like
a woman in travail, I will gasp and pant,’ the prophet has God say (Isaiah
42:14), and “Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have
no compassion on the son of her womb?” (Isaiah 49:15). Again the inno-
cence of children, and also the immutable loving kindness of mothers,
are invoked. And the radical anomaly of the image lends urgency to the
prophet’s statement. As biblical scholar Abraham Heschel observes, “The
allusion to the Lord as ‘a woman in travail’ [is] the boldest figure used by

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any prophet.”43 But Second Isaiah is also distinguished by his concern for
the vulnerable and by his mission to give “power to the faint.”4 Equally
important, the Old Testament prophets were, like Teresa, by definition
the beneficiaries of transcendent knowledge that arrived.in moments of
dissociation from ordinary life, experiences from which they drew their
teachings.
Important though these sources were to Martin, Eastern spiritual sys-
tems, Buddhism in particular, are much more commonly cited as an influ-
ence on her thought and artwork. This, too, was an interest she shared
with Reinhardt and Kelly—and with Tawney, Wilson, and many others.
Like Christian mysticism and quietism, Buddhism—which is notoriously
difficult to define, and comprises a range of traditions and spiritual prac-
tices—provided Martin with a model of humility, egolessness, and patient
devotion. Among the Buddhist teachings that would have particularly
recommended themselves to Martin are emphases on innocence and mod-
esty; on the immanence of spirit in the natural world; and on a precise
balance of rigorous discipline and fundamental anti-authoritarianism—of
discipline without a disciplinarian. Preferences for receptivity and silence,
and for acknowledging stillness and void as active and creative forces, are
all reflected in her quietly animated work. Late in her life, she spoke of a
daily meditation practice, and of her belief in reincarnation, for both of
which Buddhism lends support. Perhaps appealing to her as well were
the profound absurdity of many Zen parables—attractive, arguably, to a
woman sometimes plagued by bouts of unreason—and Zen’s admonitions
against yielding to the body’s appetites. Transcending one’s self by sub-
mission to a greater, trans-subjective whole may have seemed to her an
eminently sound determination.
The influence of Buddhism and other Eastern spiritual systems was
widespread in the New York culture of the 1950s and 1960s, and, as dis-
cussed earlier, it had taken an at least equally strong hold earlier on the
West Coast. While Martin’s exposure to Buddhism in Washington State
in the 1930s is speculative, her engagement with such ideas in Taos in

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the 1940s and again in the 1950s is almost certain. But Martin’s contact in
New York with artists avowedly engaged with Eastern thought, including
Kelly and Reinhardt, is confirmed. In 1949, the year Kelly met with Arp
and began to experiment with automatism, he also met in Paris with John
Cage, who was already deeply engaged with the I Ching and chance-based
compositional strategies.** Reinhardt, who after Columbia went on to study
Asian art history, in which he completed a master’s degree in at New York
University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1951, had attended Japanese scholar
Daisetz Suzuki’s seminars on Zen at Columbia in the early 1950s. Reinhardt
himself became a proponent of Zen, and he lectured on it at the Abstract
Expressionists’ Eighth Street “Club” (of which he was a somewhat reluctant
member).*° In addition to learning of these teachings through Kelly and
Reinhardt, Martin might also have come across Zen teachings through
Rauschenberg, who learned of Suzuki’s teaching from Cage.
Martin’s statements about Buddhism are not consistent and, especially
later in her life, she expressed great disappointment and even anger that
her painting was considered by some to be an expression of Eastern spir-
itual beliefs. In fact she was cautious about embracing spiritual beliefs
from the start.4”7 Reported Martin’s friend Jill Johnston, “she hates magic
and fetishes and superstition and the i ching” and was “a zen sort of per-
son who never studied zen.”** To an audience of students, Martin had this
rather earthy advice: “When youre in life drawing, you're really thinking
of all the women you've ever seen, and all the gestures they ’ve ever made.
That’s what brings life into the drawing. It’s your experience of life. It’s
not spiritual, it’s really in this life. You sort of underestimate the human
being when you say that every least thing that is an abstract experience
is spiritual. It isn’t. It’s just your real self. You can be capable of fantastic
abstract experiences, right in this life.”** Nonetheless, she often proclaimed
the importance of practices and beliefs belonging to Taoism and certain
schools of Buddhism. “My greatest spiritual inspiration came from the Chi-
nese spiritual teachers, especially Lao Tzu,” she wrote. “My next strongest
influence is the Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng.... I have also read and been

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inspired by the sutras of the other... Buddhist masters.’° Lao Tzu, who
dates to roughly the sixth or fifth century B.C.E. and thus was probably a
contemporary of the Buddha, taught that happiness depends on living in
harmony with the Tao—the void from which reality emerges. While it is
only one school of the many Buddhism comprises, Taoist-influenced Zen
Buddhism, which is what many Americans think of when they think of
Buddhism, had the greatest impact on Martin. The critic Holland Cotter
reports that Martin read Suzuki and attended lectures by Krishnamurti,
and that she said, “One thing I like about Zen, it doesn’t believe in achieve-
ment. I don’t think the way to succeed is by doing something aggressive.
Aggression is weak-minded.”" Martin’s friend David McIntosh says, “She
often referred to Lao Tzu, the Tao te Ching. She had meditated for a long
time when I met her, continued to do it in the eighties. She would sit for
long periods of time. I don’t know whether she was in meditation, or just
listening to her mind, as she would call it.’ At the end of her life, she was
still often urging Witter Bynner’s translation of the Tao te Ching, The Way
ofLife According to Lao Tzu, on friends and acquaintances, insuring that
a local bookstore in Taos kept it in stock.»
First significantly promoted in this country by Ralph Waldo Emerson (in
whose journal, The Dial, a translation of the Lotus Sutra appeared in 1844),
Henry David Thoreau, and their fellow Transcendentalists, Asian spiritual
teachings were associated from the start with reverence for nature—a rev-
erence that is expressed in starkly different ways in Western and Eastern
culture. The distinction was taken up in the writings of the indefatigable
Suzuki, who was the foremost ambassador to the United States for Zen in
the first half of the twentieth century; his Introduction to Zen Buddhism,
published in 1934 with an introduction by Carl Jung, and his Manual of
Zen Buddhism, published by Grove Press in 1960, were both widely read
by artists. In the former, Suzuki contrasts the canonical Victorian poem by
Alfred, Lord Tennyson that begins, “Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck
you out,” with a verse by the Japanese poet Basho, who discovered a flower
by the roadside and simply looked at it, absorbed in thought.» The pious

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and Romantic Tennyson feels compelled to pick (and hence, of course, kill)
the flower—“hold you here, root and all, in my hand”—write an ode to it,
and construct an allegory around it; his Buddhist counterpart admires it
where it grows and moves on.® For Martin, as for Basho, the natural world’s
bounty is best expressed in gestures that make no attempt to appropriate
it or speak in its name. A passage from Martin’s “The Untroubled Mind,”
a text of 1973, seems to offer a resolution of Basho and Tennyson: “When
the rose is destroyed we grieve / but really beauty is unattached / and a
clear mind sees it.’5° She returned to the motif, adding a touch of Platonic
idealism, in the 1989 lecture, “Beauty is the Mystery of Life”: “When a
beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose.
Beauty is an awareness in the mind.”s”
Such awareness is easier to attain if intellect does not corrupt one’s
ability to perceive; Zen teachers warned against allowing the intellect to
prevail, at the cost of “sense-experience” and, even more damaging, “the
loss of ‘innocence.”5* This teaching compares closely with that of Cage,
whose “Lecture on Nothing” offers this epigram: “Putting the mind on it
takes the ear off it.”5° And it is even closer to Martin’s thinking, as when
she wrote, “We constantly pursue perfection... the danger is intellectual
interference,’ a danger she warned against as frequently as she praised
innocence. Moreover, Zen teaches that generosity should be extended
without looking for recognition; rather than seeking such gratification,
one should pursue selflessness, to the extent of allowing the self to be
absorbed into oneness, or allness. Having reached this state, however, is
not an uncomplicated achievement, since “the idea of oneness or allness
is” itself “a stumbling block... which threatens the original freedom of the
spirit.” Again, a passage from Martin’s writing makes a striking compari-
son in its radical self-abnegation: “Thinking leads to pride, identification,
confusion and fear. Work is a function in which we seem to be identified.
[But] In the great process, in the sum total of the outward being of all liv-
ing things, our work is insignificant, infinitesimal and insignificant. This
must be realized.”

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The italics were Martin’s caution to herself; work indeed was everything
to her. But she believed that it achieved its importance only through being
seen by others. Her conviction that art’s value for both artist and viewer was
in its expressive utility can be linked to John Dewey—and, in turn, through
him to Zen. Although he didn’t address Buddhism in his writings, Dewey
was in contact with Suzuki early in his career, and when the educator
traveled to Japan in 1919, Suzuki served as his translator; the connection
was consolidated when Suzuki lectured at Columbia, Dewey’s academic
seat. As art historian and Buddhist scholar Jacquelynn Baas observes, Bud-
dhism is experiential (unlike Christianity or Judaism, which are based in
revelation), an emphasis that ties the school of Zen Buddhism to Dewey’s
Pragmatism—and, in turn, to the values Martin affirmed in her own work.
Just as Martin’s paintings are committed to the practical good of com-
municating with viewers, they are visibly reliant on her own manual labor;
the slow inscription of precisely drawn and painted webs and bands can be
compared, with not too big a stretch, to Zen acolytes’ sweeping of monas-
tery floors. The humility of the practice is its own reward. Suzuki could be
firm on this point: “Morally, any work involving an expenditure of physical
force testifies to the soundness of its ideas.”*4 At the same time, “Life is an
art, and like perfect art it should be self-forgetting; there ought not to be
any trace of effort or painful feeling. Life, according to Zen, ought to be
lived as a bird flies through the air.”® As this pair of conflicting teachings
suggests, “Zen is decidedly not a system founded upon logic and anal-
ysis. If anything, it is the antipode to logic.” The many tales of monks’
irrational, and sometimes rather brutal, answers to supplicants’ pleas for
wisdom or clarity are ample evidence of its contradictory nature.” It is
easy to imagine the appeal, to Martin, of such mutually opposing and
even frankly irrational precepts.
Zen also calls for the practitioner to submit to fate, which relates directly
to the non-introspective variant of automatism that attracted Kelly and
Martin. Fickle in its attentions, the inspiration that produced her visions
was unerring in its wisdom, and she followed it unequivocally. Just as

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Cage's applications of the I Ching were determined by guidelines as arcane

and arbitrary as they were rigid (an explanation of his methods that may
cause the mind to wander begins: “Three coins tossed once yield four lines:
three heads, broken with a circle; two tails and a head, straight; two heads
and a tail, broken; three tails, straight with a circle”), so did the translation
of Martin's visions onto canvas rely on fixed but bewildering calculations.
Her faith in the formal structures the visions provided was immutable. As
explained with winsome grace by Cage, in his legendary 1949 “Lecture on
Nothing,” “structure,” whatever its seeming difficulties, offers “those rare
moments of ecstasy, which, as sugar loaves train horses, train us to make
what we make.’” And what Martin appreciated best in Cage was not his
promulgation of spiritual precepts, nor his reliance on chance, but his
respect for nature’s sense of humor. “Agnes loved Cage,” Ann Wilson says.
“She would go to his performances and laugh and laugh.””
Another aspect of Zen Buddhism that likely appealed to Martin was
its opposition to European styles of thought, including the bleakly Exis-
tentialist and, especially, the libidinously Freudian, which by the 1950s
had both taken deep root in progressive American culture—not least in
Abstract Expressionist circles. Commonly understood to underscore the
fundamental meaninglessness of life, Existentialism ran counter to Mar-
tin’s exertions to affirm the universal states of happiness and innocence.
It could be said that her commitment to these states was something of a
rebuke to the irremediably depressive character of the Abstract Expres-
sionists whom she otherwise respected, and with whom she generally iden-
tified. And the introspective thrust of Freudian psychoanalysis, combined
with the priority its orthodox practice places on exploring sexual conflict,
would have struck someone of Martin’s disposition as wrong and intru-
sive. Moreover, Freud was notoriously unsympathetic to homosexuality,
a bias not lost on the many gay artists with whom Martin associated; it is
perhaps no coincidence that they largely turned elsewhere for insight. The
connection between Zen and homosexuality has been noted by Jonathan
Katz, who writes, “Only in retrospect does it make sense that the zenith

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of Zen Buddhism’s influence in American cultural life was probably the

mid-1950s.... a period when more homosexuals than Communists lost
their jobs” and were persecuted; the self-liberation offered by Zen was,
Katz suggests, a form of personal salvation and a refuge.”
Along with all these parallels between Buddhist practices and Martin’s
sensibility, it should be noted, too, that certain of her paintings have been
understood by some viewers as examples of very particular forms of Zen
imagery, which she assiduously denied. Says Baas, “Zen influence is read-
ily apparent in Martin’s Cow, a painting from 1960. Its brown circle could
almost represent the ‘Both Vanished’ episode from the Zen Oxherding
Pictures about the taming of the mind.” Such “Oxherding Pictures” fea-
ture broken circles drawn in ink. Baas continues, “I am not suggesting
that Martin’s intention was so literal.... Martin’s ultimate subject was
perfection of which the circle is symbolic... Still, Martin did entitle this
painting Cow,” which “is surely related to the ‘meaning of the Oxherding
pictures.” Despite the combination of motif and title, it seems an unwar-
ranted reduction to account for the circle, always completed (and not, as
in the Oxherding Pictures, broken) in Martin’s paintings of this time, as a
Zen pictogram. Martin didn’t live to contradict this particular interpreta-
tion, but she did oppose such readings in more general terms, as when, in
response to a question about the place of spirituality in her art, she said
heatedly, “I think that the spiritual community is encroaching on the art
field. ... People say, you’re painting Zen, or you're painting Taoism, or
something like that. And that’s not right.” In any case, she soon repudi-
ated all her circle-based paintings as well.

Inspiration, certain aspects of Surrealism, and spiritual practices of both

the East and the West all played important parts in shaping Martin’s work.
But perhaps no source was more important to her than the pressure of
language, whether oral, written, or internal. To the extent that her paint-
ing can be called automatist, it can also be identified with unspoken and

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not fully articulated writing. The lines of thought along which her mind
ran can be said to find literal expression in the penciled lines that course
throughout her work. And in the years when Martin was in New York, she
could look to many other artists who were cross-wiring the verbal and the
visual.
Of course, written language had long been hybridized with visual art.
Ever since the Futurists’ parole in liberta (“words-in-freedom”)—or since
Mallarmé or medieval illuminated manuscripts—the shape of a verse, its
typography and arrangement on the page, as well as the rhythms of speech
it shapes, have all functioned as supplements to its semantic content. In
traditional Asian art the relationship between image and text is espe-
cially intimate; the calligraphy that accompanies pictorial representation
in scroll painting is a form of expression both equal to figuration and
integrated with it. Neither alone is sufficient in accounting for material
reality: “Existence is beyond the power of words / To define,” writes Lao
Tzu. “In the beginning of heaven and earth there were no words /... The
core and the surface / Are essentially the same /... If name be needed,
wonder names them both.’ The contrast with the first Gospel’s origin
story is striking.
The legacy of European experiments in marrying image to text can be
seen in some of Cage’s writing, in which it is further linked to music. His
“Lecture on Nothing,” first delivered at the Club around 1950 and published
ten years later, is organized on the page by a scaffold of lines, columns, and
spaces (they indicate pauses for the speaker, and the reader), which together
strongly resemble a grid. Cage was not alone, at the time, in considering text
as a musical score and both music and score as forms of drawing; Morton
Feldman’s scores of the 1950s and later have an independent life as visual
works and in fact also took the form of grids. For the musical avant-garde
in the postwar era, words were read as sound just as ordinary sound was
music, and notations were images as well as instructions.
The connection to Martin’s work is made explicit in Richard Landry’s
Quad Suite (Six Vibrations for Agnes Martin), 1972, a black-and-white video

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in which the camera frames a section of a guitar’s neck as it is strummed

and picked by the unseen musician; the instrument's four visible frets
form the vertical components of a grid completed by its six vibrating
strings. With the deadpan whimsy characteristic of the time, Landry (a
Louisiana-born musician best known for playing the saxophone—and for
his involvement with the cooperative restaurant Food) thereby makes
literal the internal hum of Martin’s work: the visual vibrato that several
observers have noted.
For Martin, the connections between instruction and image are unusu-
ally complicated. A generous correspondent and at times an active author,
Martin almost always wrote by hand, and her penmanship was careful.
Here again there is a connection to Reinhardt, in the elegantly penned
calligraphy of his written statements (and also, more distantly, the careful
lettering of his political and cultural cartoons). But Reinhardt kept writ-
ing separate from painting, which, it can be argued, Martin did not. The
penciled line in her artwork is not just the record of a straight edge as it is
moved over the surface of the canvas, laying down the structure of a grid
or the breadth of a stripe. It is also a line of measure and deliberation.
Implicitly, it is a line of language, not in the sense of discrete meaningful
words but as the minimal structure, the onward flow, of all rumination.
Whatever else surrounded or accentuated it, whether blank canvas or pre-
cise strokes of oil paint or dilute washes of acrylic, that penciled line runs
beneath and beside.
Among the many authors Martin is known to have read, including the
spiritual guides noted above, Gertrude Stein looms large at the nexus
between the visual and textual. For Martin, Stein seems to have repre-
sented liberating candor and, perhaps even more agreeably, the freedoms
offered by concealment. Robert Indiana, a seaport resident, recalls that
Martin reintroduced him to Stein’s To Do: ABook ofAlphabets and Birth-
days, which she had in her loft, and he says Martin admired Stein's writing
for its simplicity and its density.” She was hardly alone. Stein’s legacy was
important enough to Kelly that he (and Ralph Coburn, during the busy
 DUNES? OF T'H'O'U'G!
HT

summer of 1949) found time to pay a visit to Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas
at Bilignin. Cage notes having mentioned Stein to Suzuki, “who had never
heard of her. I described aspects of her work, which he said sounded very
interesting.”””
The scholar Brendan Prendeville has drawn attention to a quotation
from Stein printed inside the foldout card for Martin’s December 1959
exhibition at Betty Parsons Section Eleven gallery: “In which way are stars
brighter than they are. When we have come to this decision. /We mention
many thousands of buds. And when I close my eyes I see them.” Prende-
ville observes that the explicitly romantic lines following those Martin
excerpted are “among the most overt and declaratory in Stein.” They
read, in part:

If you hear her snore

It is not before you love her
You love her so that to be her beau is very lovely....
She is sweetly here and I am very near and that is very lovely
She is my tender sweet and her little feet are stretched out well which
is a treat and very lovely....
She is very lovely and mine which is very lovely.”

These citations and exchanges are points of solidarity for a necessarily

self-protective homosexual community of the 1950s and early ’6os, and
it is heartening to imagine the reticent Martin sharing in this encrypted
round of personal communication.
There is also a kinship linking the measured, repetitive beat of Stein’s
writing and its insistent materiality to the rhythms of Martin’s grids.
Obdurate to the point of impenetrability, Stein’s prose and poetry push
against comprehension in something like the way Martin’s work (and Rein-
hardt’s) pushes against visibility. The dispersion of attention across the
field of the page that Stein’s prose and poetry often invite is comparable
to the dispersion of attention across the expanses of Martin’s paintings.

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In creating text that tends to be both syntactically negotiable and, at its

most difficult, semantically inaccessible, Stein made the act of reading
come close to that of looking. (As Prendeville points out as well, Stein had
studied with the philosopher and psychologist William James, and she
“was stimulated by James’s notion of the stream of consciousness”; she also
“clearly drew on James’s philosophical pragmatism.”* Similarly, Martin was
educated under the influence of James’s Pragmatist colleague Dewey; the
relevance to her of stream-of-consciousness procedures has already been
suggested.)
The formal parallels between Stein’s writing and the work of artists in
the 1960s attracted attention at the time, notably in a key essay of 1965
by Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” which proposed that term as one among the
many competing names for what would come to be called Minimalism.
One section of Rose’s essay is titled “A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose: Repetition
as Rhythmic Structuring,” and she includes a quotation from Stein’s “Por-
ACG

traits and Repetition”: “the kind of invention that is necessary to make a

general scheme is limited in everybody’s experience, every time one of
the hundreds of times a newspaper man makes fun of my writing and of
my repetition he always has the same theme, that is, if you like, repetition,
that is if you like the repeating that is the same thing.”* Stein’s writing
is clearly relevant to the serial, formulaic, reductive visual artwork then
emerging. Just as important, there are present in Stein’s writing—as with
other poets connected to the art world in which Martin participated: Frank
O’Hara, John Ashbery, Joe Brainard, James Schuyler, and such elders as
Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams—accounts of everyday things
occurring in everyday lives, observed closely and dispassionately. “Not
ideas but facts,” Cage wrote,’ echoing Williams’s famous “No ideas but in
things.” That insistence on primary experience is felt in Martin’s work, too.
At the same time, many of the visual artists with whom Martin asso-
ciated at the seaport were reconciling the written and the painted. For
instance, in Robert Indiana she found not only a friend who shared her

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interest in Stein but also an artist whose work integrated word and image.
During his downtown years, Indiana began making sign paintings that
combine words and geometric figures into imperative statements of nois-
ily mixed meanings, in which a blunt form of dark poetry often lurks—as
do, occasionally, references to leading poets, including Williams.*3 One of
Indiana’s earliest sign paintings, The Slips, 1959-60 (private collection),
features the names of various slips-turned-streets at the seaport: Coenties,
Old, Peck, Pike. And he notes that at the time he was developing work
involving equidistantly spaced orbs—the names in The Slips are inscribed
in circles—he went to see what Martin was working on and found that
she was doing something similar, which was, he said, naturally discourag-
ing.*4 (Ironically, Martin would soon discard circles herself, and, as noted
previously, she later repudiated all paintings in which they appeared.) In
addition to the similarity between these compositions, the bisected black
diamond in an untitled painting of 1956-57 (Dia Art Foundation), with its
powerful graphic simplicity, strongly evokes Robert Indiana’s sign-based
paintings of the time.
Far more lyrical, hence closer in sensibility to Martin, are the canvases
of Cy Twombly. His paintings of the early 1960s make classical allusions in
large, unsteady, intermittently legible script that loops across pale expanses
of paint; works of the later sixties simulate chalk drawn across classroom
blackboards. Martin, too, considered herself a classicist, although her ref-
erences were to Plato, while Twombly’s were to Homer. Of this cohort of
painters, the artist making work closest to Martin’s was Jasper Johns, a
taciturn Southerner who was eighteen years her junior and not as per-
sonally close to her as Kelly, Reinhardt, or Indiana. In the 1950s Johns was
introducing the regular grids of letters and numbers for which he would
become so well known. Examples include Gray Alphabets, 1956 (The Menil
Collection, Houston) and White Numbers, 1958 (The Museum of Modern
Art, New York), both of which are richly textured encaustic paintings fea-
turing ghostly stenciled figures set in tidy rows. Compounding looking
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

and reading, the prosaic and the poetic, Johns was developing a language
that had much in common with Martin’s. Rauschenberg’s use of newsprint
in his transfer paintings, starting in 1958, is also relevant, as are the white
paintings in which numbers appear. Rauschenberg’s white paintings of
1950 and 1951 have striking similarities to Martin’s small white paintings of
the late 1950s in which pencil lines push through thick paint. For instance,
his The Lily White, ca. 1950 (private collection), consists of a mazelike pat-
tern penciled into white oil paint. Within the maze are inscribed numbers,
facing up and down and, in one case, sideways, as well as the title and
the word “free,” both upside-down. Comparisons with Martin’s work are
highly suggestive.
To the extent that Martin’s grids resonated to spiritual harmonics, they
also find company in the contemporaneous work of Alfred Jensen, who
by the late 1950s had begun to make heavily painted grids, the internal
squares and framing margins of which bore characters relating to various
numerical systems, including Arabic and Mayan counting procedures and
symbols from the I Ching.*> In these years, Mark Tobey was deploying a
delicately calligraphic white line in compositions that suggest a fine North-
west rain of writing, skittering across his work’s generally dark surfaces.
Neither painter, though, was personally connected to Martin.
On the other hand, two artists with whom Martin surely interacted while
she was in New York, Lenore Tawney and Chryssa, were at the time using in
their work written language—including letter forms and newsprint—inte-
grated with grids. In 1961, around the time of her solo show at the Staten
Island Museum, Tawney stripped her work of color, creating fiber hangings
with knots that reflect her nautical setting at the time and with braids that
make reference to (among other things) ancient Egyptian headdresses. By
the following year, Tawney’s work had become fully three-dimensional,
as seen in the floor-to-ceiling hangings included in the landmark 1963
group show organized by Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen
at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts (now the Museum of Art and

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Design), titled Woven Forms (after Tawney’s series of the same name).*° The
delicate lines of Tawney’s Woven Forms, dominated by vertical threads in
close parallel, as well as the closely woven wall works they followed, lend
support to the many claims by critics that Martin’s grids reflect a concern
with textiles—and, by extension, that Martin made deliberate reference to
domestic handcraft and its traditional association with women’s labor (a
claim that, as noted above, she vigorously denied).
In any case, the closest point of contact between the two women’s work
is not Tawney’s textiles but instead the drawings in ink on graph paper that
she began to make in 1964 and the collages she made in the same period.
Tawney said of the drawings, which consumed her for a year, “They were
like a meditation, each drawing, each line,”*’ suggesting a familiarity with
mindfulness practices she shared with Martin. Executed on graph paper,
often in red and/or blue ink, these drawings are not themselves grids.
Fanning out to form mirrored or overlapping triangles and circles, often
creating moiré patterns where they cross, the vanishingly thin lines are
organized into compositions that are at once aerodynamic and vaporous.
Tawney’s small collages, a significant number of them made on the
backs of postcards sent to friends, are as painstaking as the drawings.
Among those from the mid-sixties are some involving delicate inked lines
in close parallel, occasionally crossing to form grids; a few are overwritten
with lines of script perpendicular to the first, resulting in illegible grids
of cursive penmanship. Strips of newsprint, with both text and numbers,
alternate with rows of small pebbles and vertically inked lines in a 1966
postcard to Jack Lenor Larsen. In another postcard of 1966, horizontally
drawn lines are crossed with strips of text in old French, their direction
alternating, making it even harder to read; in the center is a circle of verti-
cal lines. This one was addressed to the two proprietors of a sewing shop on
Manhattan's Upper East Side called Tender Buttons—another Stein refer-
ence. In later years, Tawney’s collages included elements—feathers and pet-
als, images of animals—that Martin likely would have found dismayingly
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

sentimental. But the collages held an important place in Tawney’s work; a

1990 retrospective included as many collages and assemblages as weavings.
They intersect directly with Martin’s work and thinking: in the delicacy of
Tawney’s gridded lines—alive with language that, teasingly, is almost but
not quite legible—and in the touch of a hand that is evident but disciplined,
it is easy to see the lineaments of Martin’s paintings.
Ann Wilson, too, was making textile-based work in the sixties, hers com-
prising partially painted patchwork quilts composed in grid-like patterns.
Some incorporate passages from her extensive writings.** But a far stronger
commitment to the integration of image and text was made by Chryssa,
whose initial body of work in New York was a plaster and clay series,
Cycladic Books. Relatively small abstracted forms, they are each bisected
vertically by a subtle spine that suggests the gutter of an opened codex,
although a horizontal form generally spanning the top (these “books” were
made from casting the inside of flattened cardboard boxes) evokes instead
the brow of a highly abstracted face and thus the Cycladic figures to which
the series title refers.
From 1955 to 1960, Chryssa was engaged with compositions of multiple
letters, some of which take the form of raised type on bronze plaques
suggesting press plates, as in the Bronze Tablets of 1956 and’57. Others
are plaster reliefs, the letters either lined up in regular rows or more freely
distributed. There are also reliefs featuring large, solitary uppercase letters,
and others composed from rows of projecting elements that simulate the
incandescent light bulbs of the period’s older commercial signs; these ele-
ments also resemble, rather strongly, the boat spikes that appear in several
of Martin’s assemblages in those years. Between 1958 and 1962, Chryssa
turned to newsprint—news stories, classified ads, stock prices, crossword
puzzles, from the Herald Tribune and the New York Times—for repeated
rectangular units that were formed into grids. There were seven large paint-
ings in this body of work, 8 and 10 feet on a side, as well as a number of
smaller studies, some stamped in ink on paper and/or newsprint; in 1963
the newspapers became sculptures.*?

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Neither the language Chryssa visualized nor its alphabet was native to
her, and her work reflects an absorption by all that was new and exclam-
atory in the city’s visual (and textual) landscape. As early as 1957 she was
already conceiving sculptures dedicated to Times Square, iconic desti-
nation of all first-time visitors to New York, and in 1961 she began to use
electric lights. By 1964 she had commenced work on the mammoth neon
Gates of New York, which monopolized her time and resources for two
full years (it was shown at both Grand Central Station and the Pace Gal-
lery). “For two years, I'd had no desire to see anyone,” she said, testifying
to the depth of her commitment to her work—as well as, perhaps, to the
volatility of her character." And if she was alive to the lyricism lurking in
her new environment—“I saw Times Square with its light and its letters,
and I realized it was as beautiful and as difficult to do as Japanese callig-
taphy”*?— she was also keenly alert to the flavor of a city changing at warp
speed: by the late sixties she was using rheostats to make her glowing neon
sign sculptures turn themselves on and off, and black lights to enhance
their impact.%
In Chryssa’s uninhibited drive to make her work literally shine forth,
she and Martin stood poles apart, and nothing seems further from Mar-
tin’s sensibility than Chryssa’s monumental neon extravaganza. By the
same token, it is hard to imagine work further in spirit from Tawney’s
than Chryssa’s of around 1967; to put the comparison in terms of the era’s
popular culture, think of love beads and macramé in comparison with
light shows at acid rock concerts (or, taking fewer liberties, the artists’ own
points of reference: Gertrude Stein at her most tender as compared with
Sophocles at his most savage). But in Chryssa’s newspaper-grid paintings
especially, which are shadowed and whispery by comparison with her bet-
ter-known light-based sculptures, the three women find common ground.
And, as time would tell, Martin’s quiet determination would far surpass
Chryssa’s drive in securing public visibility and critical acclaim.
It would be wrong to discuss these points of commonality between Mar-
tin and a range of artists all finding their varied voices, from Kelly and

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Reinhardt to Tawney and Chryssa, without noting the perhaps obvious

point that the influences they reflect were all reciprocal. Martin’s annoy-
ance—“Oh don’t give me that”—at being associated with Tawney’s weavings
may have less to do with a reluctance to confirm their intimacy, or the
reliance of her paintings on textiles, than with legitimate resentment of
an attribution of influence going in the wrong direction. As was noted by
Sam Hunter, “The faint intelligibility of Martin’s repeated markings and
formalized graffiti do have a bearing on her [Chryssa’s] own forms and
content.”* During the years that Martin spent in New York, her eyes were
wide open, and she absorbed a great deal. But she arrived as a full-grown
adult—she was roughly twice Chryssa’s age—with considerable experience
and exposure to modern art. There is plenty of evidence—one thinks of
her documented conversations with Kelly and Reinhardt, and also with
Tuttle—that she was a deeply compelling presence whose thoughts were
taken seriously, no small matter for a woman in a world of men. Her many
years as a teacher had not, it seems, gone to waste. At the same time, she
was, at least in the first few years, very plainly still learning from those
around her.
Still, like most artists, Martin mainly listened to herself. Art historian
Briony Fer, who notes the intimacy in Martin’s work between drawing and
painting, writes powerfully of its reflexive inner language: “Repetition sets
in train a self-reference so intense that it is like an interior monologue. No
dream of camaraderie, but a dream of solitude.”® It matters, in considering
Martin’s work, that reading silently to oneself is something like listening
to a voice inside your head, and—habitual and commonplace though it
may be—is devilishly hard to define. The closest analogy to silent reading
is thought. Or spending time with one of Martin’s paintings. A fair amount
of scientific and philosophical attention has been paid to the history and
phenomenology of reading and writing, in all their variants, including
reading aloud to an audience and noiselessly in private. “Thought requires
some sort of continuity. Writing establishes in the text a ‘line’ of continuity

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outside the mind,” explains Walter Ong in his classic study Orality and
Literacy. That is, writing lends persistence and substance to mental activ-
ity that may have neither.%”
As is intuitively clear, reading text aloud doesn’t offer the imaginative
flexibility associated with silent reading. While it hardly needs saying
that writing comes much later in history than spoken language, it is less
well known that reading silently to oneself also emerged only gradually,
long after the development of written language. As the literary scholar
Alberto Manguel explains, it is only with silent reading that words “could
exist in interior space.”®? In a jeremiad proclaiming (in 1987) the imminent
death of written language, Vilém Flusser summarized, “As the score of a
spoken language, the alphabet permits us to stabilize and discipline a
transcendence of images that has been won, with effort, through speech.
One writes alphabetically to maintain and extend a level of consciousness
that is conceptual, superior to images, rather than continually falling back
into pictorial thinking, as we did before writing was invented.” Flusser
believed that we are in danger of just such a regression. For Martin, whose
illness included aural hallucinations, and whose healthy imagination pro-
vided her with extraordinarily clear visions, negotiating relations between
vision and thought, thought and image, inner voices that came unbidden
and those over which she had control, was central to her mental life and
her art. The line that runs through her work, from drawings to paintings,
from one artwork to the next, and one decade to the next, can be seen as
the contour of those negotiations.
Shaping thought is one thing art does for everyone, artist and viewer
alike. The natter of both inner speech and public language can be intrusive
for anyone; sometimes both make unwelcome demands. Talking back is
one effective response. In the early 1960s Chryssa (who was plagued by
mental illness, too) made audio recordings of letters pronounced at various
regular intervals, progressively extended: it was an exercise in disarming
language by radically slowing it down. In her public speech, Martin stilled
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

the private clamor with a contravening voice that tended toward the incan-
tatory. The rhythms of her texts are often those of a sermon. But they are
not that way consistently, and in recordings you can hear her listening
both to her own words and to the audience, chuckling to herself at her
remarks and laughing along when her listeners got her jokes: she had a
quick wit, dry and laconic, as in proverbial Yankee humor. But it is in her
artwork that she succeeded best in bending sometimes wayward private
thought to public image.
 Chapter 5

AS SHOWN

ccounting for how an artist’s work developed—describing the

internal and external pressures that shaped it—is a different
matter from relating how it was seen at the time it was made.
More than half a century later, it takes some effort to bring into focus the
context in which her work was first shown.
By the middle of the 1960s Martin was firmly established among a rising
generation of young Minimalist painters who were taking the path first
trodden by Reinhardt, Kelly, Newman, and a few others of their generation,
a path that led away from gestural abstraction and toward hard edges and
smooth surfaces. Being new to New York galleries and museums, Martin
was often presumed to belong to this generation—that is, to be younger
than she was. Amusingly, her birthdate is transposed to 1921 in biograph-
ical material in the catalogue for The Responsive Eye, an important exhi-
bition organized in 1965 by William Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art,
which promoted what is most often termed Op Art. Similarly, Michael
Corris, in his careful recent study of Ad Reinhardt, includes Martin among
the “younger artists” who sensed an affinity with Reinhardt’s “black” paint-
ings, though Martin was Reinhardt’s senior by a year.’ But the Betty Parsons
Gallery, where Martin first showed her paintings in New York, was not only
the context that initially defined her work, it also provided the associations
with which she remained most comfortable throughout her career.
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

Parsons, who opened a gallery under her own name in September 1946,
inherited the group of artists Peggy Guggenheim had exhibited at Art of
This Century, which closed in 1947. Guggenheim knew both Parsons and
Barnett Newman socially, and Newman became an important advisor to
Parsons. Her biographer, Lee Hall, writes, “Barney’ became a touchstone
Oe

in Betty’s life, a friend with whom she discussed virtually every aspect of
the gallery and of her own progress as an artist; above all, Barney was both
the theorist and artist by whom Betty measured all others.”? Parsons cred-
its Newman’s encouragement with her decision to inaugurate the gallery
with a show of Northwest Coast Native American art. Newman’s interest
in that art was shared with many of his colleagues, including Martin, who
had firsthand knowledge of the region. Indeed, one wonders if Parsons
was listening not only to Newman but also to Martin when she chose the
gallery’s first show. (This interest has also been cited as a link between
Martin and Tawney, who also deeply admired Native American art of the
Northwest.)
At the outset, Parsons’s artists included Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and
Still, a group she would come to call the Giants and also, less amiably, the
Four Horsemen. The caustic yet loyal Reinhardt became very important
to her as well. Unlike the Giants, he retained her as his dealer until he died
and, Hall reports, “He wrote notes and postcards to Betty as if she were his
diary.’* With coverage in Time, Life, Vogue, and other popular magazines,
and critical support from such writers as Thomas Hess, Clement Green-
berg, and Harold Rosenberg, the gallery was celebrated in the fifties as a
bellwether for new art.
But Parsons’s moment as the New York School’s chief dealer was brief,
and it was waning by the time Martin arrived. An artist herself, Parsons was
notoriously distractible and generally short of funds. In 1951 most of her
best-known artists defected to Sidney Janis, who was subletting a portion
of her space at 15 East Fifty-seventh Street. She said he “just took them away.
He could offer them stipends. I couldn’t.”5 The help Parsons continued to
offer newcomers was nonetheless invaluable. Jack Youngerman expresses

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the protective feelings she elicited from some. “At the time Ifelt defensive
toward Betty because she had a modest income,’ he recalled “But she had
a generous soul. Betty was supportive, had a quiet confidence, a social
confidence, that a lot of us didn’t have.”® Martin recalled that Parsons was
“very social” and threw lots of parties—which Martin remembered enjoy-
ing.’ Youngerman’s first solo show there was in 1958. Kelly had come on
board in 1956. Says Youngerman, “Ellsworth’s first show at Parsons was a
bombshell. It was so assured. It countered, totally, the art atmosphere at
that time,’* which was dominated by Pollock and de Kooning.
While Parsons’s relationships with the artists she represented were often
close and complicated (as is commonly the case between dealers and art-
ists), her ties to Martin were perhaps uniquely complex, even setting aside
the question of romantic involvement. According to Newman’s wife, Anna-
lee, “Barney had a terrific eye for new young talent, and he recognized
Agnes’s possibilities. But he wouldn’t have done all that if Betty hadn’t
made it clear how important Agnes was to her.” Newman had a studio on
South Street, but he didn’t live there, and he wasn’t as close to Martin as
Reinhardt and Kelly. Nonetheless, Martin was grateful to him. “I consid-
ered that I was very good friends with Barnett Newman, or he was a very
good friend to me I should say, because he used to hang my shows for
me,” she later told Irving Sandler.” Although the paintings in Martin’s first
show at Parsons, in December 1958, were not those Parsons had bought
in Taos but ones Martin made in New York, they were consistent with the
biomorphic abstractions in bleached shades of sand and sky that she had
been doing in New Mexico. In her next show, one year later, the palette
deepened, and small circles and rectangles dominated the compositions;
titles included Wheat, Tideline, Earth, and Buds. Her third and final exhi-
bition at Parsons, in 1961, featured the early grid works.
Crucial though it was, Parsons’s representation of Martin lasted only
these three years, during which Martin was still groping toward the work
with which she would be identified, and she later discarded much of
what she showed there. (In a letter of the early 1970s, Martin wrote, “All

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the paintings in the [December 1959-January 1960] show at Betty’s have

been destroyed except The Ages at Santini’s [a storage facility] and White
Flower at the Guggenheim.”") And despite Parsons’s invaluable support
at a critical moment, her record as a promoter and salesperson was decid-
edly mixed. “She was a very good dealer from the standpoint of artists,”
Martin said; “she took so much interest in them and encouraged them.”
At the same time, Martin conceded, “She didn’t make so much money
as some other dealers. She didn’t price up art as high. She was just a real
friend”? Even following a successful show in terms of sales, Martin would
get quarterly statements from Parsons indicating, “after expenses for mov-
ing, storage, publicity, et cetera, 1 owed her money ... I just couldn't live
on what I was getting from Betty.”
The one-year contract Martin signed in 1958 stipulated, “The dealer will,
during this period, be responsible for promotion of the artist and the artist
will have the use of the gallery free of charge. The artist will be responsible
for any additional expenses such as advertising, catalogues, photographs,
etc.” It was not by any standards a generous arrangement. Initially, Martin’s
smaller works were priced at $450 and larger ones around $650; by Feb-
ruary of 1959, Parsons had had sold seven drawings and small paintings
by Martin, for a total of $1,183.35, and Martin had incurred expenses of
$630.14 (for transporting works, stamps for announcements, photographs
of works and advertising, and advances totaling $308.34). Following the
year’s end, Parsons paid her $553.21. (In 1961, on the other hand, one paint-
ing sold for $1,500.)"4
Martin later said she brought legal complaints against several dealers,
but, she said, “I couldn’t sue Betty... You’d ask her for your money and
she’d say you owed her for storage and transportation. She didn’t believe
in artists having money.” But looking back, Martin was nothing if not a
realist about the relationship. “Lots of dealers won't pay up until artists
make a fuss,” she said. “Artists are so anxious to show their work they put
up with anything. Betty, she’d wait until you were starving, then reduce
the prices and buy them up herself” At the same time, she maintained, “I

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owed her a lot, though. She came to Taos and bought enough so I could
get to New York and start up. She put me up until I found a place to stay.”
If similar financial accountings could have been made by many of her
serially disappointed gallery-mates, Martin’s decision-making process was
her own. As she remembered it, “Every morning for two and a half years,
asked my mind if I could change galleries, and for two and a half years
it said, ‘No, no, no’ Finally, it said ‘Yes’ I leaped out of bed, went uptown,
and told Betty Parsons I was leaving.” (In another recounting of this atten-
uated inner debate, she added, “It doesn’t usually take that long.””) Also
characteristic was her choice of going straight to the top: “When I left Betty
Parsons I went to [Leo] Castelli.” She was pragmatic about the outcome:
Castelli told her “that he was filled up, you know, had all the artists, but
that there was the Robert Elkon [sic] that had opened a gallery and it was
brand new and he didn’t have any artists and so I thought I'd go someplace
where there was no competition.”
Robert Elkon, who was in his early thirties, had just established the
gallery in 1961, on Madison Avenue, where he showed a mix of European
and American painters, ranging from Picasso, Magritte, and Kandinsky to
Pollock, Kline, and Rothko, as well as some younger Pop artists. In 1962
Martin had her first exhibition with him, and he remained her dealer
until 1974.9
Martin was fortunate from the start in the critical response to her
work, which has mostly remained remarkably sympathetic. Dore Ashton
reviewed her first exhibition at Parsons for the New York Times, writing,
“Miss Martin offers an evanescent, infinitely simplified communica-
tion—one that is quite apparently the result of many years of refinement.”
Responding in suitably lyrical fashion to the “poetic expression” she saw in
Martin’s paintings, “all in pale, floating keys,’ Ashton identified allusions
to the landscape: “The warm glow and the carefully controlled optical
illusions in these delicate paintings seem to be the observed and deeply
felt benign essences of the mesa country so long Miss Martin’s home,’”°
country of which Ashton had recent firsthand experience.

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Notable in this auspiciously alert and favorable review is the reference

to optical illusions, which—oddly, it now seems—would be ascribed to
Martin’s work for some time, as well as to the natural environment, a con-
nection Martin would always denounce. Ashton reviewed Martin’s next
show at Parsons, which opened in December 1959, this time quoting the
artist, to underline a connection between her art and the environs of her
youth and early adulthood. “I guess I am really an American painter,’
Martin said. “I’ve never been to Europe. Never thought about it, and I
suppose the only other place like Vancouver is the Russian tundra.” (She
must have been thinking of Saskatchewan; Vancouver is nothing like the
tundra.) Of New Mexico’s high desert, Ashton quotes Martin as saying,
rather uncharacteristically, “The land is effective there. Isn’t there some-
thing ecological about painting?” The 1959 show was also reviewed in
Art News, by Lawrence Campbell, who introduced Martin, in the short
notice’s patronizing first sentence, as “a specialist in teaching children
creative activities.” Campbell, too, saw optical illusions in the paintings,
which he described as centered on “color disks—like buttons on a card—or
small rectangles—like light through a Venetian blind,” which produce “a
strange, spoofing, kinetic experience. The disks and rectangles seem to
swell, jump or skip.... The total effect is unsettling and entertaining.”
On the other hand, two early reviews by the soon-to-be-renowned Min-
imalist sculptor Donald Judd, both of exhibitions at Elkon featuring grid
paintings, are surprising for their wealth of associative links. In 1963 Judd,
in somewhat hesitant praise (“the paintings are simply attractive, a word
which is usually, and is here, used both as a derogation and a compliment’),
noted, “Most of the paintings are composed of a large square, within an
empty border, of rows of small dashes.... A small painting that really works
has horizontal rows of dash-dot-dashes (every iconologist should know
that this is ‘K’ in Morse).’ While perhaps overestimating the cryptological
literacy of most viewers, Judd tellingly implies that there is something in
the paintings to read, as a written message. He ends by noting that the
work he favors has “a tightly quilted surface.”

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Probably unaware of (or unconcerned with) Martin’s deep aversion

to this analogy, Judd returned in the next year’s review to the theme of
textiles. This time, writing about paintings and drawings in which grids
are filled with dashes, he began approvingly (“These paintings are much
better than last year’s”) and applauded the work’s quiet force. There was
no mention of code; instead, he stated emphatically, “The field is woven.”
Also writing in 1964, Barbara Rose compared “these quiet works” to “Rein-
hardt’s black paintings”; both “are reticent and retiring. They inspire con-
templation rather than empathy.” But Rose hastened to dispel any notion
that such modesty indicates a limitation. “They are related to the most
important painting being done today,” she asserted.
By 1965, Martin was being written about as someone with whom the
reader might be expected to be familiar (“Agnes Martin [Elkon; April 10-30]
continues to make extraordinarily lyrical geometric paintings”). In fact,
she was already being quoted, familiarly, by Jill Johnston, a writer who
would become a good friend. While observing that “the all-over rectan-
gular schemes... are absurdly simple,’ Johnston praises them for achiev-
ing “the quiet intensity of a perfectly contained image.” The result is that
“The pictures are, as the artist says, like tranquilizers.””° A paraphrase, the
analogy is a striking anomaly. It is hard to picture Martin speaking openly
of psychotropic drugs, even harder to imagine her recommending her
paintings as simulating their effects. That doesn’t mean she didn’t; it just
indicates the variability with which she presented herself to—or was under-
stood by—her many, very varied friends.
In a longer piece for the Village Voice in 1973, Johnston recalled her
first acquaintance with Martin. “i think it was 1964 when i stopped in at
the elkon gallery and saw all these six by six foot paintings washed out
whites and tans crossed by close vertical and horizontal lines muted and
irregularly perfect... little later... i was knocking on her door to review
her most recent show for art news... her hair was long then and she had
lots of it and when i came in it was all loose and she was busying herself
putting it back up.” They had tea, and, Johnston continued, “looking at

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agnes’s paintings with agnes was a quiet concentrated ceremonious rit-

ual... she traversed from the point in her loft where the paintings were
stashed to the spot right next to the door where she showed them... when
she reached the showing place next to the door there would be a cer-
tain gesture of hiking the work with her foot under the canvas up into
position on the nails sticking out of the wall. then she would sit down
next to you and contemplate the work with you and wait.””’ It is a vivid
evocation of a first encounter between artist and critic, and the extended
moment of quiet sitting is notable. Others would later often remark such
encounters.
Another friend who wrote about Martin early on was Ann Wilson, a
neighbor at the seaport and, like Johnston, one of the few to maintain a
relationship with her after she left New York. In a feature-length article
of 1966, Wilson touches on many aspects of Martin’s work, sometimes
contradicting herself but casting revealing light. She begins by claiming
that Martin’s paintings “imply the sound of pencil lines drawn on canvas
above a tape measure,””* and she returns several times, curiously, to audi-
tory associations. Wilson observes the artist at work: “There are measuring
tapes, which she herself has made for each painting, hanging on a nail on
her painting wall beside a T-square. These marked canvas tapes, the rulers
she makes for each canvas, are clear in their simplicity.”
Wilson’s language can be richly lyrical—she refers to Martin’s penciled
lines as “dry bones, taking away ... whatever time, soap, hard use might
take way, leaving... a painting that might survive in a desert.” She refers
to the “absolute symmetry” that Martin pursues, and she notes, “Classic
form has always been difficult, austere, and impersonal.” The subtle trace
of her hand’s fallibility is noted, an early example of an observation that
critics would make again and again. And not unlike Johnston, Wilson
asserts, “These paintings can evoke a trance.” It is possible that Wilson had
experience of Martin’s tendency to fall into such a state; if so, she quickly
averts any suggestion of a psychological symptom, claiming the trance
denotes a “spiritual quality,’ one which “is related to the work of Mark

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Tobey and Morris Graves, who share with her a deep connection with
the Pacific Northwest heritage of strong Indian presence and immense
wilderness.”" (Again, one wonders if Parsons was listening to Newman or
to Martin when she inaugurated her gallery with an exhibition of North-
west Indian art.)
Wilson discusses Martin’s early connection to farming—she compares
Martin, shamelessly, to Daniel Boone—and provides what is evidently
(there are quotation marks but no footnotes) an account by Martin of
a family farm: “They planted navy beans half a mile across a field near
Flint, Michigan. They put 40 acres in potatoes, an eye in each square of a
chequerboard field, all by hand.” This suggestive reminiscence, with clear
implications for Martin’s grid paintings, continues, “The land was a dollar
an acre and Uncle Pete had 2,000 acres. There were big pine trees on the
land. They dragged the trees to the field edges and stood them up, roots
out along the roads. The roots would stand twelve to fourteen feet high
in the air along the roads running straight as a die for miles and miles to
the horizon.” This Flint farm, at considerable distance from Saskatchewan
and even further from British Columbia, is unlikely to have been a place
Martin often visited; nevertheless, her evocation of it is sharp, and it has
the shape of a strong childhood memory, or perhaps of a story often heard,
everything outsized and interminable. Wilson quotes it with obvious rel-
ish; an embellisher (and powerful writer) herself, she is determined to
frame Martin with distinctly different language from Ashton’s, or Judd’s,
and to mythologize her character. But Martin’s own voice is clear in the
often-cited “statement about her work” with which Wilson concludes her
article. It begins, “When people go to the ocean they like to see it all day.
They don’t expect to see, to find all that response in painting. ... There's
nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It’s a
simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, you wouldn't
want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can
see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to
draw a certain response like this... that quality of response from people

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when they leave themselves behind. My paintings... [are] about merging,

about formlessness,... A world without objects, without interruption.’*
It would be several years before Martin’s words began to be published
at any length, and this early quotation is important. It sets out a preferred
perspective, and demonstrates that Martin was keen on controlling—or
at least shaping—discussions of her work. Not that critics have altogether
complied, but they can’t entirely ignore her statements either. She was
hardly alone among artists of her generation (or any other) in hoping to
manage viewers’ responses. As the statement quoted by Wilson suggests,
Martin invoked the experience of nature often, but only as a state compa-
rable to the response she sought, never as subject or theme for her work.
She fought for this distinction for the rest of her career, often in vain. She
would not generally insist that people leave themselves behind in the act
of viewing and tended later not to dwell on such images as sitting on a
stone in a field. But she retained hope that a viewer might engage with her
paintings as if walking into water, or a field of wheat, and with a similar
kind of release and submission.
By the time Wilson’s article appeared, Martin’s work was being included
in important museum exhibitions and positioned by the theories they
advanced, not all of them consonant with her own. She is silent in the cat-
alogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1965 exhibition The Responsive
Eye, and her work is neither referred to in curator William Seitz’s text nor
illustrated. Nonetheless, her inclusion in the show is important and reveal-
ing. It was one of the first of many exhibitions and essays in the middle
1960s that aimed to reground abstraction in terrain free of emotion, reli-
gion, politics, and even the vocabulary of formalism—indeed, the tension
between verbal and visual language is a leitmotif in these attempts, and
nearly every one proposes new terminology meant to support the works
in question without compromising their freedom from words.
Seitz’s effort was unusual in its focus on perception, although not in
its impatience with the fogs of spirituality or the swamps of Existentialist
angst. The “perceptual abstraction” he defined with his exhibition (and

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catalogue essay) is work “stripped of conceptual association, habits, and

references to previous experience.” Though it shares with the abstraction of
the early twentieth century “areas of color or tone... applied flat and hard
edged,” it avoids asymmetry and part-to-part composition. In comparison
to, say, Mondrian, many perceptual abstractionist works, Seitz wrote, “have
a stronger family resemblance to mechanical patterns, scientific diagrams,
and even to screens and textured surfaces than to relational art.”* In short,
while old-style nonobjective painting and sculpture defined “a work of art
as an independent object as real as a chair or a table,” perceptual abstrac-
tion, in contrast, is dematerialized by uniform surface treatment, reflec-
tive or transparent materials, and a battery of optical devices; its primary
purpose is to challenge perception. It is equally unproductive to approach
these new works from a conceptual angle: “Ideological focus has moved
from the outside world... and entered the incompletely explored region
area [sic] between the cornea and the brain.”35 Where once there were hazy
esthetic concepts grounded in soft disciplines (introspective psychology,
philosophy, theology), now there was biological science.
As with many other such manifesto-like essays of the period, Seitz’s goes
on to outline a taxonomy of the field: his categories include “The Color
Image” (chromatic investigations by painters ranging from Josef Albers
to Frank Stella), “Black and White” (various kinds of optical illusions), and
“Moiré Pattern”; his core interest, though, lies in “Optical’ Paintings,” which
combine the color and pattern provocations of all three. Although Seitz
doesn’t specify the heading under which Martin’s work falls, the category
it best fits is “Invisible’ Painting,” which is illustrated in the catalogue
with a red painting (in black-and-white reproduction) by Reinhardt. Seitz’s
brief account of this category concludes with the admission, “It is easy
to associate these large paintings with religious and mystical states. The
contemplation of nothingness, which they invite while retaining their
identity, quickly goes beyond purely visual sensation.” Defended with little
passion (a “harried . .. visitor can easily dismiss these ‘invisible’ works”),
such paintings gain admission to his exhibition, Seitz says, because of the

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particular quality of visual attention they require, demanding that the eyes
accommodate to them “as they do to a dimly lit room.”° One suspects that
Seitz also values them for defining, by opposition, the rackety paintings
of artists like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely: optical exercises that are
tough, loud, and shiny new.
Op Art would not seem to be a lasting association for Martin’s work.
Yet in Thomas Crow’s 1996 book The Rise of the Sixties, she is still linked
with Riley: “It is striking that two women artists, operating on opposite
sides of the Atlantic, should have drawn parallel lessons from the all-over
compositions of Pollock and de Kooning,’—this despite Martin’s dismissal
of de Kooning, with whom she felt no kinship whatsoever—“should both
have seen the finely controlled, abstract grid as the next logical step for
painting, should both have seen emotionalized rhetoric and self-expo-
sure as superfluous to the task at hand, and should both have opted for
pure tone over color.” While Crow goes on to concede crucial differences,
he concludes that “Both Riley and Martin ultimately appeal alike to the
authority of nature... the latter’s sensual concreteness plays on the divide
separating human subjective faculties from the underlying natural order.”2”
For many observers, the only solid defense for Martin’s “modest” work
would always be in firm dismissal of emotion and fixed attention on the
abutment between subjectivity and the “natural order.”
The year after MoMA’s The Responsive Eye, Lawrence Alloway’s Sys-
temic Painting appeared at the Guggenheim. Alloway begins his essay by
claiming, “The painting that made America famous” was associated with a
“lore of violence.” Certain outliers, however—-Newman and Rothko among
them—were “clearly not offering revelatory brushwork with autobiograph-
ical implications.” We would expect to find Martin among the outliers,
but the essay’s only reference to her suggests, rather oddly, that she is a
maker of hard-edged shapes, rather than delicately drawn lines. Just as in
The Responsive Eye, she is linked with Reinhardt.* And, drawing a com-
parison with abstractionists of the early twentieth century who “universal-
ized their art by theory,” including Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian,

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Alloway insists, “What seems relevant now is to define systems in art, free
of classicism, which is to say free of the absolutes which were previously
associated with ideas of order.” The key innovation, Alloway argues, is
reconciling rule-based esthetics and human values: “A system is as human
as a splash of paint, more so when the splash gets routinized,” he writes.
While the larger philosophical framework seems to accommodate Martin,
it is very hard to find in his essay the particular contours of her art or her
thinking—not because he was unresponsive to her work (seven years later
he would write a sensitive feature article on it), but because his rather ten-
dentious argumentation marshaled her painting for a scholastic battle in
which, unlike some of her younger colleagues, she had no interest at all.
While these maneuvers (and many others, including those by Judd,
Robert Morris, and Richard Wollheim) went on in the demarcation and
defense of what would be called Minimalism—with explicitly martial lan-
guage, as in Michael Fried’s famous declaration, “there is a war going on
between theatre and modernist painting”*°—other writers were beginning
to pay close attention to Martin’s work on its own terms. As with her earliest
reviews, many of those most sympathetic were women, which remains true
today. From 1967, Martin’s last year in New York, come a number of such
responses, including a short feature by Annette Michelson in Artforum.
Michelson begins by defining an opposition between “younger painters
and sculptors” and “their Constructivist and neo-Plasticist precedents,” and
then names Martin as an example of those artists who “invoke historical
precedents, only to bracket or negate them in the interest of fresh depar-
tures.” Quoting Mondrian at length, especially on the achievement of unity
and the abolition of particular form through the mutually neutralizing
interactions of rectangles, Michelson concludes that the neo-Plasticist’s
theories actually fail “to wholly account for what [Martin’s] paintings are or
do.” Another historical marker she uses is the “destruction of the surface’s
hierarchy which, originating in Pollock and Tobey, developed through the
painting of the 40s and sos.” By “repressing the suggestion of any spatial
depth, Miss Martin attains an ‘annihilation of the existence of forms as
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entities’ [quoting Mondrian] typical of the sixties.” If this kind of stylistic

categorization recalls the essays by Seitz and Alloway, Michelson differs
by describing in some detail the way the paintings are made—the T-square
and stretched, shifting string; the hand-ruled line—and writes of a “visual
tremolo,” a phrase taken up by other critics; Michelson raises as well the
“question of optimum viewing distance” that also becomes a staple of crit-
ical writing about Martin. In concluding, Michelson points to the work’s
fundamental resistance to words—its “ultimate ineffability”"—a term also
often applied, understandably, to Martin.
In a review later that year of an exhibition at Nicholas Wilder in Los
Angeles, Jane Livingston notes the paintings’ subtleties and remarks
on their “asceticism”— another that term would become a mainstay for
describing Martin’s work and her character—and observes qualities, such
as vague, shadowy inflections of the surface, that are “visible only from
some distance.” Again the T-square is mentioned, as is a yardstick: critics
were increasingly paying attention to the transparency and integrity of the
artist’s process. But unlike other writers in this period, Livingston insists
that “there is virtually no adequate precedent or comparison by which
one can measure” Martin’s paintings: they “undermine the relevance of
historical or stylistic analogy.” While explaining that Martin destroys many
of her works, she writes, “the works present have an almost incredible air
in themselves of being culminations. Confronted with these canvases, one
simply does not argue intent, or resolution, or lack of it.”# It is an early
ascription to Martin of an identity beyond the reach of ordinary measure.
The same year, Lucy Lippard organized an article for Art in America
titled “Homage to the Square” (itself, of course, an homage to Josef Alb-
ers’s series of paintings of the same title), in which a handful of artists
were invited to make statements about their work. In her introduction,
Lippard began by quoting Plato, a source dear to Martin. “To the ancients,”
Lippard wrote, the square “was a source of ideal proportions—endowing a
structure with permanence and stability, making it a constant factor in a
transient and corruptible world.” Perhaps not surprisingly, several of the

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artists represented in the article demurred in one way or another. Wrote

Donald Judd, “I don’t think there’s anything special about squares, which
I don’t use, or cubes. They certainly don’t have any intrinsic meaning or
superiority. One thing though, cubes are a lot easier to make than spheres.
The main virtue of geometric shapes is that they aren’t organic, as all art
otherwise is. A form that’s neither geometric nor organic would be a great
discovery.”4 Sol LeWitt agreed: “The best that can be said for either the
square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves
... [they] lack the expressive force of other, more interesting forms...
[and hence are] better used as grammatical devices.”45 On the other hand,
Kelly wrote, “To me the square is sufficient because of its exact quality.
The rectangle and the curved form are dictated by sensibility. The square
is in the present tense, unchanging.”
Also included were Tony Smith (represented by the cube-shaped sculp-
ture Die, 1962), Dan Flavin (fluorescent light), Claes Oldenburg, Marcel
Breuer, and Albers: a markedly heterogeneous group variously associated
with Pop sculpture, functional design, and reductive abstraction new and
old. Nonetheless, Martin stands out. Paired on a page with LeWitt and
illustrated with her The Rose, 1966 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), Martin's
statement—the shortest of the group—reads, in its entirety: “My formats
are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles,
a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance,
though I don’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface
with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”*”
The only woman in this cohort, she declines the studied nonchalance
of LeWitt and Judd, and, unlike her peers, admits some space between
what she sets out to do and what she accomplishes. What she describes
is a process in which she contends, vigorously, with the forces at work in
visual expression, defying the power of the square, achieving a satisfying
imbalance. It is evident that for her this struggle is not allegorical, but real.
Later statements would smooth over the dissension, the instability. But it
is always clear that when she is doing battle for her work, for her vision, it
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is with forces—pride, envy, the enchantments of nature—both more funda-

mental and more intractable than the power of art historical precedents.
Among other group shows of more or less like-minded artists in which
Martin found herself at this time, none was more important than 10, a
landmark October 1966 exhibition at the Dwan gallery. Curated by Robert
Smithson, it featured—in addition to Martin, who was separately brought
to Dwan’s attention by Reinhardt—work by Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Fla-
vin, Don Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Michael Steiner, along with
Reinhardt and Smithson. (The abbreviated, working-stiff first names—Dan,
Don—were those favored by the artists at the time.) The installation was
spare, interpretive material nonexistent. Andre was represented by a
square field of ceramic magnets, Judd by six equal-sided galvanized steel
boxes, LeWitt by nested cubes, Morris by a square plywood box, Reinhardt
by a square black painting. Martin’s contribution was the 1966 painting
Leaves (private collection). The catalogue, with a glossy white cover, was
square (like the newly ascendant Artforum). The number “10” appears on
the title page, and the table of contents lists the artists in alphabetical
order; black and white images of each work follow. The preponderance of
squares (in paintings, sculptures, and the catalogue documenting them)
is almost comical. And the staple-bound publication’s taciturn, just-the-
facts-ma’am presentation, in newsprint-y black and white, consolidated
the sense (also then gaining ascendance) that less—whether of explana-
tory text, in the catalogue, or of the slightest personal inflection, in the
work—was immeasurably more.
Afterward, the question of how Martin felt about having been included
was raised many times. Looking back, she said, “They asked me to show
with them, and I was flattered. They were all so young. I considered myself
to be an abstract expressionist but they considered me a minimalist. I
couldn’t do anything about that.” She went on to explain that they were
classicists, in the sense that “they followed perfection in their minds. You
can’t draw a perfect circle, but in your mind there is a perfect circle, that you
can draw towards.... That’s the Greek ideal.” She subscribed to classicism
 AS SHOWN

in that sense herself, she admitted. “But they insisted more than I did on
being impersonal. They wanted absolutely to escape themselves... they
didn’t even allow people to put their names under their pictures.” After
some discussion, she continued, they were persuaded to put their names in
the back of the catalogue, with numbers identifying which work belonged
to each. But “They even had to be talked into that.”4* And, further, “we all
make mistakes. I mean, when I exhibited with the minimal artists at the
Dwan Gallery, I was much affected by my association with them.... They
want to minimalize themselves in favor of the ideal. Well, I just can’t...
I rather regretted that I wasn’t really a minimalist. It’s possible to regret
that you're not something else. You see, my paintings are not cool.”49 (Later
still, she said, with the candor of advanced age, “I don’t know why I ever
showed with those boys... I’ve regretted it ever since.”>°) Virginia Dwan
herself admitted that Martin was an imperfect fit with this group, in a letter
to the New York Times addressing a review by John Canaday. After apolo-
gizing for not producing a press release or manifesto, she offered, by way
of compensation, the explanation that the artists shared a commitment to
“stillness,” and that their work is, “Above all,... non-expressionistic, and,
with the possible exception of Agnes Martin, impersonal.”™
One reason the Dwan show continued to preoccupy Martin was its unde-
niable importance in advancing her career. Hardly alone among artists,
Martin had conflicted feelings about success. While she went all out for
recognition, she also feared it, as attested by her preoccupation, in her later
writing, with the sin of pride. The same ambivalence lodges at the heart
of her work, in the difficulty it presents to reproduction, a characteristic
that had been remarked from the outset.
Michelson notes that the paintings display a “resistance to photographic
reproduction almost as obdurate as that of Reinhardt’s or Robert Irwin’s
painting.” Addressing the same issue, Michael Corris wonders, “Is there
a political lesson to be extracted from the level of un-reproducibility of
Reinhardt’s work? Might we assume provisionally that ‘un-reproducibility’
is a marker for withdrawal?” The politics to which he refers, of aversion

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to the machinations of capitalism as manifest in the art market, were more

clearly of concern to Reinhardt than to Martin, though the two artists
may have talked about such issues. They played a role in Martin’s life-
long but selectively enforced opposition to exhibition catalogues, which
at times inhibited her career. In any case, Michelson’s observation that
“The threshold of perception... is pitched so high” in Martin’s work, places
them in a category very similar to the one in which Seitz put them when
he accommodated Martin under the heading “Invisible Painting.” A resis-
tance to reproduction—to visibility itself—can certainly be, at least in part,
a resistance to distracting or distorting forms of promotion and packaging.
At the same time, the glare of attention against which Martin was
defending herself cast an unreliable light. Despite her increasing public
presence and critical favor, her opportunities for exposure weren't the
same as those offered her male peers. Reinhardt, for example, had three
simultaneous gallery shows in 1965 (of blue paintings at the Stable gallery,
red ones at Graham, and black ones at Parsons), and a retrospective at
the Jewish Museum in 1966. Chryssa, too, had a higher public profile in
the middle 1960s than Martin. Even, or perhaps especially, for someone
actively struggling against vanity, it must have been frustrating. To Jill
Johnston, Martin later deadpanned that in New York, “i had 10 one-man
shows and iwas discovered in every one of them. finally when i left town
i was discovered again—discovered to be missing.”
By the late 1960s, the art world in New York was transforming itself with
unprecedented speed and force. An unlikely number of first-generation
Abstract Expressionists had died (Kline, Newman, Reinhardt, and Rothko,
along with Pollock, were all gone by the end of the decade, none of them
older than 65), and a rising cohort of Pop artists were looking to bright new
modes of consumer culture, while others were shaping a rarefied world
of Conceptual and Minimalist art. The press was avid for all of it, and the
acclaim that came unevenly to Martin’s friends was a source of tension for
all. Mildred Glimcher writes of:

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a change in the atmosphere on the slip. It began to replace Tenth Street

for those in search of the avant-garde. Kelly remembers a visit from
[Michelangelo] Antonioni and Monica Vitti at the time of the opening
of [Antonioni’s] L’Avventura. The visit was arranged by Sophia Loren’s
secretary because Antonioni expressed an interest in meeting some
artists. Whereas Betty Parsons and Eleanor Ward [director of the Stable
Gallery] were the earliest dealers to visit the slip, after 1960, as more
artists began to settle in the area, it became a destination for dealers
and the hungry new collectors hot on the trail of the “new art.”

Thomas Hess’s 1965 response to The Responsive Eye provides a vivid

picture of changes affecting both artists and viewers. His review begins
with arch hyperbole: “In an exemplary display of what Harold Rosenberg
called ‘the Premature Echo, some forty or fifty-thousand Op-Art group
shows in 1963-65 strewed flowers in front of the band-wagon of the Mod-
ern Museum’s recently opened smash survey of the mode a la mode.”*
With iciest sarcasm, Hess adds, “One striking thing about Op-Art: its return
to modesty.”*’ This exhibition’s dialogue, he says, is “with the audience
and through the audience to a responsive, indeed glad-handing Society.”
Finding an incoherent diversity among the works shown, Hess narrows in
on its core group of eye-tingling paintings, at once “very clean” and pos-
sessed of a “decorous violence.”* Martin’s incontestably pacific The Tree
is illustrated in the article, although Hess does not mention the artist; his
argument is with the more aggressive work and with the bridge it creates
between fashion design, graphic arts and traditional painting, leading to an
unhealthy commodification of the latter. In his most pointed assault, Hess
contends, “There is an invisible but crystal-hard wall between the viewer
and a Franz Hals or a Franz Kline.” This is as it should be. By contrast, “Op
will actually come down off the walls and shake your hand.” Concluding
on the same note with which he began, he writes, “I see no reason why
collectors should not keep Op in racks, like wine in cellars.”

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Martin, too, was deeply dismayed by the commercialization of art and

vulgar preening of its audience, as is clear from her praise, several years
later, for Lee Seldes’s scathing book, The Legacy ofMark Rothko, which
reviews in great detail the sordid financial and legal dealings that followed
Rothko’s death in 1970. Martin told her friend Donald Woodman in the
late seventies that Seldes’s book contained “everything you need to know
about the art world.” Among its contents is this notorious account, by
Calvin Tomkins, of the reception for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s
exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970:

The stately, black-tie world of the Metropolitan trustees found itself

mingling with tribal swingers dressed as American Indians, frontiers-
men, Cossacks, Restoration rakes, gypsies, houris, and creatures of pur-
est fantasy. The see-through blouse achieved its apotheosis that night,
and spectators lined up three deep to observe the action on the dance
floor—there was a rock band in one gallery and a dance orchestra in
another, to say nothing of six strategically placed bars. Works of sculp-
ture acquired festoons of empty plastic glasses, the reek of marijuana
hung heavy in the air, and at one point late in the evening, while the
rock group blasted away in a room full of Frank Stella’s paintings and
David Smith’s sculptures, a tall woman and a lame sculptor wrestled for
fifteen minutes on the parquet floor, untroubled by guards, spectators
or a century of Metropolitan decorum.”

The arch tone of Tomkins’s reportage, no less than the assaults against
propriety it describes, capture a spirit of violent cultural collision that
whiplashed participants of every inclination. It is impossible to imag-
ine Martin in the scene Tomkins details so vividly (and indeed she had
left New York two years earlier); it is not much easier to picture her at
the opening of The Responsive Eye, which she may well have attended.
And the over-familiarity with—or disrespect for—artworks that both Hess
and Tomkins observed on these occasions seems, understandably, to

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have infuriated and alarmed the artists whose work was ostensibly being
celebrated.
In the chronology of his life that Reinhardt assembled for the catalogue
of his Jewish Museum survey, he give particular emphasis, in these years,
to vandalism of his notoriously vulnerable work (“1963 Six paintings in
New York and six paintings in Paris get marked up and have to be roped
off from the public. 1964 Ten paintings in London get marked up.””) Sim-
ilarly, Martin complained throughout her life of paintings being defaced.
“Somebody took an ice cream cone and went around and around on one of
my paintings,’ she reported. “Then there was one that was destroyed with
a green crayon.... And in Germany there was a nationalistic group that
threw garbage at the paintings at Documenta Five.” By way of explana-
tion, she offered, “You know, people just can’t stand that those are all empty
squares. And the vandalism that happens, you wouldn't believe how many
of my paintings have been destroyed. ... Once some vandals just took an
india ink fountain pen and they just opened it right across the painting
and that one wasn’t restored. They wanted to fill in the squares.... It’s a
narcissistic type that would do that... In San Francisco, a woman gave one
to the Museum and people started coloring in the squares.’
In addition to its portrait of a changing art world, there were many
aspects of Seldes’s book—and of Rothko’s life story—that would have
caught Martin’s attention. Born in 1903 in Russia, Rothko (then Marcus
Rothkowitz) emigrated with his family to Portland, Oregon, in 1913. His
father died soon after, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.
Rothko went East to Yale, in 1921, but its social restrictions made him
uncomfortable and he dropped out, becoming a part-time teacher. All
these experiences—moving from a fatherless family with little education
or means into a world of wealth and power, coming to New York from the
still rough-hewn Northwest, and supporting himself at times as an edu-
cator—would have resonated with Martin, entirely apart from the kinship
she felt with him as an artist. Rothko was among the artists Betty Parsons
represented when she opened her gallery (he left in 1954 for Sidney Janis);

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he was one of her Giants. Martin and Rothko hardly knew each other: “I
only had lunch with Rothko once, but Ienjoyed it; he talked about the dif-
ference between the life of an artist and a layman—very amusingly. That’s
the only time I met him,’® she recalled. But his influence on her work of
the early 1950s in particular is inarguable.
Seldes’s book opens with Rothko’s suicide and is concerned primar-
ily with legal challenges to the disposition of his estate, managed by the
Marlborough Gallery, which represented Rothko in his last years. His
survivors charged, in a case that ultimately proved successful, that they
and a foundation Rothko had established to protect his work and his leg-
acy had been defrauded. Seldes addresses all of the tangled financial and
legal particulars in great detail; they are both bleak and numbing, but
Martin was evidently engrossed. Shell companies in Liechtenstein, off-
shore tax shelters, double bookkeeping, and the minutiae of sale prices
and court proceedings are all part of this modern-day tragedy involving
greed, power, deception, and despair.® Not least alarming, for an artist,
was Seldes’s exposure of a then new form of investment, in which inter-
national banks hold valuable artwork—unseen, in vaults—as elements of
a species of mutual fund in which investors could own shares. Those who
see Martin as an otherworldly mystic uninterested in the fine points of
financial legerdemain miss her astute awareness of the social and cultural
environment, her acumen, and her practicality.
Martin was not only predisposed, like Rothko, to a dim view of the com-
mercialization of the art world and to a similar dismay over the money
and glamour that came to dominate it, she was also prey, often and endur-
ingly, to similarly deep depression. And the paranoia to which Martin was
subject finds ample support in The Legacy ofMark Rothko. Seldes goes so
far as to cast suspicion, tacitly but clearly, on the untimely deaths of two
interested parties: Rothko’s young widow and would-be heir, Mary Alice
(known as Mell), and an esteemed art historian appointed by Rothko as a
director of his foundation, Robert Goldwater. Both proved uncooperative
with Marlborough’s schemes.” (Goldwater’s demise, in 1973, left another

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widow, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois.) In fact, Seldes’s speculation extends

to dark doings in the death of Rothko himself—although, she admits, he
had threatened to kill himself and was extremely unhappy and physically
unwell at the time of what she suspects was his murder.
In a second edition of her book, she finds support for her hypothesis
in none other than Agnes Martin: “Years afterward, the possibility of foul
play occurred not only to the conspiracy-minded, but some of those who
had known Rothko well and thought him incapable of suicide. Finally the
speculation was voiced publicly in a 1976 Art News interview by painter
Agnes Martin: ‘I wish you could publish that I don’t believe for a minute
that Rothko committed suicide. Nobody in that state of mind could. He
was done in, obviously ... by the people who have profited or have tried to
profit.”°* Seldes was wrong about Martin knowing Rothko well (her quot-
ing of Martin tactically cuts before the discordant concluding estimation,
“Why, Rothko might have been the happiest man in this world, because
his devotion was without mark or stain. He just poured it out, right from
his heels!”®?); neither was Martin an exception to the conspiracy-minded.
But she was clearly deeply affected by the results of Seldes’s own sleuthing
(whence, surely, the conviction Seldes so gladly cited). Indeed, looking
back at the New York art world from New Mexico in the late 1970s, Martin
might have felt lucky to have gotten out alive, figuratively if not literally.
To be sure, those who knew her have recalled occasions on which Martin
not only enjoyed, with gusto, the professional and personal associations
she had made, but also entered into the spirit of the period with consid-
erable abandon. Jill Johnston, by the later sixties a good friend, recalls an
“incredible evening in 66 i think it was when i brought five or six people
over to her loft and we sat around in a vague circle in a sort of a trance
as though it was a séance although nobody mentioned it and there was
at one point this great overhead crash ... whatever it was she didn’t bat a
lash she went right on talking,” inviting her guests to participate in various
exercises for the imagination (if you picture a body of water, would you
cross it, for example).”

CONCORDIA COLLEGE LIB

BRONXVILLE, NY 10708
pac
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“Trance,” the word that Martin’s friends (including Ann Wilson) some-
times used to describe her periods of profound dissociation, seems to have
been taken, by her guests, if not by Martin herself, as an experience of
more or less voluntary mental levitation in keeping with the era’s growing
embrace of psychic travel. Johnston reports, in the same essay, that on an
excursion during this period to rural upstate New York, “for a little two-day
cook and sleep-out next to a crick river and 20 yards in from the macadam,’
Martin kindly refrained from observing “what an elementary tourist trip
it was” for an experienced outdoorswoman like herself; instead, Martin
“seemed happy tearing off her clothes yelling at last one with nature.”
Though Johnston doesn’t favor exclamation points, one is clearly implied
here—as when, under similar circumstances, Martin had praised the Lord
for his plumbing. Even during her urban decade, nature was a reliable
source of pleasure.
But in the end it seems the occasional weekend outing didn’t suffice.
The circumstances of Martin’s departure from New York in the summer of
1967 remain hazy. It is worth noting that she was far from alone in leaving
the seaport. Recalling the breakup of the community, Jack Youngerman
stressed the urge to solitude that was, paradoxically, the thing that drew
the artists there together. He pointed out that for the most part, they left
for remote places: Kelly moved to upstate New York, Indiana to an island
off Maine, Martin to New Mexico, and so on. But Martin’s move was unlike
the others’, precipitous and surrounded by mystery. The several reasons
given for her sudden exit, at the cusp of fame, include the death of Ad Rein-
hardt, the end of her relationship with Chryssa, and the loss of her final
seaport loft, at 28 South Street; the last is the one Martin herself affirmed.
In 1996, she recalled: “They tore down my building. I had a perfect loft. It
was 125 feet long, 30 feet wide. Windows right across on the river. And up
the side it had two skylights. A beamed ceiling that was 14 feet high...
I could see the expressions on the faces of the sailors, it was so close to
the river.” Three years later, she claimed it had “20-foot ceilings, 135 feet
long and 45 feet wide, two big skylights, windows right on the water”7?3

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Whatever its true size, she would never again have a workspace with the
lambent, riverfront light, or the ecclesiastical dimensions, of those she had
at the seaport. Losing it, and the community of which it was a part, was a
hard blow.
It is also the case that shortly before leaving New York, she had had a
psychotic episode; it was not the first, but it was apparently quite severe.
These events are hard to reconstruct. The closest she came to referring to
her emotional condition as a reason for her departure was in a 1983 state-
ment: “I left New York in 1967 because every day I suddenly felt Iwanted
to die and it was connected with painting. It took me several years to find
out that the cause was an overdeveloped sense of responsibility.” She’d
put her reasons in more dispassionate but still introspective terms in 1981,
when she said the departure

was inevitable, you see. What we have to do we have to do. I could no

longer stay, so I had to leave, you see. I suppose you could say I wasn’t
up to the demands and everything, the life I had to live, there. But there
was something else; that Icame to a place of recognition of confusion
that had to be solved.... It’s just like painting; I waited patiently for...
something like permission to leave. Because I certainly felt Ishould stay
and do my work. But when I had completed a show for Los Angeles I
suddenly felt that I could leave and then I did leave.

These recollections of confusion and even desperation are exceptional.

Much more typical is this 1996 explanation: “The very day that I heard they
were going to tear down my loft, I also got a letter that gave me a $5,000
award for painting.” With this grant, from the National Endowment for
the Arts, she took a bus to Detroit and headed for a Dodge dealership. “I
picked out the liveliest salesman and said, ‘here’s a check for $5,000, what
kind of truck can haul a camper?”
When she was later asked, “Were you aware that the art world considered
you to have spent a decade in New York making masterful paintings?”

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Martin replied, “Yes, I thought I had, too....1 thought I had already made
them so I could leave.” A few days before she left, she appeared unan-
nounced at Pace Gallery. Arne Glimcher recalls, “She had brought all her
art materials she could carry—brushes, canvases, stretchers—and asked
me to give them away to young artists.’”? She would make no paintings,
by her account, for four-and-a-half years, although she did not entirely
sever herself from friends and art-world acquaintances. Her isolation was
shorter and more tempered than is implied by the biblical period of wan-
dering—sometimes erroneously said to have lasted a full seven years—that
has accrued to her myth. As always, the image she leaves is fractured.

148
 Chapter 6

SILENCE

C C he scene changes to an empty room. Rimbaud has gone to

Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgen-
stein, after a period as a village schoolteacher, has chosen
menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess.... But the
choice of permanent silence doesn’t negate their work. On the contrary, it
imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken
off—disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity.” So writes
Susan Sontag in “The Aesthetics of Silence,” an essay of 1967, the year
Martin went rogue. As if directing her thoughts squarely at Martin, Sontag
continues, “Art is more than ever... an exercise in asceticism. Through it,
the artist becomes purified—of himself and, eventually, of his art.”
The period of travel that followed Martin’s departure from New York
and the interruption to her painting career have acquired the status of
myth. There is a fair amount of mystery about where she went and how
she spent her time during those years. What is known is that for roughly
the first year and a half, she was on the move, driving and camping in the
Pacific Northwest, in both the United States and Canada. By the end of
1968, she had resettled. Even when she had no fixed address, her isolation
was not complete; she maintained limited contact with some friends. “I
am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years,’ she wrote at
this time to Sam Wagstaff, a curator and collector she’d met in New York.

149
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

“I want to do it very much,’ she added. In another letter to Wagstaff, she

reflected, in candid confusion:

I don’t understand anything about the whole business of painting and

exhibiting. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed anything else but there was
also a “trying to do the right thing” a kind of “duty” about it. Also a
paying of the price for that “error” that we do not know what it is. What
we “owe.” Now I do not owe anything or have to do anything. Fantas-
tic but even more fantastic I do not think that there will be any more
people in my life. With about thirty years to go [not a bad estimate;
she was then in her late fifties and died at 92] that is very odd. Do not
think that that is sad. It is not sad. Even sadness is not sad.”

Clearly, she struggled in these years to resolve creative—and social—impulses

with the urgent need for internal peace. But she had definitively closed
the door on the kind of involvement in a fervidly progressive urban art
community that she had sustained for a decade at Coenties Slip.
As Sontag’s catalogue of cultural saints-in-the-wilderness demonstrates,
the prestige of artists who had chosen to drop out of mainstream soci-
ety reached a high point by the late sixties. Accordingly, by 1973 Martin
was being described as a mystic: “The verbal statements of Reinhardt and
Martin are similar in nature to the self-contradictory phrases of mystics
which couple unity and multiplicity, overcoming the barriers between the
individual and the absolute,” Lizzie Borden wrote in an article for Artforum
that year. Jill Johnston recalled, “it isn’t altogether clear why she left new
york and why she stopped painting but if you heard the story it’s the sort
of story you accept and understand without any explanations. leaving
new york has become as much a ritual exodus as going to new york is a
ritual initiation.”4
But Martin’s flight is not best seen as a statement of principled with-
drawal for solitary meditation. She left New York in a state of considerable
turmoil (“every day I suddenly felt Iwanted to die”), with no clear sense of

150
 SLE NUCIE:

where she was heading and no evident intention of sustaining her career.
Everything about her period of wandering and resettling was—like the rest
of her life, but more so—riven with contradictions and exceptions. Still,
as her argument with John Cage’s notion of silence implies, one thing she
believed in deeply was the possibility of an absolute quiet, best sought in
nature, and in 1967 she went in pursuit of it. Loneliness could be a terror,
but the presence of others was at times worse. Most difficult of all was the
clamor that arose within. It seems she wanted the noise to stop.
The toll Martin’s psychological conflicts took is referred to with surpris-
ing candor throughout her recorded lectures and writing. On the other
hand, her diagnosis—of paranoid schizophrenia—was not publicly dis-
closed during her lifetime, and the nature of her trouble was minimized,
ignored, or misrepresented with surprising success. While soul-searching,
introspection, was the creative source most reliably mined by Martin’s
abstract expressionist peers, the other, mostly younger artists with whom
she was associated (voluntarily or otherwise) while in New York were look-
ing to transcend the individual psyche’s turbulence either through ethical
and material idealism (Kelly and Reinhardt; the Minimalists) or by turning
to the world of commercial imagery for their source material (the Pop
Artists). Since Martin’s death, and in the context of changing levels of
social acceptance and understanding, it has become possible to read her
statements about emotional trouble less as the solemn pronouncements
of a beatific anchorite, warning of moral and psychological perils and
pointing toward their transcendence from a position safely above the fray,
and more as telegrams of urgent psychological peril.
The first hospitalization of which friends speak resulted, in the mid-
1960s, from a break that occurred during a trip by freighter to India (much
like the one she had discussed with Georgia O'Keeffe); it is generally
described as a rather Passage to India-like episode of spiritual excursion
gone awry. It has been said that Lenore Tawney traveled to India to take
her home, and also that Tawney paid for at least some of the costs of
her hospitalizations.° In Jill Johnston’s words, “once she took a freighter

151
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

around the world and someplace in india they took her off the boat and
confined her in a hatch because she’d gone into a trance.”” David McIn-
tosh, whom Martin met in 1971-they became enduring friends later in
the decade—recalled, “She was one of several passengers on a freighter.
She knew immediately”—or believed—“the other passengers disliked her,
intended to exclude her.” The tension caused her breakdown and led to
amnesia. “She lost her memory, her sense of self. She was hospitalized
there. When she recovered one of the doctors accompanied her back to
New York. She spoke of his kindness.”®
Kristina Wilson strikes a rather whimsical note in describing the inci-
dent in India, saying Martin sang Scottish ballads to the nurses before
she remembered who she was.’ Pat Steir, who first met Martin in 1971 and
visited her every summer for three decades, says that the India episode
resulted from an “attack of conscience,’ which caused her to see that money
was inconsequential, and so she gave away what she had.” Like most of
these reports, the version written with Martin’s involvement is circumspect
and wry: Benita Eisler’s New Yorker profile records, “By 1964, Martin had
managed to earn enough from two shows at the Elkon Gallery to plan a
trip around the world, but she had barely arrived in Bombay when she
got sick. She spent a month and a half in the hospital there and then came
home. ‘I didn’t get to look around much, she says dryly.”"
The 1967 episode in New York was quite serious. Robert Indiana recalls,
“I happened to encounter Agnes on South Street and she simply walked
past me and didn’t even recognize me. Shortly thereafter she was com-
mitted to Bellevue.”” At Bellevue, she was initially placed with severely
disturbed patients. She was physically restrained, heavily sedated, and
underwent electroconvulsive therapy (ECT—“shock treatment”). Accord-
ing to her friend Kristina Wilson, Martin had been found wandering and
confused, and she “was put in a ward with violent patients. It was just
awful, people screaming and so on. She stayed there for several days, and
someone found a phone number in her pocket that was one of the Coenties
 SEN CE

Slip artists. They rallied and had her moved to Presbyterian.” Indiana says
it was he, who, dismayed by the conditions at Bellevue, called an art-col-
lecting psychiatrist with whom he was friendly, Dr. Arthur Carr, and that
Carr arranged for the transfer; Ann Wilson recalled that Kelly was involved
in this rescue as well." Kristina Wilson reported that Martin said she had
electroshock treatment at Bellevue more than 100 times, “and that when
she got out she left New York for her health.”* Donald Woodman, who met
Martin in 1977, also states that ECT was administered to her at Bellevue; it
was a routine procedure at the time for patients with her symptoms (and
in fact has returned to favor for treating major depression, though it is
now administered more humanely).
A description of shock treatment at mid-century appears in Sylvia
Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). Based on her own experience, Plath reported,
“There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent
down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-
ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light and with each
flash a great jolt struck me till I thought my bones would break and the
sap fly out of me like a split plant.”"* It is a vivid account of the treatment’s
miseries, which some doctors sought to avoid.
Carr recalls his role in Martin’s care: “Because of the influence I had
at the time, I was able to have her transferred to Columbia Presbyterian
Psychiatric Institute [at 168" Street in upper Manhattan]. She'd had a very
difficult existence down at Coenties Slip.” The conditions at Bellevue were
both unpleasant and unsanitary: “I visited her at Bellevue with Bob Indi-
ana, and a rat, or a mouse, ran across the floor.” She was very grateful to
Carr for the transfer, he says, which much improved her situation. “I would
have the New York Times delivered to her every morning,” Carr remem-
bered, “and she had a good breakfast there. She felt like a very special
person. And indeed she was. They treated her royally. Even getting food
was difficult where she was living, down on the waterfront.” To a question
about whether ECT was part of the treatment at Columbia, Carr responded
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

with some alarm. “I don’t think so. The Psychiatric Institute was a not a
place that emphasized shock treatment. It was not,’ he added with evident
discomfort, “pleasant to watch.”””
There was a later hospitalization in Pueblo, Colorado, after Martin
had again been found wandering and confused, and another in Santa Fe.
Amnesia—not knowing who or where she was—was a component of these
episodes; so was terror. Later in her life, Martin benefited from the develop-
ment of less heavily sedating medications than, for instance, the Thorazine
that was the most-prescribed antipsychotic when she was hospitalized in
1967. At the same time, her illness abated with age, which is often the case.
Martin’s benign term for her psychotic experiences, “trances,” is belied by
some of the states she evokes, at times, in her writing; similarly mundane
is her report that these spells, short and long, were caused by overstimu-
lation, as in the story she told, cheerfully, of conking out after lunch with
O’Keeffe. On another occasion, she told Arne Glimcher, she was “in a per-
fect small church on Second Avenue in New York at Christmas time and
hearing... the Messiah. After three notes, I zonked out—in a trance—I’ve
been in many trances, you know. That’s how they put me away in Belle-
vues
It may be relevant to Martin’s reference points for this experience that
“trance” is also the term used to describe Saint Teresa’s ecstatic states. The
chronology for a 1943 biography of the saint gives for 1539, “In July seri-
ously ill, and in a trance for four days, when in her father’s house. Paralysed
for more than two years.” This hardly seems a pleasant condition, but in
Teresa’s own description, found in her signal teaching, the Prayer of Quiet,
such trances left her “as it were, in a swoon, both inwardly and outwardly,
so that the outward man (let me call it the ‘body, and then you will under-
stand it better) does not wish to move, but rests, like one who has almost
reached the end of his journey.” Grave though this may still sound, Teresa
insists that such states were blissful, because they transported her spiri-
tually. When thus disposed, people like her “seem not to be in the world,
and have no wish to see or hear anything but their God... Sometimes it

154
 SE NICE

goes on for a day, or for two days, and we find ourselves—I mean those who
experience this state—full of this joy without understanding the reason.”°
While Martin never spoke of seeking (or finding) contact with God
during her trances, Teresa’s language resonates with hers in many ways.
There are also parallels in Teresa’s “Prayer of Quiet” to Martin’s prefer-
ence for laughing off intrusive thoughts, especially those that are distract-
ingly intellectual: “When one of you finds herself in this sublime state of
prayer, which, as I have already said, is most markedly supernatural, and
the understanding (or to put it more clearly, the thought) wanders off
after the most ridiculous things in the world, she should laugh at it and
treat it as the silly thing it is... if you try to drag the understanding back
by force, you lose your power over it.”* The complicated mix of paraly-
sis, self-forgetfulness, transcendence, and mirth provides a framework for
considering Martin’s psychological experience in non-medical terms that
seem to have been attractive to her and her friends.
Yet there were more than a few people who knew how dire her situation
sometimes was. Kristina Wilson and Donald Woodman both received des-
perate notes from Martin. To Wilson, she wrote, “I have tried existing and
Ido not like it. Ihave decided to give it up. Agnes.””? And to Woodman, in
the late 1970s, she wrote on a small piece of paper in shaky handwriting, “I
think I am dying / Please call an ambulance to take me to Albuquerque /
Crematorium immediately / if you find me dead / call Arnold as note on
bank account directs.”? Martin’s writing contains testaments to deepest
anguish, including at least one elliptical reference to suicide: ruminat-
ing on a favorite topic, she writes of a “little boy” who has an inspiration
that “seems to be different but is really the same. One day perhaps he is
vicious and mean and insufferable so is sent to his room. There he hates
everyone thoroughly, wishes he could kill everyone in the world, decides
to kill himself since he cannot and thinks everyone will be sorry. Thinks
his parents do not deserve him, that they probably stole him somewhere
etc. After many fantasies he becomes exhausted. Then his mind is sud-
denly cleared he is happy, transformed. The whole storm and all of the
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

evidence is forgotten.” It is hard to avoid reading this digressive tale,

which appears in undated handwritten lecture notes, as autobiographical.
A “Short Essay” Martin titled “Staleness,” with equally suggestive hand-
written emendations, reads: :

Because I cannot see

Because I cannot know my [this possessive was inserted in ms.] desire

Because of burning and ashes

Iam looking on my own death
Now in desperation and because I know suffering [the preceding five
words were struck through] I will help this one
that one
But there will be no help given
there will be hope and determination and no breathing.

(To be fair to Martin’s breadth of vision, “Staleness” is paired with a limpid

essay called “Freshness,” which reads:

Especially when the morning air

is struck alive
Especially when the stream runs cool and the grass drinks
Especially in sweet sleep when small waves go back on themselves.
Clear shining trembling gay
Soft lifting serene
Alaighing [sic] thirst
Freshness enters.)?5

The most acute of Martin’s psychotic episodes, which included catatonia

and amnesia, were widely scattered and short-lived. But for much of her
adult life she experienced aural hallucinations, one of the commonest
signs of schizophrenia. Martin, and the friends to whom she talked about
these internal voices, have generally emphasized that they had absolutely

156
 Sle
NG E

no creative use for her and were completely distinct from what she called
inspirations, or visions, which were her most reliable imaginative resource.
David McIntosh says, “She never related the paintings to the voices. I can-
not recall one instance in which the paintings had anything to do with
the voices. The inspirations and the audible voices were different. She
always said that every painter needed inspiration.”*° To Donald Wood-
man, she talked about “pushing back voices in her head to find the silence
she needed, which was of paramount importance in her work .””” If not
disabling, they were often a considerable nuisance. Kristina Wilson says
that when Martin was ill, “one hand wasn’t aware of what the other was
doing,” and that she was “often pursued by demons,” as when “beings came
through the wall one night and stole her wallet.” On the other hand, the
filmmaker Mary Lance remembers that Martin sometimes spoke of her
inner voices as being useful forms of unconventional communication:
having failed, uncharacteristically, to show up for a scheduled lunch, Mar-
tin explained to Lance, “You called me on the psychic telephone to tell
me you'd broken your leg.”? With equal matter-of-factness, Martin refers
in lecture notes to “mental telepathy” which she equates with “super sen-
sory abilities,” and, in an unusual departure from grammatical logic, she
continues, “I think you will see that if you give it a little time,—a scientific
fact, shared by all the animals in varying degrees and one that in most peo-
ple no longer functions.”*° When she was listening to voices other people
couldn’t hear, she evidently sensed a connection to other animals; it is a
moving expression of the experience of hearing, and speaking, a language
that—inverting linguistic function—isolated her from other people.
McIntosh’s recollection of Martin’s illness also reveals its bedeviling
inconsistency. “I knew her when she had clear vision and disturbed
vision,” he says. (By “vision” he doesn’t mean her image-producing inspi-
rations—note the absence of an article, “vision” not “a vision”’—but simply
clarity of mind.) “Often the experiences were destructive and painful for
her but some of the experiences with voices were jovial for her, and at
times it made her very happy. She had pleasing, exhilarating conversations
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

with the voices. It seemed quite a good social life for her, although at other
times they were malevolent and frightening.” The voices’ appearances
“weren't frequent, they were episodic. Usually they accompanied periods
of stress, from painting or her emotional situations, about which I didn’t
know.” When asked if the voices were personified—if they had different
characters—MclIntosh replied, “Yes, they did,’ but they weren’t persistent
over time. “One voice which may have been active for three or four days
would never reappear.”
Shortly after Woodman met Martin in 1977 and McIntosh reconnected
with her—and following her resumption of art-making—she was visited by
her old friend Ann Wilson and by Harmony Hammond, a younger artist.
In 1978 all three took a road trip during which Martin was particularly
garrulous. In recollections published together, both Wilson and Hammond
record discussions of instructions delivered to her by imaginary guardians
and scolds. Wrote Wilson, “Her voices told her that when she had worked
too long she needed to take a trip... She said her voices tell her not to
own property and to keep cutting back. The first thing she got rid of was
obsessive thinking. Then she dropped the things that she did not like about
herself. Agnes figures you keep cutting back until there is nothing there.”
Hammond reported, “She explained that her voices would not let her own
land. That it was dangerous to be secure. Just a few chickens. No dogs.”
Some of these admonitions are consistent with Martin’s clear-headed com-
mitments, as to material simplicity and a footloose life. But Hammond also
remembered Martin saying that the hallucinations were not always easily
accommodated or understood. “She had to do what her voices told her to
do, even if it seemed wrong. And sometimes they were wrong.”?
Donald Fineberg is a psychiatrist who treated Martin from 1985 to 2000
with talk therapy that for many years involved weekly sessions. By the time
he met her, she had entered into a long period of relative stability, and she
did not require hospitalization while under his care. He says that she came
to him on a variety of medications—perhaps too much medication, in his
view—and yet was remarkably productive. “What makes her unusual,”

158
 SILENCE

Fineberg says, “is the depth and sensitivity with which she was able to make
art in the face of a disorder that for many people would be devastating”4
While her symptoms diminished in these years (and her medication was
reduced), they did not entirely disappear. “She has a relationship, in her
medicated state, to the voices, where she has what you might say is an
observing ego—a capacity to look at them so as not to be overwhelmed
by them. So they’re voices, but they’re not typical schizophrenic halluci-
nations. They’re more like internal thoughts and meanderings. She never
had, in my presence, or reported to me, a command hallucination which
was idiosyncratic and bizarre—those are the signals of an acute, schizo-
phrenic-like psychotic hallucination. But rather they would be more like,
you would say, inner thoughts.”
But Martin’s experience of the voices seems to have varied enor-
mously*°—likewise her feelings about psychiatric treatment. “My voices
never allow me to take medication and I have no use for doctors—I’'ve taken
it sometimes but I’ve had to repent,’ she told Arne Glimcher; clearly, that
wasn’t the whole story. And despite the stress placed by Martin and by her
friends on the unbridgeable divide between the visions that nourished
her art and the voices that impeded it, sometimes she said things that
made that distinction seem hazy and even untenable. For a 1982 Whitney
Museum of American Art acquisition form, she responded to a standard
question about “the subject of this work, the ideas expressed in it”—it is a
1960 grid drawing, one of her earliest uses of the form—by writing:

All art work is made in obedience to the conscious mind. It is something

like conscience it says do this or that and it also says when it has been
done and when it has not been done. That is inspiration. Real art work
is made by inspiration.... A real artist is lisening [sic], like Adam &
Eve while they were in the garden, for his commands, and struggling
to obey them accurately. He follows a path. This drawing was made on
the path to more simplified grids. It is a wonderful expierience [sic] for
me. Much moreso [sic] now than when I drew it.
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

In these few short sentences, she thoroughly blurs boundaries between

inspiration and voice, voice and command, while suggesting that there
is a personified Judeo-Christian God to whom the artist (at first like the
innocent Adam and Eve, then simply “he”) is listening, in considerable
trepidation, and awaiting orders. She concludes by implying that the
whole process of creation was more than a little harrowing; better for her
to contemplate the finished image than put herself back in the process of
creating it.
One of the subjects to which Martin returned most frequently in lec-
tures, writing and interviews is the value of solitude. Just as often, she
talked about its cost.

Solitude and freedom are the same

under every fallen leaf
Others do not really exist in solitude, I do not exist
no thinking of others even when they are there, no interruption
a mystic and a solitary person are the same*

Thus she wrote in “The Untroubled Mind,” lending support to those

inclined to see her as a kind of Buddhist monk. Over and over she stressed
the importance of working alone, without distraction—no partners or
friends; not even dogs. “To discover the conscious mind in a world where
intellect is held to be valuable requires solitude—quite a lot of solitude.
We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude,” she wrote.
“I suggest to artists that you take every opportunity of being alone, that
you give up having pets and unnecessary companions.”9 The tone is of a
calm, wise parent; it was directed at students and young artists and meant
to convince them that only from the quiet that accompanies isolation can
inspiration arise. And yet, and far more vividly, she spoke just as often of
the devastation wrought by solitude. Sometimes these descriptions take
on an allegorical quality, though the epic tone doesn’t conceal the depth of
feeling involved: “The solitary life is full of terrors.... Worse than the terror

160
 eee ODO 619 (/

13
Mildred Tolbert. Agnes Martin in Taos, ca. 1953.
Courtesy Mildred Tolbert Archives, The Harwood Museum
of Art of the University of New Mexico, Taos
 15 (ABOVE)

HarborI, ca. 1959.

Oil on canvas, 49%4 x 40 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Agnes Gund and Committee on
Painting and Sculpture Funds

16 (LEFT)

The Laws, 1958.

Boat spikes and oil paint on wood,

932 x 18 x 2in.

Private collection, London

\

17 (ABOVE) 18 (BELOW)
The Spring, 1957. Cow, 1960.

Oil on canvas, 70 x 70 in. Oil on canvas, 69 x 69 in.

Collection Fayez Sarofim Private collection
 Se

A ER at

ee ae LEE Sef EE =a —

A. Vihar.
 19 (ABOVE)
Little Sister, 1962.
Oil, ink, and brass nails on canvas and wood; sheet: 97% x 9'/c in.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Gift, Andrew Powie Fuller and Geraldine Spreckels Fuller Collection

20 (OPPOSITE, TOP) 21 (OPPOSITE, BOTTOM)

Untitled, 1960. Mountain, 1960.
Black ink on paper; sheet: 11% x 9% in. Ink and pencil on paper, 9% x 11% in.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift, Andrew Powie Fuller and Ruth Vollmer Bequest
Geraldine Spreckels Fuller Collection
 22-23
White Flower, 1960-62, and detail (opposite).
Oil on canvas, 71% x 72 in.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York
a
rss
aa
 sreebe
tie ad

» aw 76

"Friendship, 1963.
Incised gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 75 x 75 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift, Celeste and Armand P. Bartos
 4 ee
as
Ss oOo

Larry Aldric h Foundation Fund

als
x
ae
eK +
g <
2
a &8
& Ss
os
&§
ae
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 26
Milk River, 1963.
Oil and colored pencil on canvas, 72 x 72 in.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Purchase with funds from
the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund
—_—

27
‘ Red Bird, 1964.
Colored ink and pencil on paper, 12% x 11% in.
_ The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Mrs. Bliss Parkinson
oo

ee
ee
oa. Fi F ee = “a
ie 7 a ire ae
oP = pee
4 a = ss 4
 28 A-C
Gabriel, 1976.
16mm film;
total running time:

78 minutes.

Stills by Bill Jacobson,

Courtesy Pace Gallery
 ~\ s

29 (ABOVE)
Untitled #17, 1974.
Gesso, acrylic, andpencil on canvas,
72 72
Des Moines Art Center

30 (RIGHT)
Untitled, 1977.
Watercolor and graphite on paper,
image: 9 x 9 in.; sheet: 12 x 12 in.
Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York.
Gift, American Art Foundation
4
Pee
 < 31

Untitled #11, 1977.

Graphite and gesso on canvas, 72 x 72 in.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Gift of The American Art Foundation
 SUSE NC E

of fear is the Dragon. The Dragon really pounds through the inner streets
shaking everything and breathing fire. The fire of his breath destroys and
disintegrates everything. ... The solitary person is in great danger from
the Dragon because without an outside enemy the Dragon turns on the
self. In fact, self-destructiveness is the first of human weaknesses... 1 hope
that it is quite plain that I am not moralizing, but simply describing some
of the states of mind that are a hazard in solitude,” she wrote in “On the
Perfection Underlying Life.”
Indeed, panic, arising with or without cause, is another leitmotif. “Sud-
denly your heart beats and youre in a panic and you just feel afraid,” she
told Kate Horsfield in 1974.** The essay “On the Perfection Underlying
Life” amplifies this:

Helplessness, even a mild state of helplessness, is extremely hard to

bear. Moments of helplessness are moments of blindness. One feels as
though something terrible has happened without knowing what it is.
One feels as though one is in the outer darkness or as though one has
made some terrible error—a fatal error. Our great help that we leaned
on in the dark has deserted us and we are in a complete panic and we
feel that we have got to have help. The panic of complete helplessness
drives us to fantastic extremes, and feelings of mild helplessness drive
us to a ridiculousness, We go from reading religious doctrine to chang-
ing our diet.

Thus, she told Arne Glimcher, she sometimes resorted to extreme food
restrictions: only cheese, tomatoes, and walnuts one winter, just bananas
and gelatin three years later.” Or, Martin continued in the essay, one goes
“from absolute self-abasement or abandonment to every known and
unknown fetish.” At times like these, “The feeling of calamity and loss
covers everything. We imagine that we are completely cut off and tremble
with fear and dread.” This description of utterly prostrating anxiety, and
of lesser states of unhappiness, is remarkably clear and deeply affecting,

161
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

and it has been quoted to substantiate her “depressions”—a more familiar

kind of psychological condition, and aless frightening diagnosis, than the
schizophrenia from which she also suffered. But that is not where Martin
ends this thought. She concludes, “But helplessness when fear and dread
have run their course, as all passions do, is the most rewarding state of
all.”43 She is consistent only in being contradictory—perhaps a symptom,
but also an invaluable gift.
The potency of the fear Martin described is illuminated by evidence of
her paranoia and her belief that success itself—its achievement and even
its pursuit—could be mortally hazardous. Mark Rothko wasn’t the only
artist whose death she found suspicious, in her darker moments, and she
did not think that one’s enemies engaged only in incidents of vandalism or
wallet-snatching. In the 1974 interview with Horsfield, which went rather
far afield, Martin said:

Success is so little understood that we don’t want it.... What we want is

peace and quiet and uninterrupted time to do work. That’s all we want.
God knows, they killed Judy Garland, they killed Monroe. You see.
Public demand made their lives so unlivable that they died of it. And
so did Pollack [sic]. My God, the first American Expressionist. If they
had just included Newman and Still and everything and not put it all
on Pollack, he wouldn't have died. He was a strong guy, from the West
out here, you know. But they killed him. I don’t care if he did drive off
the road. That’s when I went to New York; the first thing that I asked
Betty Parsons—she used to have all those artists—I said, “Why did they
all die? Why?” When the European artists lived to a grand old age....
I'm only 62. Except for Albers and Still—and de Kooning, who doesn’t
count because he’s drunk. ... You see? We don’t want it.4

This particular trait—profound suspicion, impervious to logical or

emotional dissuasion—is perhaps the biggest challenge to sustained con-
tact with other people. “Agnes has problems with paranoia,” said Richard

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Tuttle, one of her most enduring friends. “Through the paranoia, she will
hurt people, cut them off, not see them for years... ‘I have no friends and
you're one of them” is a favorite statement.* Similarly, Bob Ellis, a faithful
friend in her later years, recalled, “Occasionally she'd turn on people, if she
didn’t take her medications. She talked openly about it. One time she vol-
untarily put herself in a mental institution. She was aware of [her illness].
There was a line she didn’t want to stray far from. She had her depressions,
and she would have periods when she didn’t paint... She’d sit in her studio
or at home in her rocking chair and wait.’#° Kristina Wilson remembers,
“There was a niece she liked for a long time, then abruptly ended it. She’d
get paranoid.” And again, “She was close to my son, and when he had a
daughter and named her Jade, she got furious, wouldn’t talk to him or
his wife or the daughter, because she thought that was a terrible name
and the child would suffer by it. We didn’t talk for a long time. That was
very hurtful.”4”
Donald Woodman was another close friend for several years with whom
she abruptly and categorically ceased contact. Martin’s psychiatrist Don-
ald Fineberg says that she referred to “Arnold [Glimcher] as her trusted
friend and confidant and someone who couldn’t be trusted, sometimes in
the same consultations.” As Fineberg explains, such discontinuous social
reality is characteristic of Martin’s illness. “Putting things in separate boxes
is the ambivalence characteristic of psychotic ambivalence. A neurotic
ambivalence is like uncertainty, I want this, but I want that... But psychotic
ambivalence is things are in separate boxes. Agnes had that.” This kind
of erratic behavior, so hard on friendships, is no better for professional
associations. The fact that she maintained both is a triumph that pales
only beside her ability to produce artwork in a remarkably sustained way.
It seems that the compartmentalization to which Martin was sub-
ject—and which, perhaps, helped her manage her world—was reflected in
her relationships: friends and associates similarly often put the various
disjunctive elements of her character in separate, non-communicating
boxes. Not surprisingly, friends with emotional difficulties of their own
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seem to have understood her trials best. One of her bonds with Chryssa
may well have been that both suffered from mental illness. Reported Jill
Johnston:

another fairly safe thing to talk about is insanity since i suppose we

would both agree that nobody knows anything about it except the
insane. i think it was at the very end of the summer that i did go out
again and agnes and thalia [Poons] were the ones who rescued me up
in brewster where I abandoned my car and called them... and didn’t
take the whole bottle of thorazine that agnes suggested I should but
rather about 400 mcs or mgs or whatever they are. possibly agnes asked
me what was wrong with me and I said I was afraid to die.‘

But for most of her friends and associates, tact—and perhaps willed
blindness—prevailed over active intervention. At Coenties Slip, Benita
Eisler writes, “The conventions that governed their tight little commu-
nity—respect for privacy, solitude, distance—served also to isolate and
imprison [Martin] ... Moreover, the distance that she required—a larger
‘envelope of private space’ than was the norm on the Slip—allowed her
rigid defense system to be taken as an objective state. Agnes was fine—until
she wasn’t. Then friends would be summoned. When it was over, nothing
had happened.”
This snapshot of genteel reserve might be profitably contextualized
by considering the crosswinds actively reshaping approaches to mental
illness at the time. Just as attitudes about homosexuality were beginning
to undergo radical change—and meeting ferocious resistance—so were cul-
tural beliefs about psychological disturbance being upended. To summa-
rize, as is necessary: psychiatric treatment from the end of the nineteenth
century to the middle of the twentieth was bifurcated, with those most
ill—and least wealthy—warehoused in increasingly large and ineffectual
institutions.” Conditions were generally execrable: filthy, dehumanizing,
and often dangerous. A notorious 1947 report noted patients tied to beds

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with leather straps or even handcuffs tied to chains. Some were confined to
bed because there wasn’t enough clothing to go around. The many popular
representations of mental institutions at mid-century ranged from a long,
illustrated article in Life magazine called “Bedlam 1946” to the successful
1948 movie Snake Pit, for which Olivia de Haviland in the leading role
was an Oscar nominee. As Edward Shorter writes, “In the first half of the
twentieth century, psychiatry was caught in a dilemma. On the one hand,
psychiatrists could warehouse their patients in vast bins in the hopes that
they might recover spontaneously. On the other, they had psychoanalysis,
a therapy suitable for the needs of wealthy people desiring self-insight,
but not for real psychiatric illness.”
Inadequate although it was for treating the most seriously ill, Freudian
psychoanalysis had, by the 1960s, reached the height of its influence.»
But in the postwar period, biological research gained support as well. For
schizophrenia, insulin shock therapy was developed in the middle 1930s,
and it was in widespread use by the 1950s; so was electroconvulsive ther-
apy, which was used for the first time in 1938.4 By the 1950s, psychotro-
pic drugs, beginning with Thorazine (chlorpromazine) in 1954, had been
introduced, which dramatically alleviated psychotic symptoms. These
drugs allowed public health services to relinquish their longstanding reli-
ance on extended hospitalization, and as a result community alternatives
appeared. In the 1980s a new class of drugs for depression, the SSRIs, of
which Prozac was the first and best known, again revolutionized psychi-
atric practice.
It is hard to reconstruct Martin’s early psychotic episodes; the first inci-
dents of psychosis are often the most frightening. The options for treat-
ment that would have been available in the early 1930s—if her illness, as
is typical, first became apparent in early adulthood—would have been
hospitalization hardly different from incarceration, including physical
restraint and perhaps insulin shock therapy, a brutal remedy involving
induced coma, along with, perhaps, some talk therapy. She was living at
that time in Bellingham.

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The symptoms that afflicted her had first been described by clinicians
in 1809, and their reported incidence increased substantially during the
course of the nineteenth century. The term “schizophrenia” wasn’t intro-
duced until 1908, when Zurich psychology professor Eugen Bleuler pro-
posed it (to replace the earlier “dementia praecox,” or premature dementia)
and shifted the discussion from physical symptoms, such as catatonia, to
psychological processes, such as the “splitting” of consciousness. Shorter
writes, “The term schizophrenia was probably an unfortunate choice, for
subsequent generations of physicians and nonphysicians alike would asso-
ciate it with some kind of splitting or divided consciousness. In schizophre-
nia, nothing is split.”5 In the decades before effective medications were
developed, psychological affliction was seen to be a question of degree
rather than kind; the analysts whose thinking then predominated believed
that dividing psychoses (characterized by a loss of contact with reality)
categorically from neuroses (less acute disorders) was misguided. At the
time that the National Institute of Mental Health was established, at mid-
century, diagnostic criteria were still vague; “The category of schizophre-
nia, for example, was generally defined in terms of an inability to relate to
the external world or to other human beings. The symptoms—depending
on the form—were equally broad.”
Establishing parameters for schizophrenia remains a work in progress.
On the NIMH website in 2013, it is defined as “a chronic, severe and dis-
abling brain disorder that has affected people throughout history. Peo-
ple with the disorder may hear voices other people don’t hear. They may
believe other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts,
or plotting to harm them. This can terrify people with the illness and make
them withdrawn or extremely agitated. People with schizophrenia may not
make sense when they talk. They may sit for hours without moving or talk-
ing. Sometimes people with schizophrenia seem perfectly fine until they
talk about what they are really thinking.” A few things are striking about
this definition: one is that schizophrenia is defined as a brain disorder;
indeed, that simple fact is accepted throughout the psychiatric community.

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The NIMH goes on to explain that both genes and environment play a
part in the illness’s development; experience reshapes the brain, so an
organic mental illness can be attributed in part to life events as well as
to heritable traits. But it is now generally agreed that schizophrenia does
not arise solely from patients’ early childhood experiences or the short-
comings of their first caregivers. Just as noteworthy in the NIMH’s first,
categorical statement is that everything after it is provisional: a person with
schizophrenia may experience this or that symptom; delusional thoughts
can be terrifying, and so on. Based in brain chemistry though it may be,
schizophrenia remains hard to pin down.
In a somewhat more nuanced definition, psychiatrist Donald Goff
explains, “Schizophrenia has traditionally been classified as a major psy-
chotic disorder. The term psychotic denotes a loss of reality testing, which
can occur as a result of delusional beliefs or hallucinatory perceptions,
usually auditory or visual. The psychotic symptoms are the most dramatic
and potentially dangerous features of this illness, but other symptoms
may be even more disabling.” Among them are disorganized thinking and
behavior, and “inappropriate” affect. “A third symptom cluster includes the
negative symptoms of apathy, social withdrawal, loss of emotional expres-
siveness, and poverty of thought and speech.”»” Patients with the third
syndrome “are often particularly unresponsive to treatment.’ Fineberg says
that Martin did not exhibit this “third symptom cluster,’ and stresses that
her illness was atypical in many ways. It is also possible, however, to see her
episodes (prior to his treatment) of social withdrawal, her voluntary restric-
tions of sensory pleasures, and the formalized nature of her conversation
and her friendships, as just such negative symptoms; in fact psychiatrist
Mark Epstein has suggested this possibility.** What seems beyond doubt
is that Martin’s case was atypical: she was an extraordinary artist with
exceptional courage, intelligence, and determination; the magnitude of
her success is only one proof of that. But it is easy to forget, in an age when
emotional ailments are so widely acknowledged and diagnosed, that only
approximately one percent of the American population has schizophrenia
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(by contrast, more than a quarter of American adults are diagnosed with a
mental disorder in any given year; depression and anxiety are the leading
complaints). It is a serious and fairly uncommon problem.
For that reason, schizophrenia remains poorly understood by the
general public; it was still more challenging to scientists, clinicians, and
patients (and their friends) half a century ago. In a respected textbook pub-
lished in 1966, the year before Martin’s hospitalization in Bellevue, it was
conceded, “the important questions of diagnosis, prognosis, etiology, and
therapy are still unanswered... is schizophrenia a group of ill-defined syn-
dromes, or is it a true nosological entity? Is it a disease? A maladjustment?
A way of life? Is the irrationality of schizophrenia transmitted by genes
or by interpersonal relations? What are the best methods of treatment?”
Writing in 1997, Shorter admitted, “Why shocking the brain to the point of
eliciting convulsions makes psychotic patients better is unclear. But it does.
So does the dangerous procedure of putting them into prolonged comas.”®
Mark Epstein wonders if, in today’s climate, Martin might have been con-
sidered to have bipolar or schizoaffective disorder because of how well
she functioned between episodes, but he believes on balance her history is
strongly suggestive of schizophrenia.” Goff raises the same issue of shifting
diagnostic standards. The positive symptoms (hallucinations, catatonia)
can appear in people with both conditions. But if these questions remain
unanswered, the issues they raise are not as contentious as they were in
the late 1960s, when psychoanalysis and neurobiology collided head on,
and when Martin’s illness reached the status of an emergency.
In keeping with a redirection of medical attention in the 1960s, there
was a turn toward community-based psychiatric treatment centers that
addressed social as well as psychological problems, often at the expense of
the seriously ill.’ But the most provocative attack against the conventional
treatments of the time came from a vigorous if controversial and short-
lived anti-psychiatry movement, arising both from within psychiatry and
without, which challenged the very notion of mental illness as such. The
position advanced by Thomas Szasz, an American psychiatrist, was the

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most radical. Bitter and caustic, his epigrammatic diatribes, first launched
in a book challengingly titled The Myth ofMental Illness (1960), were aimed
at not only at the therapeutic system but also at those who sought (or were
committed to) treatment. The book concludes with the resounding decla-
ration, “There is no medical, moral, or legal justification for involuntary
psychiatric interventions. They are crimes against humanity.” Denounc-
ing psychiatric patients as self-involved, over-indulged malingerers, he
claimed that people with psychosis suffer only from “righteous indignation
and seeing oneself as a victim,” and that (most) schizophrenia is a simply a
“type of arrogance and immodesty.’* These judgments, however vicious,
struck a chord that resonated widely in the cultural community, if not
among practicing psychotherapists. Szasz’s pronouncement that “Today,
particularly in the United States... nearly everyone is considered to some
extent mentally ill,’® and his identification of a “Therapeutic State,” in
which there is the socially sanctioned establishment of faith in therapy,
rather than in religion, anticipated, for instance, Christopher Lasch’s Cul-
ture ofNarcissism, Robert Hughes’s The Culture of Complaint, and their
many descendants.
Szasz’s argument rested on the belief that mind and body were distinct,
which ignored growing evidence—reflected in clinical practice—that psy-
chiatric symptoms could be alleviated with medication. The same assump-
tion underlay the writing of R. D. Laing, a British psychiatrist identified
with the New Left and with a movement encouraging more equitable
relations between psychiatrists and patients. Laing’s The Divided Self,
which also appeared in 1960, was a more traditional—and more sympa-
thetic—combination of case histories and interpretive conclusions, but he
too challenged the psychiatric establishment, writing that by its nature,
“psychopathology perpetuates the very dualism that most psychopathol-
ogists wish to avoid and that is clearly false.” In Laing’s view, maintaining
fixed divisions between mental health and illness in general, and assuming
in particular that schizophrenic behaviors are irredeemably meaningless,
exacerbated the problems psychiatry was meant to relieve; moreover, it

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was not innocent in this process, but culpable of abuse of power. Laing
has been criticized for romanticizing schizophrenia; while he recog-
nized the need for hospitalization in urgent cases, he believed that “the
cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter
the intact minds of many sane people,’ and claimed, more provocatively,
“The schizophrenic is often making a fool of himself and the doctor. He
is playing at being mad.”®
Laing’s contention that psychosis was a sane response to an ailing
society had wide appeal, although most mental healthcare providers dis-
missed renegades like him and Szasz, who ultimately did little to change
to the course of therapeutic practice. Among other cultural figures whose
writing contributed to the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s was
Michel Foucault, whose influential Madness and Civilization (1961; 1965
in English) looked to the Enlightenment for the origin of cultural patterns
cleaving sanity from madness.® Just as mental illness was being termed a
cultural construct by Foucault, Laing, and Szasz, it was also being revealed
to reflect a range of biases. Yet sexism, however prevalent, was not at first
prominent among them. Although psychiatry might have been accused of
gross injustice for holding women solely accountable, as bad mothers, for
all manner of emotional distress, that charge was not a primary thrust of
the anti-psychiatry argument. Instead there was implicit, in much of the
attack on psychiatry, a belief that women patients were as much to blame
as their doctors, for being disposed to complaint and helplessness and
talking too much, particularly about themselves. There were exceptions;
perhaps surprisingly, Szasz recognized the plight of the “modern woman”
who feels herself “a domestic slave.”® But the indictment of psychiatry for
sexism was taken further by a few rising feminists such as Phyllis Chesler,
whose sometimes imprecise but nonetheless forceful Women and Madness
(1972) charged a largely male psychiatric establishment with perpetuat-
ing prejudices that contributed to women’s emotional crises. From the
nineteenth century forward, Chesler claimed, “most women in asylums
were not insane,’ but instead had simply flouted conventions. Law and

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medicine were interchangeable resources, Chesler argued, for fathers and

husbands looking to dispose of unruly women. Seeking artistic prerogative
was, she wrote, seen as lunacy, as witness the treatment—and outcome—of
creative but troubled women from Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath.”
Chesler, putting schizophrenia in quotation marks,” said that the label
was often applied to women who simply didn’t act feminine; she also sug-
gested that hospitalization itself caused a gender role-shift. On the one
hand, “Madness and asylums generally function as... penalties for being
‘female, as well as for desiring or daring not to be”; on the other, “If asy-
lums are where you go for being alienated from your sex role, then you
might as well act out that alienation as much as possible.””3 While Chesler
suggested that Laing went too far in equating madness with political or
creative expression,” her focus on women as victims of a male psychiatric
establishment comported with tenets of the anti-psychiatry movement. It
also had parallels with the impulse toward alternative healing practices,
including those that looked away from sexuality—from the body—alto-
gether, with Zen meditation a popular example at the time.
Prominent among cultural figures who were sympathetic to the anti-
psychiatry movement was Susan Sontag; her essay celebrating Antonin
Artaud—whose mental illness resulted in long periods of hospitalization
and was progressively debilitating—appeared in 1973. Sontag wrote approv-
ingly of insanity as a route to expressive freedom: “Only a few situations in
modern secular society seem sufficiently extreme and uncommunicative
to have a chance of evading cooptation. Madness is one.””> Conceding
that “Artaud at no time in his life wholly got out from under the lash of
madness,” she argued nonetheless, “Psychiatry draws a clear line between
art... and symptomatology: the very boundary that Artaud contests.” In
Sontag’s view, “Madness is the logical conclusion of the commitment to
individuality when that commitment is pushed far enough.”
In popular culture, there is perhaps is no clearer expression of the belief
that the inmates are saner than those running the asylums than Ken Kesey’s
1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the 1975 movie Milos

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Forman made from it. But there is reason to believe that people with seri-
ous disorders of thought and mood found such representations—and the
anti-psychiatry movement that was their underpinning—both inaccurate
and insulting. It has been reported, for instance, that Joanne Greenberg,
author (as Hannah Green) of a fictionalized account of her struggle with
schizophrenia called I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964; it, too,
was made into a movie, in 1977), “hated the Kesey book. She later said,
‘Creativity and mental illness are opposites, not complements. ... I want
to choose my perceptions. I don’t want them to come out of some kind of
unconscious soup. I want it to be somethingIchoose to say, not something
that says me.”
Without question, this was Martin’s feeling as well. She never talked
about madness as a creative resource; she seldom talked about it at all. And
while it would be wrong to categorically deny any connection between her
illness and her work, there is absolutely no reason to consider her work
spontaneously cathartic or in any other way therapeutic. It was, instead,
manifestly deliberate and meant to express universal rather than personal
experience. Nonetheless, she was surely affected not only by the enormous
burden of living with mental illness, but also by the badly fractured system
of care available when she most needed it. Nor could she have been helped
by the wildly conflicting ideas promoted in the culture at large—and the
art community nearer at hand—about just what such illness was.

The conviction that a link exists between madness and creativity runs
throughout the history of art. While making the connection generally
involves celebrating access to ostensible reserves of imaginative freedom
and emotional breadth, as with Byron, perhaps, or van Gogh, some argu-
ments run in very different directions. One is presented in Madness and
Modernism by psychiatrist and cultural historian Louis Sass. In his con-
tention that schizophrenia inclines people toward the cerebral and the
abstract rather than the “free play of desire,” Sass outlines a disposition in
 SLEENCE

which Martin’s character as an artist is recognizable (although it should be

noted that his views on “madness” are not widely shared; as Mark Epstein
writes, “most schizophrenics can’t think coherently”; they are concrete in
their thinking but hardly cerebral or abstract”). It would in any event be
grossly irresponsible to approach Martin’s paintings as “schizophrenic.”
But suggestive comparisons can be made with other artists whose minds
apparently moved along similar pathways. Among well-known artists
whose schizophrenia is confirmed is a handful who made work that has
interesting points of contact with Martin’s. The highly structured and pat-
terned paintings and drawings by Adolf Wolfli, for instance, are organized
by rigid geometry and parallel lines that frame emblematic figures. Simi-
larly, the figurative contents of Martin Ramirez’s work—men on horseback,
trains—are set into systems of parallel lines that impose a hypnotic rhyth-
mic order. Martin’s paintings, thoroughly sophisticated and historically
conscious, and adamantly abstract, have in common with the work of
Wolfli and Ramirez only a more subtle version of such order’s ineffably
engrossing appeal. The measured increments of Martin’s grids (and, later,
stripes) establish a rhythm that insinuates itself into one’s perceptual field
with a force that, while much quieter, is no less insistent than the untrained
artists’ imagery. A 2005 exhibition linking Martin with faith healers Emma
Kunz and Hilma af Klint (of which more later) makes a similar comparison.
But perhaps a more productive comparison is with Yayoi Kusama, whose
work and life have several striking parallels with Martin’s. Born in 1929
in a provincial town west of Tokyo, Kusama came to the United States in
1957 (the year Martin settled at the seaport), having burned most of her
Surrealist-influenced early works. She landed in Seattle, with an encourag-
ing letter from Georgia O’Keeffe in her pocket, and, like Martin before her,
was exposed to the city’s Zen-influenced art community, still dominated
by Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. Kusama soon headed to the East Coast
and first exhibited her “Infinity Net” paintings in Boston in 1959; later
that year, they were shown in her first solo New York exhibition, at Brata
Gallery. These paintings, widely exhibited in the 1960s in New York, are
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composed of short curved strokes of paint, most often white against a dark
ground. Evoking loose crocheting when observed closely, they coalesce at
a distance into shimmering expanses, oceanic in their largest iterations.
Kusama has worked in a very wide range of mediums, including sculpture,
installations, performance, film, fiction, and poetry as well as painting and
works on paper, and in her sculptures particularly has employed repeti-
tive gestures or forms related to those in the Infinity Net paintings. These
canvases, which first gained wide attention for Kusama, remain among her
best known, and they are closest in sensibility to Martin’s work. Taking the
form of what could be called cursive grids, Kusama’s Infinity Nets form a
link between conventional Surrealist “automatism” and Martin’s paintings.
In 1961 Kusama moved to a studio one floor below Donald Judd’s. Like
Martin, Kusama received favorable critical attention from Judd, and from
Dore Ashton, early on. And again like Martin, Kusama’s residence in New
York during the 1960s was marked by the challenges of being female and
foreign, experiences that would figure explicitly in her work and that also
contributed, as the spirit of the times grew more hectic, to “recurring bouts
of depression and ill health.”*° Having briefly visited Japan in 1970, Kusama
returned for good in 1973, and since 1977 has lived by choice in a psychiat-
ric hospital close to her studio, even while achieving international renown
and continuing to paint. By that time, she “had come to understand and
explain her own work and obsessions as intrinsically linked to hallucina-
tory episodes during her childhood that resurfaced in later recurrent men-
tal breakdowns,’ Frances Morris writes in a survey exhibition catalogue.”
Thus, in a 2002 autobiography she titled Infinity Net, Kusama wrote, “I
often suffered episodes of severe neurosis. Iwould cover a canvas with nets,
then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my
own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began
to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me.” Waking
one morning to find, she said, the nets stuck to the window and crawling
onto her hands, Kusama was thrown into “the throes of a full-blown panic
attack” and called an ambulance, “which rushed me to Bellevue Hospital.
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Unfortunately this sort of thing began to happen with some regularity.”

(It is not inconceivable that she and Martin crossed paths there.) Panic and
its outcomes notwithstanding, Kusama saw fit to celebrate this unchecked
proliferation of nets: in 1959, she “issued a manifesto stating that every-
thing—myself, others, the entire universe—would be obliterated by white
nets of nothingness connecting astronomical accumulations of dots.”®
Unlike Martin, Kusama attributed her motifs to her native landscape: “The
scenery of the river bed behind our house, where I spent much of my
disconsolate childhood, became the miraculous source of a vision: the
hundreds of millions of white pebbles, each individually verifiable, really
‘existed’ there, drenched in the midsummer sun.”* But her hold on the
verifiable was weak. “I fluctuate between feelings of reality and unreality,”®
she wrote. In sharpest distinction to Martin is Kusama’s declaration, “Artists
do not usually express their own psychological complexes directly, but I
do use my complexes and fears as subjects.”*°
As Frances Morris observes, “Much of the writing on Kusama’s work has
followed the artist’s lead in linking her motivation, her manner of working,
the style of the work itself and its subject matter... to a psychological disor-
der dating from childhood and related to memorable traumatic incidents
in her early years,” including “her mother’s alleged violence towards her
daughter.”*” In consequence, “Consideration of her working process as
an artist is frequently diagnostic in character, particularly in relation to
notions of proliferation, accumulation, repetition, and obliteration within
the work.”®* The childhood hallucinations Kusama reports were primar-
ily visual, though they included, for instance, “an endless sea of violets
that ‘spoke’ to her.”*? Despite the artist’s own willingness to talk about it,
the nature of Kusama’s illness is given only indistinct definition in crit-
ical writing. According to Mignon Nixon, a psychoanalytically inclined
art historian, “The dynamic of desire” Kusama’s work enacts “is at once
manic and melancholic, hyperbolically indiscriminate and depressively
indifferent.” Juliet Mitchell, a psychoanalyst who writes often about art,
claims, “Kusama looks at the world from an hallucinatory perspective” and
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believes that “Kusama’s many ‘Infinity Net’ paintings suggest that nets can
provide protection from black holes.’ But Mitchell rejects the idea that
hallucinatory experience is emancipatory, arguing that the compulsive
repetition of the Infinity Nets “marks a traumatic experience: the trauma
has permeated the psychological protective barrier and exploded inside
with an ‘unbound’ energy; what fragmentis left of the shattered ego repeat-
edly tries to get hold of this wild energy and bind it.””
An intermittent extrovert whose flamboyant personality has often
fueled her work, Kusama is in some ways the polar opposite of Martin,
and the kind of psychoanalytic readings that Kusama has solicited would
surely strike Martin as profoundly misguided and personally abhorrent.
But the parallels remain, each body of work helping to illuminate the
other. For Martin, art is not born on gusts of irrepressible feeling. On the
contrary, it is an expression of control, which is a source of calm and hap-
piness. One senses that, for her, mental clarity was a moral imperative, an
ethical guidepost. Her paintings were aimed at this goal. To the extent that
Kusama’s art was an invitation to probe her psychological recesses, Martin's
work can be seen as a screen, shielding her from such scrutiny—baffling
the curious—while also protecting her, as she made them, from unwanted
and excessive stimulation. If it is possible to see her work as an ambience
one enters, as into the ocean, or the landscape, it also functions as a lens
through which she saw the world; it may be said to have clarified that
world for her and organized it, making it both orderly and luminous; it
surely does that for viewers.

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 Chapter 7

DEPARTURES

ithin half a dozen years of leaving New York, Martin was

painting and exhibiting, as well as writing and lecturing to
rapt audiences. In Jill Johnston’s vivid description of a talk
at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1973:

An overflow audience was reverent and expectant. She appeared very

alone sitting on a chair in the middle of a stage, her hair now short to
the ears and still brown, wearing a tangerine velveteen skirt to the floor
and a white starched blouse flared at the elbows, so solemn and formal
looking for a woman who joked a lot and laughed at herself and knew
how to build houses and shoot a.22 and maintain her own vehicles....
All the while she spoke she was twisting a white handkerchief like worry
beads in her lap. Her speech was a memorized piece of writing 4,000
words long.'

But there had been an interregnum of some length and significance.

In the white pickup truck she’d bought in Detroit in 1967, Martin “drove
around” (the vague term is hers, insistently) in the Pacific Northwest, Can-
ada, and the American Southwest for eighteen months, circling areas where
she’d grown up and sleeping in the camper the truck hauled. While on
the road, she wrote to Sam Wagstaff, “I have been enjoying myself. Have

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a canoe that I put on the lakes and some rivers. Sometimes camping out
and packing.” She was heading, she said, for the desert and Lake Powell in
Utah. “Being alone and not talking I recommend,” she wrote.”
In 1976, she again spoke of the solitary pleasures of this long road trip:
“I went on a camping trip. I stayed in forest camps up north which could
camp three thousand people. But there was nobody there. I was there alone.
I enjoyed it. I had this problem, you see, and I had to have my mind to
myself. When you're with other people, your mind isn’t your own.”? Speak-
ing like the homestead-born pragmatist she was, Martin advised treating
inner trouble through active, independent response: “Say that you have
become aware of a sudden fear or something like that. Suddenly your heart
beats and youre in a panic and you just feel afraid. Well, if you can put
your whole mind on that fear, you cannot only understand it,... you recog-
nize it. And once recognized, it no longer has the strength to disturb you.”4
But looking back at her period of driving around a dozen years later,
she was far less resolute. “A lot of people withdraw from society, as an
experiment. So I thought I would withdraw and see how enlightening it
would be. But I found out that it’s not enlightening. I think that what you're
supposed to do is stay in the midst of life.”> Shortly after her wandering
had ended, she’d written the summary assessment, “Asceticism is a mistake
/ sought out suffering is a mistake.” Walking, Zen-like, in sandals in the
snow was not advisable. Neither did she consider the wilderness interlude
a resource for her painting. Recalling the occasional snowfall in places
where she had camped and the cold, she said she didn’t mind it, being
from Canada, and then hastened to add, “I didn’t go out to go into nature
[for my work]; I don’t want anybody to think that. My work is anti-nature.””
Even the unbroken solitude often attributed to this period (with Martin’s
blessing) is overstated. Lenore Tawney spent nearly two weeks with her,
traveling to Big Sur in California and then to Flagstaff, Arizona, by way
of Death Valley, and, perhaps most surprisingly, Las Vegas—Sin City sel-
dom figures in the portrait drawn of Martin. Tawney went back East from

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Flagstaff, but Martin went on to the Grand Canyon before concluding her
travels in New Mexico.
In Martin’s initial recollection, the journey eventually just wound down
of its own accord, its mission fulfilled. “Well... finally, you see, I remem-
bered New Mexico. I was there before, but I traveled a long way, as far
as I could go, and in every direction.”? But in subsequent (and repeated)
retellings, her extended ramble ended more momentously. As she recalled
it in 1987, “I drove around and drove around, and then I had a vision of an
adobe brick. So I thought that must be New Mexico so I went back”; the
memory made her laugh heartily.” In any case, the period of nomadism
led Martin, in a counter-biblical narrative, back to the desert, this time
for good. By 1968 she had surfaced in Cuba, a small town northwest of
Santa Fe, where she stopped at a gas station café and asked its manager if
he knew of any available land with a spring. She was looking to rent, not
buy; her voices had told her not to own property." The manager directed
Martin to his wife’s property on the remote Portales mesa, approximately
six miles wide, eight long and one thousand feet in elevation. She secured
a “lifetime” lease, at ten dollars a month, for fifty acres.
Portales overlooks a valley that runs along the foothills of the Sangre de
Cristo Mountains to the west. It is a twenty-mile drive, over dirt roads, from
the nearest highway. Cuba, the nearest town, was (and remains) isolated,
poor, and lacking in visible history or charm. On the mesa, Martin—who
was 56 when she settled there—had no telephone and no electricity; rain-
water was collected for drinking, and water for other household needs was
pumped from a well.” Her closest neighbor was six miles away. In the early
months, Martin’s efforts were directed entirely toward building, which
absorbed both her energy and her avid interest. The first dwelling, apart
from the camper, was made with adobe, using skills she had developed in
Albuquerque in the 1940s. Adobe is a natural choice in a region where
dirt is more readily available than lumber, and it is also favored because
it is both a good insulator and an excellent sound absorber. Assembled

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brick by handmade brick into rectangular units laid in even courses, it is

a kind of physical equivalent to Martin’s hand-ruled painting scaffolds.
It has further been noted, by Karen Schiff, that the mud that covers
the adobe bricks, inside and out, softens the surfaces.and obscures the
underlying grid in a way that is comparable to the atmospheric effects of
Martin’s paintings, when seen at a distance."4 Martin’s interest in building
with native materials also led her to use “logs they call vigas”; she cut
down trees with a chain saw, she said, and built “a very big log studio...
by myself because I lived so far away that by the time anybody got there
they’d have to go home.” She ultimately constructed five buildings."® (In
fact, it seems she had help with the studio from the young architect Bill
Katz, a friend of Robert Indiana, through whom they met.”)
Protected on her mesa-top fastness, Martin soon began to make regular
contacts with old acquaintances and new ones and resumed traveling. As
early as April 1968 she was at Bennington College in Vermont with Betty
Parsons, for a memorial exhibition of Paul Feeley’s work." In 1971 she
traveled to Germany, at the invitation of Luitpold Domberger, to create
a suite of thirty screenprints, titled On a Clear Day, published in 1973 by
Robert Feldman’s Parasol Press in New York. Exceptionally simple and
subtly luminous, the square grids, of varying internal proportions, are
delineated in dark gray ink. In a draft for the statement accompanying
the portfolio, Martin wrote, “these prints express innosense [sic] of mind.
If you can go with them and hold your mind as emty [sic] and tranquil
as they are and recognize your feelings at the same time you will realize
your full response to this work.” Like the portfolio’s title, the statement
was an announcement of a break in the clouds: work had resumed, though
for several years it would follow digressive paths. When the prints were
shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973, curator Riva Castleman
wrote for the exhibition’s press release, “[Martin] has sought to replace, by
means of mechanical application, the illusionary and irregular drawing
that detracted from the perfection she sought in her compositions, asking
the silkscreen workshop to cut stencils “without attempting to duplicate

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her autographic line.” Although consonant with esthetic preferences of

the early 1970s, eliminating the autographic line was starkly at odds with
Martin’s previous work, and she did not repeat the experiment.
By the early 1970s Martin was also welcoming visitors, albeit on a selec-
tive basis. In 1971 the writer and curator Douglas Crimp contacted her for
help in locating paintings for an exhibition he was organizing at a small
gallery run by the School of Visual Arts in New York—it was Crimp’s first
curatorial effort and a first noncommercial solo show for Martin. After
some time, she telephoned him and asked him to come and see her, and
when he accepted, Crimp recalled, “I learned how far she’d had to drive
to make that phone call.” In his telling:

We had a map of the mesa where Martin lived that she'd drawn and sent
to me, but it wasn’t at all detailed, and Pat [Steir, the painter, who was his
traveling companion] and I found it very difficult to determine, in the
dry desert landscape, what was a road and what wasn’t.... Eventually
we realized we had no idea where we were in relation to Martin’s map,
or even the way to get back off the mesa, and the sun was beginning
to set. Then, as if from out of nowhere, Agnes Martin drove up in her
pickup. As Irecall, she showed little sympathy for our plight.”

They followed her to the “beautiful one-room adobe she'd built’; that
night, Martin slept in her camper, “which seemed to serve as her bedroom,
even though she had the house. I remember sleeping in a kind of log
shed... there was no sign yet of the studio she would build three years
later in which to resume painting.” And although the trip was fruitful and
memorable, it was no easier socially than logistically. “Apart from Martin’s
shyness and her being unused to being around people,’ Crimp says, “her
conversation was odd, gnomic~—assertive and tentative at once.” Steir’s
memory of this initial trip—she became a regular visitor—included the
bountiful meal of chicken and white wine that Martin prepared, and in
her recollection the two women shared the one-room adobe house.

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 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

Ann Wilson visited shortly thereafter, in 1972, and later wrote, “After
taking a bus from the airport to Cuba, I asked in a coffee shop where Agnes
Martin lived. Two men said she was the woman who cleaned their bear
skins for them, and they drove me in a truck down the road to a fence by a
dry river bed.” Wilson’s rather reverent account of the simple furnishings
of Martin’s home make mention of an old wood-burning, cast-iron stove
used for baking muffins (as at the seaport), a bright orange hydraulic water
pump, a wooden board with tools, a sewing machine, and a sink chest.
Among the details Wilson noted are a few clearly intended to suggest
connections to Martin’s artwork: “Looking out the window Agnes built
over her table. Four-over-four-over-four rectangles of glass. Pure cerulean
with white clouds.” Wilson observed, “Pine trees and sage scent. The room
has whitewashed and plain adobe walls. The rough wooden cupboards are
also whitewashed. Tree beams, with bark still on them, measure across the
ceiling spaces. Black-and-white wide squares of checkered linoleum tile
measure out the floor. There is a rocking chair, and the simple wooden
benches that Agnes made.” Wilson also provided testimony to the sixty-
year-old Martin’s prodigious physical strength. “Agnes Martin wanted to
lay stones in front of her adobe door. ‘Big enough for two chairs, so I can
sit outside in the evening, she said.” So Wilson and a friend “worked in
the hot New Mexico sun on the roof of the world all one morning digging
the clay and moving stones in place. We were then too tired to continue
as the stones were very heavy. Agnes came out of the door and laughed at
our result. We had not been able to make the stones lie flat. In a half hour
she moved all the stones and leveled the earth and placed them exactly
right.”-4
Jill Johnston made the pilgrimage the following year and soon after pub-
lished a decidedly more picaresque account: after leaving Cuba, she and
her travel mates, utterly confounded by the unmarked terrain, bumped
along rutted dirt roads past “lots of gates and dry river beds and little for-
ests.... there was not only a third gate but a fork... we had passed the half
eaten carcass of a cow right along the side of the road... some part of my

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 DEPARTURES

head said we were going to die in the desert... i was about to die laughing
... isaid we should turn back... so we did it again.”5 Of their conversation
on finally reaching Martin’s home, Johnston recalled:

she talked about animals having thoughts” and how she doesn’t keep
domestic ones any more, she doesn’t want them around any more than
people. What she keeps exactly is five vehicles in perfect working order
and a beebee gun and a regular .22. not counting the small adobe in
which she cooks and eats and possibly reads and undoubtedly muses,
an open tall shedlike garage where she was parking her new shiny blue
vw sports model, an outhouse, a tiny cave log room guest dwelling and
a compost affair and she still sleeps in the dodge pickup or the pickup
detached from the truck in which she lived for a couple of years riding
all round the u.s. and canada till she found the proper mesa.”

But few were welcome on the mesa; the material rigors of her life (the
shiny new VW notwithstanding) were sufficiently demanding to discour-
age socializing—and art-making as well. And her initial projects, in this
period, largely departed from paint on canvas.
One of the detours Martin followed before recommitting herself to
painting led to the conception of a kind of earthwork, a then new form of
generally large-scale sculpture created directly in the landscape—evidence
that despite her seclusion, she had been keeping up with developments in
the art world. “I had an inspiration about a land thing—like Smithson,’ she
said. (Robert Smithson’s best-known work, Spiral Jetty, was constructed in
1970; Martin had met him when he curated the 1966 Dwan gallery exhi-
bition, 10. She also later mentioned Michael Heizer’s work in connection
with her garden plan.) She continued:

I thought I was going to build a garden. I mean, I was going to build an

eight-foot wall, 40 yards square. It was going to be a Zen garden, or at
least something like it, but with absolutely nothing alive in it. We have

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a lot of interesting materials where I live. The mountains are volcanic,

and there are a lot of different kinds of lava, some of it very light and
very white. I was only going to let people in this construction one at a
time, and if their response to the silence would be good, then I would
have considered the structure successful.... But I haven’t built this
garden. I don’t know if I will, because I can almost see what I’m going
to do.?8

Even though she didn’t construct it—later she said the fear that it would
be vandalized “took the starch out of me”*°—this project confirms the
depth of Martin’s involvement, in this period, with building in indige-
nous materials, whether adobe dwellings or garden walls made of volcanic
rock. It was not the last time that she’d entertain the idea of departing
from painting in order to celebrate—if that is the right term for a proj-
ect so parsimonious—the natural world with a directness she renounced
in her primary medium. The many striking elements of this unrealized
“garden” include the absence of living flora, the unyielding control such
a structure would have permitted her, the silence and isolation it would
have enforced
for viewers, and, not least, the judgment Martin would have
passed on each visitor’s response. Having talked of entering a painting as
one parted a curtain, or entered the ocean,* she envisioned a decidedly
more arid version of such an experience. Yet for all its commitment to
profound solitude, the equilateral garden—so evocative, even in Martin’s
sketchy description, of a LeWitt sculpture—suggests she was still thinking
of her place in the cosmopolitan art world.
By the time of Ann Wilson’s visit of 1972, Martin had also returned to
paper, pencils, and paint. “There is a wire strung across the long wall on
which hang two small watercolors done on thin paper,’ Wilson reported.
“The first is of sixteen squares indented all around about a quarter-inch
with cross spaces between them. The lines are penciled in and painted
with a gray-white. The lines give the effect of seeming to be part of the
fiber of the paper, or of emblems growing out of the grain... The second

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watercolor presents twelve rectangles in a cross division of the paper, three

rectangles per division.
The paint surface is very apparent.”
Having tentatively resumed painting, on paper, Martin soon reengaged
with the system by which art is exhibited and sold, and although she would
always be wary of art dealers, museum directors, critics, and publishers,
her membership in the art tribe would remain firm. In fact, Wilson’s trip
had been prompted by a key event in Martin’s reentry into the art world.
In 1973 Suzanne Delehanty, who had become director of the Institute
of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
two years earlier, presented a survey there of the work Martin had made
between 1957 and 1967. Having seen and admired Martin’s paintings ina
number of places, including Documenta V, in 1972, Delehanty (like Crimp)
approached Martin directly, and the artist agreed to cooperate with her.
The exhibition included more than three dozen paintings (some quite
small), nearly as many works on paper, and three constructions from the
late 1950s. It proved to be a turning point, crucial in reviving interest in
Martin’s work: an opportunity for her both to open herself to critical and
public response and, as she saw it, to set some aspects of her record straight.
Perhaps inevitably, it was preceded by a number of struggles, begin-
ning with one over the nature of the exhibition catalogue, that generally
non-negotiable exhibition accessory about which Martin was so leery. An
undated letter from Martin to Delehanty begins, “I simply cannot come
through with a biography I do not present my life only the work and
perhaps thoughts that that are completely unhelpful as I explain in my
notes.” Evidently responding to a term Delehanty had introduced, Martin
continued, “It is very discomforting thinking about ‘the demand of the
people’ I do not pay any attention to ‘the demand’ ever. ‘The demand’ can
never be met I assure you. We must act according to inspiration.” Martin
did concede her age and birthplace, wrote that she learned to paint at
Columbia (stretching the truth just a bit) and that she was “was happy
to become an American citizen.” She added, “I would prefer it if you did
not list exhibitions but the names of collectors of course should be listed

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and all those who help in any way.”? Obviously, her reluctance to publish
personal information had nothing to do with naiveté.
In further correspondence with Delehanty, Martin contended with other
aspects of the written record to that point. She distanced herself from her
paintings’ titles, in part by attributing them to friends. For instance, she
insisted, “All Lenore’s titles are romantic not classic and a contradiction of
the work. If I wrote a romantic title I fell by the wayside probably started
Lenore on the wrong foot. If 1come out for any reason it seems to me it
should be to correct those titles.” In an attempt to explain the titles of which
she approved, she wrote, “You will probably think I am mad when I say
that what makes my titles unromantic is that they represent experiences
of the mind.” And in a letter to Frank Kolbert, an art dealer and critic who
had written about her work, Martin said, “This is a very sensitive criticism
and I am grateful to you for writing it.... But the titles are not ironical. I
do not think I am capable of irony. ‘The Desert’ is of the mind.”
The correspondence with Delehanty also reveals Martin’s disappoint-
ment with previous critics and commentators. (Writing on a photocopy of
an early Dore Ashton review, Martin fumed, “this is completely inaccurate
in every detail and in point of view please don’t quote anything from
it Environment and biography have nothing to do with inspired work.”)
Nothing made her angrier than a statement that had appeared over her
name in press material for an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. It
begins, “I paint out of certain experiences not mystical. 1 paint without rep-
resentational object. I paint beauty without idealism, the new real beauty
that needs very much to be defined by modern philosophers. (I consider
idealism, mysticism and conventions interferences in occasions of real
beauty.)” On a photocopy of this statement, Martin wrote, “I did not write
this statement and it is not true. I do not paint or not paint what it says.”
And in a separate letter, she added: “This statement is the most quoted of
my ‘statements’ and I did not write it and I hate every word. It was written
by a fellow called Ray Izzbiki who pretended to write what I said but wrote
instead his own thoughts. Please File.”3

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 DEPARTURES

Martin struggled as well with Ann Wilson, whom Delehanty had asked
to furnish a catalogue essay—or to extract from Martin a body of writing
that would serve the same purpose; hence Wilson’s visit to Cuba. Martin’s
anxiety ahead of her arrival is evident in a postcard she sent to Delehanty
in April: “Forgive me for taking your time,” Martin begins, “but please
send me Ann’s Wilson’s [sic] phone number I am afraid she will come to
see me without giving me enough notice and tam my house is very hard
to find. I would like to meet her in Albuquerque airport. Agnes Martin.”
Subsequently, in an undated letter, she wrote gratefully to Delehanty, “I
feel very fortunate in having had the opportunity of talking with Anne.
We had a number of good interviews and I think the general theme is set.
Thank-you. She asked me to send the notes that I write to myself once in
a while and perhaps drawings etc.” But in a subsequent letter to Wilson,
also undated, she pleaded, “Dear Annie, Please don’t say anything about
why I do this and that like that bit about the horizontal line. It is crazy to
say I paint from an image and then pull it to pieces.” And finally, in a letter
about the catalogue to Delehanty, “Is Ann on the job? If she fails you, surely
Alloway could do it and would since he is investigating. I would still prefer
Ann but she is not very dependable. Agnes.”
In the event, it was Lawrence Alloway, already familiar with Martin’s
work, who wrote the catalogue’s critical essay. Wilson’s unpublished essay,
titled “Agnes Martin: The Essential Form, The Committed Life,” is excep-
tionally rich with metaphor and insight; she compares the compositions
of the grids to Chinese painting and its multiple focal points, and she says
Martin’s “diagrams” are “very like the relationship of rain to the ocean.”
Perhaps less amenably to Martin, Wilson also wrote, “The reason some
people are drawn to Agnes Martin is because she had the vision to try to
make a map of the proportions of the undistracted mind.” And she con-
cludes with an American Indian Shaman Song (“With the Zig Zag lightning
flung over your head, come to us soaring. ..”).*
By contrast, Alloway begins with a straightforward account of Martin’s
development. While noting that her square canvases anticipate Reinhardt’s

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black squares and also LeWitt’s pencil drawings on walls, which he sug-
gests “may be an extrapolation of Martin’s incorporation of the pencil
into painting,” Alloway claims that her “repetitive forms . .. resemble
stitching” and recall the “motifs on Indian textiles”»°—connections that
Martin had vigorously disputed. Alloway’s short text also includes the
assertion, “Both by inference from her imagery and from judging her titles
we recognize a form of nature imagery,” along with the slightly grudging
admission, “There is reason, however, not to make too much of the nature
metaphors.”?”
Despite Alloway’s violations of Martin’s strictures, she was overjoyed
with the publication. “Dear Suzanne,” she wrote, “If this catalogue is an
accurate indication of the composition of the show-—it is hard for me to
wait to see it Ithought your introduction just right and the choices beyond
my hopes just right.... Very happy Agnes.” And the formality of her rela-
tionship with Delehanty had completely evaporated. The sixty-one-year-
old artist told the ICA director, then in her late twenties, “I beg you not
to work too hard. I really am a bit afraid for you. Exhibiting is the hardest
work in the world. I will be glad to hear that you are taking a bit of holiday.
Quite a long one would be best.... Please be guided by me.”
Martin also specified, with great care, what she would and wouldn't
do in connection with the exhibition’s reception, in January 1973. “Since
Richard Tuttle has volunteered to help I will suggest that he stand in for
me at the opening and protect you.” Further, “I cannot talk informally to
the students or anyone—but I could talk to the students—a formal talk that
would last one hour. The subject would be: ‘The Underlying Perfection
in
Life’ No social reception. I would come to the Inst of C. Art. Someone
would show me the room in which I would speak then I would go to my
hotel return to speak and return to the hotel. No interviews. We are well
enough acquainted now so that you will understand I am sure and explain
for me. Just say that Iam a hermit”
The progression of these letters is illuminating and touching. Martin’s
warmth, her long experience as a teacher and her irrepressible maternal

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inclinations are all apparent in her correspondence with Delehanty. Her

anxiety about the exhibition opening (hardly unusual, except perhaps in
its extremity) is handled with a firmness that is both funny and revealing.
She knew exactly what to expect, and also just how to handle it. She even
had an idea of how to exploit the persona with which she knew people
identified her: “Just say that 1am a hermit.” (On the occasion of a lecture
three years later, at Yale, she similarly said to her new dealer, Arne Glim-
cher, “No questions afterward. When I come down, just take my arm and
make a beeline for the door.”3*)
As Delehanty describes the lecture, which took place in February, Martin
prevailed in every way. Arriving at the ICA in a Burberry raincoat, plaid
Pendleton skirt and white shirt, stout and crop-haired, she presented her-
self as a plainspoken, conservatively dressed outlier to the notoriously
fashion-conscious cultural elite. The spirit of the sixties still lingered on the
college campus, but Martin did not indulge it. And by contrast with other
women artists she admired, including O'Keeffe, so effectively glamorized
by her husband Alfred Stieglitz, and her soon-to-be gallery mate at Pace
Louise Nevelson, with her famously luxuriant eyelashes and furs, Martin
declined the demeanor of a star. She sat in a chair and she read her talk
to a capacity crowd of over two hundred.® Published later, the lecture
began, solemnly, “The process of life is hidden from us. The meaning of
suffering is held from us. And we are blind to life.” But she quickly turned
toward uplift: if pride is what blinds us, work helps us defeat it. With the
pronouncement, “I will now speak directly to the art students present,” she
shifted to exhortation: “There is no halfway with art. We wake up thinking
about it and we go to sleep thinking about it.” While inspiration leads us,
failure can’t be avoided; artwork is very hard. Moments of joy help, and
they should be stockpiled. “The function of art work is the stimulation of
sensibilities, the renewal of memories of moments of perfection.”*°
A substantial portion of the lecture concerned the feeling of defeat,
when all hope is lost. It is in this talk that Martin described “the panic of
complete helplessness” that “drives us to fantastic extremes,’ and admitted,

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“the solitary life is full of terrors.” And she spoke of the “Dragon,” worse
than the terror of fear. He cannot be slain—“that is a medieval idea, I
guess”—so we must become familiar with him “and hope that he sleeps.
The way things are most of the time, is that he is awake and we are asleep.
What we hope is the opposite.”
Although the Dragon introduced a theme that revealed a good deal
about Martin’s interior life, it also can be understood as an allegory with
universal application—which is precisely how it was read. In any case, much
of the lecture is firmly dedicated to guiding the young: “Say to yourselves:
I am going to work in order to see myself and free myself. I will have to be
by myself almost all the time and it will be a quiet life,” she urged near its
conclusion. Rising to a rhapsodic final statement, Martin crafted a nautical
metaphor: “For those who are visual minded I will say: there seems to be a
fine ship at anchor. Fear is the anchor, convention is the chain, ghosts stalk
the decks, the sails are filled with Pride and the ship does not move. But
there are moments for all of us in which the anchor is weighed.”
With the presentation of such public lectures (including one at Cornell
University in January 1972, one at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1973 when
the ICA show traveled there, and one at Maharishi University in June 1976;
Johnston writes that she gave six lectures in 1973 alone, and there were
several in the 1980s), Martin introduced a speaking voice that was aug-
mented by occasionally published texts, including those that appeared in
the ICA catalogue. (A selection of texts and lecture notes were published
by Hatje Cantz in 1992.*’) Thereafter, this voice forcibly intervened in the
critical reception to her work and constituted, in the near-total absence
of exhibition catalogues she enforced, a substantial part of the textual
framework for her work. Looking back, she gave conflicting reports about
her writing. In 1974, she responded with some annoyance to a question
about whether she wrote every day: “I don’t write at all. There’s a girl mak-
ing a catalog for me, Ann Wilson and... she asked me to send sketches
and notes. Well, I don’t really write notes very much? Fifteen years later,
when asked again about her writing, she said, “Oh, I was just staying sane.

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I wrote a journal. ...1 think anybody who goes to live a solitary and sim-
ple life would naturally write a journal.”45 But on the same occasion she
said, of the fables that were published in the catalogue, that though they
came to her “all at once,” she’d never written them down.“* In 2013 Wilson
recalled their writing process to me: “I’d handwrite what she said. Then I
restructured it.’*” Additionally, Martin “had a whole pile of notebooks,”
which Wilson similarly “edited and restructured.” Obviously, Martin had
mixed feelings, at best, about this process. Both Martin and Wilson signed
the ICA catalogue texts. (In the Hatje Cantz volume they are attributed
only to Martin.) And while Martin fretted over details, she nonetheless
approved and even embraced the publication. If in some passages it is
hard to disentangle Martin’s words from Wilson’s intervention, the tone
is generally consistent with later writing published by Martin alone and
surely revealing of her preoccupations at the time.*
The ICA catalogue’s first text, “The Untroubled Mind” is a hybrid of
sermon, poetry, fable, and diary; printed in verse form, it wanders further,
and is less carefully worded and constructed, than the lecture. It is rife with
references to the Christianity that significantly shaped Martin’s childhood
and reappeared in her reading of Christian and Old Testament figures
in her seaport years, but there are also invocations of classical thought,
Plato in particular, along with Asian art and spiritual systems. It is in “The
Untroubled Mind” that certain much-quoted phrases appear. A number of
them are koan-like: “beauty is unattached,” or “look between the rain / the
drops are insular / try to remember before you were born.” Some in this
category apply directly to art: “The observer makes the painting.” And some
provide uncharacteristically direct accounts of her compositional choices:

I saw the plains driving out of New Mexico and I thought the
plain had it
just the plane
If you draw a diagonal, that’s loose at both ends
I don’t like circles—too expanding

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Martin also reflects in this text on her development:

Painting is not about ideas or personal emotion

When I was painting in New York I was not so clear about that
Now I’m very clear that the object is freedom®*

: pers ee :
Among Martin’s references to classical writers is her variation on Plato’s
allegory of the cave:

Just follow what Plato has to say

Classicists are people that look out with their back to the world.
It represents something that isn’t possible in the world
More perfection than is possible in the world
it’s as unsubjective as possible

In a related passage, she contends,

Plato says that all that exists are shadows.

To a detached person the complication of the involved life
is like chaos
If you don’t like the chaos youre a classicist
If you like it you’re a romanticist

Deliberately or not, she has, it seems, upended Plato’s allegory. In the

dialogue in question, Plato has Socrates say that we unfortunate mortals
are imprisoned in a dark cave, chained at neck and feet so we face its rear
wall, where we see only the shadows of the true world’s inhabitants and
artifacts, projected by a fire burning behind us. The light of day alone can
grant life its fullness, and “is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful
in anything.» Converting Plato’s lightless cave to a realm of clarity and
freedom, Martin infuses it with perfection, an inversion that may have
 DEPARTURES

resulted from compounding Plato with Buddhism, as suggested by another

passage in “The Untroubled Mind” that also urges turning away from the
world: “When you get off the wheel you're looking out / You stand with
your back to the turmoil.” In Buddhism, the Wheel of Life is a series of
concentric realms through which all beings progress in cycles of rebirth
into increasingly enlightened forms of existence; one can step off it only
in a state of transcendence. In either case, the point toward which Martin
strove is the same: quiet, clarity, simplicity, and above all freedom from
worldly entanglements.
“The Untroubled Mind” ranges broadly, from passages in which Martin
speaks from a distant height of moral precepts and advantageous practices
to others where she writes more frankly about her emotional experience.
There is quite a bit concerning solitude: “Others do not really exist in sol-
itude. I do not exist / no thinking of others even when they are there,” she
writes, describing a feeling that might resonate for many readers. More
elliptically, she says,

I, like the deer, looked

finding less and less
living is grazing
memory is chewing cud
wandering away from everything
giving up everything
not me anymore, any of it
retired ego, wandering

Martin expresses her belief in inspiration when she writes, “Muses come
and help me now. It exists in the mind / Before it’s presented on paper it
exists in the mind.” Her claim that “it is a consolation even to plants and
animals” is perplexing. And there are places where the writing becomes
frankly irrational, such as,

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A boy whenever he had a problem

he called this rock up out of the mud
he turned into a rock
he summoned a vision of quiet

Such passages can be read as flights of lyric symbolism, but they are
also, perhaps, indicative of darker impulses. At the end of “The Untroubled
Mind’ is a prose paragraph that concludes on a note as arresting for its mat-
ter-of-factness as its poignancy: “Small children are taken to the park for
social play; sent to nursery school and headstart. But the little child sitting
alone, perhaps even neglected and forgotten, is the one open to inspiration
and the development of sensibility.” As in her passage about an unhappy
little boy, Martin has abruptly descended from the podium to speak of
palpable things she surely knows well: early education with its dubious
advantages, on the one hand, and on the other a solitary child, neglected
and forgotten, but spared utter misery by an inclination toward art.
The ICA catalogue includes two further texts. One is a pair of very brief
“Willie Stories” that offer, in rather strenuously homespun language, two
tales of a fictional man-child. References to classical myth, as well as to
Christianity’s God, devil, and angels, thread through both; Martin would
later say that like the paintings, the fables just come into her mind, “abso-
lutely from beginning to end.”* In the first, Willie is dragged through the
river of Lethe, then jumps into “the fire.” After three days, having proved
immune to its flames, “he walked right up to satan’s office / and he signed
up to be a devil.” The second tale tells of Willie’s fondness for his mother,
replaced by love for his wife, which is surpassed by his love of his son. He
beseeches God each time his affections shift to ensure that the new love sur-
vives unchallenged, which prompts a patient deity to instruct His angels,

“Take care of Willie.”

And the angels said, “What are we going to do with
these human beings they all want the same thing

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and want it changed?”

And God says, “Arrange it that way.”

It may be relevant to Martin’s several Willie stories that Willa Cather,

often called Willie by her family, wrote a short story for children called
“Wee Winkie’s Wanderings”—the reference is to the nursery rhyme “Wee
Willie Winkie’—in which an intrepid and stubborn little girl decides that
she would like to ride the mower with her father; when her mother denies
her wish, Winkie declares her intention to run away. To the child’s deep
chagrin, her mother, in an ostensibly benevolent but plainly hurtful effort
to teach her a lesson, urges her on. So the little girl sets out for a nearby
mountain, “resolved that she would not speak... to a single living crea-
ture.” The story ends happily, with Winkie restored to her mother; there
are unmistakable parallels, though, to the unhappy relationship Martin
had with her own mother.*
The last of the ICA catalogue texts is the “Parable of the Two Hearts.” It
begins, “Once there were two lovers that had equal hearts,” who pursued
each other and, with the help of the angels, “perceived each other,’ so
that “their hearts melted into one.” But finding themselves restless, they
parted, one flying into the sky, the other into the sea. Ceaseless yearning
for the spurned other ensued, stumping the angels (as did Willie). Luckily,
however, “There’s one thing that God is not able to endure— / a suffering
heart,” so he caused the two hearts to reunite in the form of sea water,
which when it evaporates and then returns as rain “affects people and
softens them. I painted a painting called This Rain.” Ending on this unex-
pected note, the distinctly childlike parable offers itself as the subject of
a Rothko-esque painting of 1960 in which a blue rectangle hovers over a
warm white one; the ascription of meaning is utterly at odds with Martin’s
unyielding insistence that abstraction is a language devoid of narrative or
indeed figurative reference.
It is possible to see again, in the “Parable of the Two Hearts,” evidence of
Martin’s interest in Plato. In his Symposium, Plato ascribes to Aristophanes

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a speech that explains, “our nature wasn’t originally the same as it is now:
... there used to be three human genders,” male, female and “a third,
which was a combination of both the other two. Its name has survived,
but the gender itself has died out. In those days, there was a distinct type
of androgynous person,” which “combined male and female; nowadays,
however, only the word remains, and that counts as an insult.” Originally
such persons were singularly valued and powerful. So Zeus, after taking
counsel with the other gods, decided to cut these androgynes in half, a bru-
tal stroke. “It was their very essence that had been split in two, so each half
missed its other half and tried to be with it,” Plato wrote, in language strik-
ingly echoed by Martin’s. The sundered parts yearned for reunification,
with a longing that Plato pointedly describes as by no means less powerful
when the attraction is between those of the same sex: “Now, when some-
one who loves boys—or whatever his sexual preferences may be—actually
meets his other half, it’s an overwhelming experience. It’s impossible to
describe the affection, warmth, and love they feel for each other.”® Like the
passages from Gertrude Stein that are, it has been suggested, present off-
frame in Martin’s writing, Plato’s Symposium, to which Martin may have
been alluding, considers with great frankness (and considerable humor)
a kind of desire that she firmly refused to publicly acknowledge. Its bear-
ing on her painting may indeed be negligible, but it suggests the range of
passions, and of inhibitions, that she negotiated with a remarkably steady
hand—and no small measure of wit—throughout her career.
Martin’s writing, and the public speaking that broadcast it, held an
important but hard-to-define position in her creative life and in her per-
sonal one as well. By several accounts, the voice of her writing and public
speaking, for all its formality, was not that different from the tone she took
in social interaction. Though some old friends insist on her earthiness, she
often defaulted to a form of personal exchange that could be confused
with an internal monologue spoken aloud; in private as well as public
speech, she projected both modesty and incontrovertibility. According

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to her friend the artist Harmony Hammond, “you didn’t have a conversa-
tion with Agnes, because she would hold forth,’ a description echoed by
other acquaintances. Jill Johnston offered a complementary perspective,
reporting, “she says she talks all the time when people come in order not
to know more than she wants to know.”’ As with her instructions to her
lecture hosts, she generally knew just what she was doing.
One senses that words often were, to Martin, as numinous as the mental
images that she called inspirations: her writing conducts a kind of charge
that is sometimes nearly independent of conventional meaning. And, as in
her painting, Martin’s handwriting matters: the line that never ceases in her
painting is kept moving just as steadily in her correspondence, personal
musings, and public texts. The manuscripts, which are almost always on
lined notebook paper, often seem to be fair copies of discarded drafts; the
penmanship is careful and old-fashioned. Just as she never had a television
set, she apparently never saw a need for a typewriter (both, it might be
noted, are objectionably noisy). And like her paintings, her writing is as
effective at keeping people at bay as at drawing them in. If, as Delehanty
observes, “She wrote things out as a way to protect herself,”* it was a strat-
egy that served her not only for public speaking. It was also a procedure,
perhaps manual as well as mental, for organizing her thoughts. And it
expressed an impulse, which sometimes seems forcefully compelled, to
construct a comprehensively ordered world, to issue precepts for its ongo-
ing regulation and to speak in generalizations that preclude the emotional
give and take of ordinary conversation.
But Martin’s writing has a wide-ranging erudition and wealth of met-
aphor that go far beyond compulsion; as with her painting, it would be
wrong to label it symptomatic, or cathartic. And like her proposed walled
garden, her involvement with text can be linked to contemporaneous
developments in art. Much of the writing by the Minimalists—Donald Judd,
Robert Morris—was, not altogether unlike Martin’s, both imperiously pre-
scriptive and studiously impersonal. In both respects, such writing echoed
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

the ideas, and the style, of Reinhardt’s implacable pronouncements. All

these artists shared with Martin an aversion to art based in individual
experience. At the time she began writing in earnest, the Conceptualists,
too, were producing universalizing texts that sometimes tended toward
arrogance, even if in their loftier reaches they were at least partly ironic.
The latter is surely true of the first three of Sol LeWitt’s famous “Sentences
on Conceptual Art,” published in 1969: “1. Conceptual artists are mystics
rather than rationalists. 2. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
3. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments. Irrational judgments
lead to new experience.” And LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,”
from 1967, include the statements, “This kind of art is not theoretical or
illustrative of theories: it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental
processes and it is purposeless.”° LeWitt’s aversion to rationality and his
embrace of intuition both have clear affinities with Martin’s thinking.
Similarly, the writings of Robert Smithson, with their omnivorous range
of references and apocalyptic mood, create a kind of gothic sublime that
can seem a dark mirror to Martin’s texts. It is tempting to consider that
Martin not only saw documentation of his Spiral Jetty, but read what he
wrote of its creation, in 1972: “Slowly, we drew near to the lake... upon
which the sun poured down its crushing light. ... Perception was heav-
ing, the stomach turning, I was on a geologic fault that groaned within
me. Between heat lightning and heat exhaustion the spiral curled into
vaporization... Surely the storm clouds massing would turn into a rain of
blood.’ A hallucinogenic rhapsody in contrast to Martin’s mostly sober
fugues, Smithson’s writing nonetheless evokes, like hers, the willed submis-
sion to a natural environment that can be both transporting and—though
Martin avoids saying so—annihilating.
Possibly, too, Martin had read Smithson’s idiosyncratic texts before
leaving New York. In a wonderfully digressive essay published in Arts in
1966, he wrote that each of Reinhardt’s black paintings is “at once both
memory and forgetfulness, a paradox of darkening time. The lines of his

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grids are barely visible; they waver between the future and the past’ It is
tempting to imagine Reinhardt and Martin enjoying this article together.
Its cosmological range would have appealed to her; its descriptions of
Reinhardt’s work would suit hers almost as well.
The importance of writing in Martin’s work and life should not be over-
stated, nor should the parallels between the younger artists’ writing and
hers. As much as any visual artist, she made work that resisted words. Yet
with her writing and lecturing, Martin ventured to put her voice inside
our heads.

In any case, writing was not the only departure Martin took from painting
in the 1970s. She also produced one feature-length movie, Gabriel, in 1976,
and embarked on a second that remained unfinished. As the unrealized
Zen garden would have done, movies create an environment that embraces
the viewer, with sound as well as imagery that unfolds over time; like the
garden, too, Gabriel takes natural beauty as a subject (pl. 28 a-c). And
although this film flies in the face of Martin’s repeated injunctions against
using landscape imagery in art, it shows her faithful to the representation
of positive emotional states. It seems to have served other purposes as well,
including practical ones. Following her 1975 show at Pace, she announced,
“I went out to buy moving-picture equipment”; the Aeroflex she bought
was, she said, the most expensive she could find—a choice made for tax
purposes, she explained.” 16 “I'll be making a movie. Of course, I'll never
consider my movie making on the level with painting. But I’m making
it in order to reach a large audience.” It was to be about happiness and
innocence. “I’ve never seen a movie or read a story that was absolutely
free of any misery. And so, I thought I would make one. The whole thing is
about a little boy who has aday of freedom.’ As with painting, she trusted
her inspiration to guide her. “The materialist point of view is that there is
technique and expertise in the making of something. But that is not so.
And it’s not how I work. If I’m going to make a movie about innocence and

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happiness, then I have to have in my mind—free of distraction—innocence

and happiness. And then, into my mind will come everything that I need
to do,” she said at the time.”
Shot in color, with no script and no storyboards, overaperiod of three
months, Gabriel opens silently, at a beach. A child shortly appears (Martin
said that he was really fourteen years old, but looked closer to eight"),
and so does music, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which run intermittently
throughout. At first the boy stands still, with his back to us, facing the
ocean, and briefly the screen is organized in horizontal bands: the still
beach, with the child anchoring it; the moving water beyond; the fixed
horizon and sky above. Soon, the music stops and the boy trudges off
through brush toward distant mountains; wind is audible as he leaves
the frame. Thereafter, he will make his way up and down steep hillsides,
through stands of trees and fields of flowers, and follow various waterways
before finally returning to the ocean. Most of the time we see him from
the back, a slender dark-haired child in a white T-shirt, shorts, and hiking
boots. Focus is lost and regained as the camera closes in—framing nearly
abstract shots of shallow water coursing over large stones, at first crystal
clear, then turbulent and foamy—and pulls back. Along with the boy’s
progress and the flowing water, action is provided by the shifting sunlight,
which dances on the water and dapples the trees; after periods of silence,
the returning music is, each time, a gentle surprise. (One is reminded of
the beat, in competitive swimming, alternating underwater quiet and the
human noise audible when the swimmer’s head is above water.) There
are close-ups of pussy willows hanging over water, of big white blossoms
blowing in the breeze, and then flowers in a variety of colors, of a waterfall
churning. The sky is generally deep blue and cloudless.
In discussing Gabriel, Douglas Crimp quotes eminent filmmaker Jonas
Mekas, who writes, “Agnes Martin is a great painter and whatever she does
has an importance. Her film is no great cinema, that I have to state at the
outset. But it is a very beautiful film”**—an assessment Crimp endorses.
He notes Martin’s lack of familiarity with film history and writes that the

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view of nature she presents “is fairly commonplace... if perfectly lovely.

Nor does the film’s structure have discernible sense.” Nonetheless, he
concludes, “the play of sound and silence feels right, and there are some
truly exquisite sequences.”® It is hard to argue with any of this (although
Crimp perhaps overstates Martin’s ignorance of independent films); in
long stretches, Gabriel is both tedious and sentimental. At the same time,
it has moments of great beauty, and the merit of offering insight into
Martin’s perceptual world.
Moreover Martin’s stated ambition was not to reinvent nature photog-
raphy or the art-house film (as it existed in the era before video art largely
supplanted the genre), but to express a state of mind and to challenge
conventions of taste. “At first, 1made a film to protest the commercial
film being negative, that they’re always about deception and deceit—and
violence,’® she explained. And she grew deeply involved, as she had in
using adobe, with the physical aspects of the medium. “When I found out
about the sensitivity of photography as a medium, it was very exciting! ...
I enjoyed everything about it,” including editing.” Meeting the challenges
of an unfamiliar process produced some tension: “I have two cameras and
they were equally temperamental. And so I was worried about whether
they were actually working or not. It’s quite a strain.” And, as always,
she submitted to advice that arose within. Harmony Hammond reports,
“Explaining that Gabriel was about joy, Agnes described how she had no
problem carrying the heavy camera equipment but when she began to
shoot the wildflowers up close, her hands would begin this terrible shak-
ing, and she couldn’t figure out why or what was happening. Finally her
voices showed her that she was trembling for joy because of the beautiful
flowers.”°?
Its narrative and formal merits aside, Gabriel is of interest for explor-
ing two themes about which Martin often spoke and wrote: children and
music. From earliest adulthood, Martin had worked with young children,
as a teacher and in other capacities. References to children recur, again
and again, in her writing, lectures, and interviews; as already discussed,

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they reveal an understanding of childhood that veers between astute

understanding and unreasoning reverence. Several friends and associ-
ates, among them Arne Glimcher and Kristina Wilson, testify to Martin's
interest in babies and young people, with whom she could be tender and
alert, although sometimes she was less than ardent: “When people ask me if
I’m not disappointed because I didn’t get married and don’t have children,
I tell them I believe in reincarnation. I’ve been married a hundred times
and I’ve had hundreds of children. This time I asked to be left alone.””
Clearly, Martin’s concern with children was tied up with her pursuit of
innocence; just as obviously, some of her observations are conflicted, as in
the description, “Babies gurgle and laugh... reach out and touch people on
the cheek... the baby is loving them in a very flirtatious way.” More often,
babies and young people seem to have stood for a state of (unrealistically)
quiet contemplativeness: “Our most perceptive state is in infancy, before
social responsibility is put on us. Very young children can play in the dirt
with a stick, without boredom, early morning until lunch. If you played
in the dirt with a stick, you wouldn't last that long.” Some of her more
idealizing statements sound suspiciously like recriminations, addressed
retroactively to her imperfect self. “Children make a perfect response to
life. They see everything as beautiful and perfect, often telling their parents
how beautiful and wonderful they are. Children always love their parents
with perfect love regardless of what the parents are like.” But then, perhaps
admitting a small note of self-forgiveness, she adds, “They have to learn to
bear frustration which makes them seem unhappy at times.”? The actual
boy in Gabriel, of whom Martin spoke afterward with little affection, and
whose dutiful march through the film lacks visible enthusiasm—for his
surroundings or for the project into which he has been enlisted—is, in his
inscrutability, the more available as a screen for these various attributions
of childhood.
Less complicated—though not without conflict—was Martin’s relation-
ship to music, which she often called “the highest form of art.” In her
estimation, music was “the most abstract and the most effective. We make

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TU RES

about four times as much response to sound as we do to what we see.””4

Despite music’s advantages, Martin claimed that visual art could approach
its effects, as when she wrote, “Art work that is completely abstract, free from
any expression of the environment, is like music and can be responded
to in the same way. Our response to line and tone and color is the same
as our response to sound and, like music, abstract art is thematic. It holds
meaning for us that is beyond expression in words.”
Ifin Gabriel Martin exalts a rather literal kind of innocence—one that is
unattainable for adults—she also celebrates an art form that she seems to
have felt was beyond her reach: “I think musicians are a race apart)” she
once said, later adding that they attained a rare degree of triumph over
pride. “The obedience of performing musicians is extremely sensitive and
accurate. ... I wish I could point out how authoritative art work is depen-
dent on the obedient state of mind.’” At the same time, her accounts of
passing out (or entering “trances”) while listening to music in church in
earlier adulthood and, more generally, her pursuit of silence—sometimes
to extremes—suggest that music could be overwhelming for Martin. She
often said that she played music while painting and that Beethoven was a
favorite, citing the Ninth Symphony—hardly a soothing composition. The
far less turbulent Bach Variations that run through Gabriel are further
modulated by being heard in alternation with the sounds of wind and
water—which, even when barely audible, hold their own.
One further element of Gabriel worth noting is the movie’s title. The
bearer of glad tidings (the most important of course being the annunci-
ation to Mary of Jesus’s imminent birth), Gabriel is generally depicted
as a graceful winged being, neither quite male nor female—Martin’s pre-
ferred gender. And if the boy who performed in her movie was, in Martin’s
descriptions, something short of angelic, she said she named the film for
a figure that “is beyond this world” in his innocence.” In the film, he does
seem to stand for the delivery of good news: the perfectly ordered beauty
of the earth, innocent of the messy arrangements of human affairs and
immaculately conceived.

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The next film project Martin undertook, to have been called Captivity,
could hardly have been more different. A cross-cultural, trans-historical
costume drama ripe with sex and violence, it was to be based on a tale of
Genghis Khan. As Martin described its plot, when the Mongol ruler occu-
pied northern China, “he saw this princess in a garden, and he said if they’d
give him the princess as hostage that he wouldn’t destroy Peking. And so
they decide to give him the princess. And my movie was about when the
sons of the generals went to go and pick up the princess and bring her back
to Mongolia.”” The logistical and technical challenges of filming this story
were formidable. Martin said she traveled to Japan in search of Kabuki
dancers to play the princess and her maid but didn’t succeed. Instead, she
hired dancers from the Japanese community in San Francisco, where there
was a Kabuki theater. “In Japan,” Martin reported, “The actors are all men.
Even the women are men. But in San Francisco, they’re all women. Even
the men are women. I hired a woman and her daughter.”
Despite the greater congeniality, for Martin, of women performers, trou-
ble arose. She complained of the lead performer’s stubbornness—meaning,
evidently, her refusal to submit to direction, instead insisting on the dance
movements of the tradition in which she was trained. Neither could it
have been easy to convince the cast, which included local Native Amer-
icans, to sleep in the tents meant to recreate Mongol encampments. In
addition to the two lead women, there were apparently eight boys and
eight horses. “To take a picture of [even] one horse is really a problem,”
Martin admitted. She worked one of the cameras herself, and she bought
a cutting table; Donald Woodman, the photographer she’d met in 1977,
worked the second camera and provided other technical support.*? She
had “an ancient Chinese garden” built and a cart to transport the prisoners.
Much of the filming was done in New Mexico; final scenes were shot in
Victoria, in British Columbia.
Notwithstanding the naiveté attributed to—or expressed in—Gabriel,
Martin spoke knowledgably of film, and Kabuki, at around the time Cap-
tivity was in production. “Agnes talked about... the need for restrained or

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ritualized expression of emotions” in Kabuki theater, Harmony Hammond

remembered, “where the actors act out one emotion at a time to the audi-
ence rather than to each other. One can truly feel only one emotion at a
time. Then she imitated the Kabuki sounds and the gestures of wailing and
grief. She compared Fellini’s La Strada with Kurosawa’s film Rashomon,
saying that Fellini missed the mark because he did not immediately and
fully define the main character.” They also joked about recent movies.
“Speaking of Star Wars, Agnes said, ‘You know something is wrong when
a tin can gets the best actor of the year award.” Hammond concluded,
hesitantly, “As I understood it, Agnes’s new film in progress represents the
ritualized emotions of Kabuki. Something about a fence with a Kabuki
dancer on one side and a Native American on the other.”
Martin’s accounts of Captivity’s development, and its meaning, vary
considerably. One is offhand and a little ribald: “I made it because I thought
the Jemez Indians,” whom she hired as actors, “looked like Moguls [sic].”
When asked why she discarded it, Martin replied, “The woman got me
down.” Then she paused, and continued, “In the last scene, Genghis Khan
rode in and I said to him, ‘Do you think you could make a dance about
romantic love?’ And he said (laughing), ‘Oh I think I could’ And so he
danced. He was pretty good. (Pause) And so the princess fell for him, when
he did this romantic dance. She married him and she had two sons and
then they walked off into the sunset.”* In this vein, she said the project
was “really a kick.”*s But on a later occasion, she talked of the princess and
the maid dancing expressions of “fear and terror... when the boys came to
get em. And then the princess danced goodbye to her garden,’ as well as
“homesickness and all kinds of nostalgia.”*° Hammond related, “To Agnes,
it was about sorrow, fear, and acceptance, about love and fences... about
two individuals on either side of a fence—about how we all are ultimately
separate. Our joys and sorrows are separate.”*”
Arne Glimcher reports that when the film was under way, Martin told
him it was to be “about surrender, the mental attitudes of surrender.”
The kidnapped princess “was afraid of Genghis Khan, but eventually

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she married him and had two sons and went back to China.” She added,
“I'll stop my movie before that—I’ll end it at the moment of surrender
which is happiness. It’s the same kind of happiness that’s reached after the
mind takes charge of an idea. The idea grows up and up.until truth comes
through the idea and dissolves it. It is the surrender of the intellect to fate.
That’s where the movie ends in surrender which equals happiness—no
conflict, no irony.”*
It’s not easy to accept the emotional logic that connects the thoroughly
reasonable terror and homesickness Martin ascribed to the princess and
her maid, carried away by a rapacious despot, not only to surrender and
acceptance but also to happiness. Just as perplexing is the parallel she
draws between this experience and the submission of intellect to fate—a
submission that she felt every artist must make. In any event, Martin her-
self ultimately decided the entire undertaking was a failure. It was never
shown; she told friends she threw the completed footage into a dumpster.
She said nothing about the issues it most obviously raised: of cross-dress-
ing and gender ambiguity, of cultural conquest, violence against women,
and power struggles between the sexes, and of her own quite stunning
artistic ambition.
While Martin continued to speak in public and to write for both public
and private purposes, the excursion from painting represented by these
films (and the proposed garden) was never repeated. They can be consid-
ered experimental investigations of possible relationships with viewers—of
the “response” that Martin deemed an essential aspect of any worthy
painting. “Everybody’s got their mind on artists and paintings. But it’s the
response to art that really matters,” she said on one occasion.*® Asked how
much time she thought a viewer should spend with her work, she replied,
laughing, “Just about one minute.” When the surprised interviewer replied,
“A minute?” Martin offered the seldom acknowledged truth, “Yeah, but a
minute’s quite a while.”
The question of reception, in the late sixties and early seventies, was
being given considerable thought. Michael Fried’s 1967 denunciation of

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Minimalist sculpture for its “theatrical” relationship with the viewer inad-
vertently promoted interest in the ability of static, abstract art to induce
a time-based experience. Other relevant, more-or-less contemporaneous
formulations of visual response include Barnett Newman’s bid for viewers
to be absorbed by the painted field. Also pertinent is Sontag’s distinction
(in the essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence”) between “Traditional art,” which
“invites a look,’ and “Art that is silent” which “engenders a stare” (that is,
it allows “no release from attention”).
The egoless immersion in an undifferentiated, disembodied aware-
ness that is promoted by Zen is another of the cultural options on offer
at the time for thinking about looking.” All have some bearing on the
engagement that Martin invited—an immoderate visual experience, an
absorption by the work that is a kind of secular rapture, even if it only
lasts sixty seconds. The experimentation with film can be seen as the trial
of an alternative to painting that would prolong the encounter. And the
writing, in this respect, serves not only as a set of instructions for students
on how to go about making art, but also, and maybe especially, for viewers
of all ages about how to see it.

By the middle 1970s Martin had constructed a thirty-five-by-thirty-five-

foot studio and returned to painting on canvas, and apart from the kind
of occasional fallow period that appears in most artists’ careers, she con-
tinued to paint until the very end of her life; she had resumed painting
by the time the films were made. In June of 1974, Arne Glimcher writes,
she came into the Pace Gallery and “asked if we would show her work.” He
promptly agreed.% In September Glimcher, too, made the trip to Portales
mesa, and he described the small, one-room house Martin had built there,
“a water well, pump-handle sink, a black Naugahyde sofa, a table, kerosene
lamp, and three chairs pushed against the wall next to a large window, the
transversing wooden supports of which are filled with Agnes’s harvest of
ripening tomatoes.” He remarked on the outdoor bathtub, filled from the
pump in the morning and warmed by the sun during the day, and he noted

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the split tree trunks, their bark left on, that supported the ceiling. On the
wall he saw framed early-twentieth-century advertisements for Coca-Cola,
featuring Gibson Girl models; when Martin caught Glimcher looking at
them, she laughed.” ;
Despite her bold approach to Pace and deepening relationship with its
director, she was hardly establishing herself in the heart of art-world soci-
ety. She told Glimcher she had been isolated for the entire winter, eating
preserved walnuts, hard cheese, and homegrown tomatoes. “That was her
entire diet,’ he writes. Though Glimcher argues gamely that the choice was
made so that “Not even the decision of planning a meal was allowed to
distract her from the making of her paintings,”® clearly she was in a fairly
fragile state, and she would remain so for some time. On another visit by
Glimcher three years later, she was eating only Knox gelatin mixed with
orange juice and bananas, living in her camper, without a working heater,
in sub-zero weather. “I have absolutely no comfort now. But I don’t want
it,’ she told him.°°
And yet, she was hard at work, and she was beginning to let people
know it. Bob Ellis had seen Martin’s ICA show when it went to Pasadena
in 1973 and was “bowled over by it. It spoke to me. I got her address from
the staff and wrote her a note, saying I’d seen her show, and would love
to meet her. I got a postcard back saying ‘don’t come out, don’t give my
address to anyone, building a studio, Agnes. I wrote back saying, ‘when
you're ready’ Didn’t hear a thing for years. Then in the late seventies came
a card: ‘you can come up now.” So Ellis, too, went up to Cuba, initiating a
2?

friendship that lasted until the end of Martin’s life.%”

“When you stop painting for a while, which I don’t think is the least bit
bad—I think it’s a good thing to stop if you have to, work something out
for a while—the painting goes on, if you want it to. But then when you start
painting again, you have to sort of get conditioned, like an athlete. You
have to get on this track, and stay on this track, and every interruption is
bad,” Martin said to Skowhegan students in 1987.9° She spoke from expe-
rience. Her first years back at work seem to have been effortful. In a 1974

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letter to Beatrice Mandelman, whom she had known since the 1940s in
Taos, Martin disparages their mutual friend Mildred (Tolbert) Crews for
not working hard enough and then goes on, “So I want to warn you. No
use for you to begin unless you want to move through ‘the field’ get out
in front and move on from there. You will have to make around 500 paint-
ings. When I made my prints [On a Clear Day, 1973] |worked 3 months
and made 500 paintings before I was even on the track... there has to be
pace and a gradual working up to what you have to do. A fast pace....
It is composition like the musicians... This year I have painted over a
hundred paintings none of them are any good.” Among these old friends
in Taos, Martin was beginning to distinguish herself as an international
star, and she seemed at pains to dispel the aura (and the gossip) that that
status provoked. To Mandelman’s husband, Louis Ribak, she wrote, also in
1974, “I cannot abide ‘wheeling and dealing’... Ihave been called brilliant,
shrewd, strong, weak everything right down to an ass-licker and the truth
is I have never done anything. I hope that they, the paintings somehow
get to the right place I believe they do.’
Martin spent just under a decade on the Portales mesa. Looking back,
she told Irving Sandler, “I decided to experiment with simple living; I went
up on top of a mesa that is eight miles long and six miles wide and there
was nobody up there and the nearest house was six miles away. There was
no electricity and no telephones. I stayed up there for years and became as
wise as a Chinese hermit. Then I decided that that is not a natural human
way of living, to be so isolated, so I came back down.” In fact, the choice
was not hers alone. Despite her “lifetime” lease on mesa property, Martin
was told to leave in 1977, when one of its owners—the brother of the café
manager’s wife—decided he wanted it back. But the eviction, and return
to a more convivial and active life, came at a good time.
Shortly before she left Cuba, Martin wrote me a letter. I had written
to her because I was doing research for an undergraduate paper on her
work, and asI recall (I didn’t keep a copy of my letter), Isought answers to
questions of intention. I asked whether there were artists and critics whom

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she felt had been particularly perceptive with regard to her work. Under-
taking the role of educator, she urged me away from intellect and toward
true feelings, which she patiently distinguished from emotions. “The artist
uses only the primary awareness because the intellect draws on knowledge
from the past and leads us in a circle. The response in primary awareness
is in feeling. The response to art is feeling not intellectual (knowledge)
or emotional, love anger etc. but true feelings such as you would have
at the beach—freedom, joy, gratitude, innosense [again this misspelling],
harmony, content, the sublime, all positive feeling.” Magnanimously, she
allowed, “Words that represent our primary response are art. That is words
that describe our positive feeling.” She advised reading Walt Whitman and
avoiding any reference to “conventional knowledge.” Sensing academic
inclinations in my letter, she warned again and again against mucking
around in scholarly matters. “Ideas are the illusion. The concrete in life
is not illusion. It is real. But ideas are not real. We simply make them up.”
To explain her working method, she wrote, “I paint from an image that
comes into my mind because I want it.” Crossed out before the last word
was “to see.” She wanted it understood, clearly, that the desire itself was
primary. And, in another clarification: “I first saw ‘the desert. I think every-
one has this mental concept ‘the desert. The real desert is nothing like it.”
She wrote of the significance to her of the Abstract Expressionists—Still,
Rothko, Pollock, Newman—and said the most important thing about their
work, and hers, “is that it presents an undefined amount of space, unlim-
ited space, or spacelessness.” Correcting an assumption I had made, she
explained, “I do not have a personal touch in my work. The Chinese paint-
ers for example had a personal line that could be recognized. All my lines
are measured and ruled and impersonal.” She touched on the importance
to her of music, notably in its reliance on silence: “In ‘On a Clear Day’ I
wanted them to recognize the composition in scale as carrying the mean-
ing. Just like in music the composition in silences and notes carries the
meaning. But it was not recognized, but the response was made and that
is enough.”

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Finally and categorically, she renounced spirituality. On the letter’s pen-

ultimate page, she wrote, “There is no spiritual. There is the concrete and
the abstract. The abstract is awareness that takes place in the mind free
from environmental influence. Reasonless joy. It is life or reality ‘passing
through’ the mind. But our primitive religious tendencies tend to call it
God or Gods or the Supernatural. But our mental awareness is our real life
and it operates also on the concrete level.”
On the envelope Martin gave her return address as Cuba; it was post-
marked Albuquerque, a long drive away. Like Douglas Crimp, I was
unaware of the circumstances under which she was living. Nor did I then
fully appreciate the generosity of this letter: the effort she undertook to
set the record straight (even if some of her corrections were provisional)
and, even more graciously, to encourage an eager but bewildered student.

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 Chapter 8

BACK TO THE WORLD

fter a brief period of transition following her departure from

Cuba,! Martin settled in Galisteo, New Mexico, in 1978. She
stayed for nearly fifteen years, her longest fixed residence. It
was during this period that Martin achieved financial security for the first
time, and although she would always maintain a life of material simplicity,
the visibility, critical acclaim, and market success her work drew by the
1980s relieved her of the hardships she had so often faced before. The iso-
lation that she had sought, and also suffered from, on the Portales mesa
was mitigated in Galisteo as well.
A half-hour drive from Santa Fe, it was a quiet little town when Martin
arrived, but it grew into a livelier—if still ruggedly rural and small—com-
munity over the next decade.” During her years there, Martin had regular
contact with her old friend Richard Tuttle and his wife, the poet Mei-
Mei Berssenbrugge, who have long had a residence in Abiquiu. Martin’s
neighbors in Galisteo eventually included the artist and writer Harmony
Hammond (resident since 1984) and cultural historian Lucy Lippard (who
has lived most of the year there since 1992). The artists Bruce Nauman and
Susan Rothenberg moved to Galisteo in 1989. Flora and Sidney Biddle,
well-known art patrons, acquired a home nearby in 1990 and became good
friends of Martin. The painter Pat Steir, who had accompanied Douglas
 BACK TO THE WORLD

Crimp on his 1971 trip to Cuba, continued to visit Martin regularly in Gal-
isteo. Ann Wilson remained a friend and reliable visitor as well.
Though the artists who chose to live in this rural New Mexico outpost
were, generally speaking, looking to escape the professionally driven social
obligations and other distractions of major cultural centers, Galisteo’s small
art community was convivial, its members meeting causally at each other’s
homes and also at such local events as church socials. Hammond reports,
“at parties Agnes never got up and danced, but she thoroughly enjoyed
herself.” Flora Biddle says Martin liked her Martinis; Donald Woodman
(the photographer who had helped her with the Genghis Khan film) said
her drink was sherry. And increasingly, over the years, Hammond recalls,
younger women artists came to Martin on “pilgrimages,” to pay homage.®
In Lippard’s words, by the end of the eighties, Martin had become “a real
queen bee.””
Her growing international celebrity notwithstanding, Martin remained
devoted to the particular pleasures, physical as well as social, of the New
Mexico environment she'd long since adopted. The landscape around
Galisteo, a basin ringed by mountains, is not as dramatically rugged as
the Portales mesa, but it shares the crystalline air characteristic of the
Southwest (and of Saskatchewan) and the dramatic changes of light that
turn mountains vivid shades of ocher, red, and purple. The home Martin
built there was on a three-acre property owned by Woodman: Martin told
him she’d pay him $200 per month in perpetuity for the Galisteo property,
where Woodman was living as well. For a couple of weeks, both slept in
Martin’s camper, until, he says, she threw him out.’ The camper in which
she stayed she later covered in adobe-—to the amusement of many—while
Woodman moved into a tipi close by. Having been trained as an archi-
tect, he helped Martin build a studio; they also built a pump house and
dug by hand a trench for electrical cable, which was three feet deep and
several hundred feet long. “We had an unspoken competition to see who
could live the most Spartan lifestyle,” Woodman says. “She was tough.” Her
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

disregard for amenities endured; she lived without electricity for some
years in Galisteo.
After a time, Martin give up the camper for a proper house on the insis-
tence of a Santa Fe therapist she was then seeing, and she and Woodman
built a long, narrow residence of rammed earth with a metal shed roof. It
contained a bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, and mechanical
room. They also built a studio.9 Visiting toward the end of Martin’s resi-
dence there, the critic Klaus Kertess described a 15-by-60-foot living space
and a 20-by-40-foot studio; the trailer was stuccoed with red earth.” Again,
there was nothing remarkable about the home or its immediate surround-
ings; the landscape is scrubby, the site lacking in drama. By 1984, Martin
and Woodman had had a falling out (though later they reconciled), and
she bought the Galisteo property from him, her early instruction from
inner voices notwithstanding.
Martin told Hammond that, at nearly seventy, she could no longer
do the physical work—moving rocks, chopping wood, building stretch-
ers—that she had done earlier, but her determination and spirit of indepen-
dence remained daunting. More conspicuous than cladding her camper in
adobe was her alteration of the course of the Galisteo Creek, which, when
it swelled with summer rains, ate into the fifty-foot-high cliff on which
Martin’s house stood. Without permission from the Army Corps of Engi-
neers, she hired earth-moving equipment and laborers to redirect the water
through adjacent ranch property and to build a large berm protecting hers.
Still devoted in these years to swimming—which she ultimately sup-
ported more as a patron than a participant—she built a pool near her house
for local children, but filled it in when “someone irked her.” She kept a gar-
den and ate what she grew. Her home’s spare furnishings were, as always,
chosen without regard for style—evidently, friends say, from mass-market
mail-order catalogues. And although she kept up, to some extent, with
trends in contemporary art, her associates don’t often recall seeing art
books or magazines in her house. For most, a visit was a fairly formal occa-
sion: guests sat at the kitchen table, where there were two chairs, one—as

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always—a rocker. However much she enjoyed a party, Martin’s preferred

social engagement was still one-to-one conversation.
Visitors were not welcome in the studio while she was working. When
favored people were allowed to enter to see completed paintings, they
found a studio carefully prepared for quiet contemplation: “You clean and
arrange your studio in a way that will forward a quiet state of mind,” she
wrote in lecture notes. “This cautious care of atmosphere is really needed
to show respect for the work. Respect for art work and everything con-
nected with it, one’s own and that of everyone else must be maintained
and forwarded. No disrespect careless or ego selfishness must be allowed
to interfere.’" And despite certain lapses, she continued to observe the
dictates of internal authorities. “Her voices would not let her have certain
things, and told her what not to do: yes to pick-up trucks, no,” for now, “to
chickens,” for example.”
Settled though she was, Martin remained restless, and she traveled
often while living in Galisteo, the trips ranging from hiking in the local
mountains to excursions to the Monterey coast and further. She generally
referred to the wilderness travel as solitary, but sometimes she had com-
pany: after Woodman was ejected from the camper but before he moved
into the tipi, he accompanied Martin on a six-week trip up the Mackenzie
River in Canada. A massive and largely unpeopled waterway that flows
north to the Arctic from the Northwest Territories above Alberta and
British Columbia, it is North America’s second-longest river, and it was a
magnet for Martin. As Woodman recorded in a diary he kept of the trip,
Martin called the journey “her life’s work” and a “goal since childhood.”
Martin’s version, as told to Ann Wilson, was, “Her voices told her that
when she had worked too long she needed to take a trip. She told us about
her sailboat on the Mackenzie River in northwest Canada, and how when
she boats on the Mackenzie, she goes where there is no help, where she
is beyond the reach of human beings.”® At least on this occasion there
was help, and the boat had a motor. Martin and Woodman set out for
the Northwest Territories in May 1978, traveling in a Jeep Scout pulling

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an 18-foot flat-bottomed aluminum motorboat. There was still ice on the

river when they entered it, and the trip would remain throughout cold
and wet, exhilarating and tiresome, challenging in the extreme, and spec-
tacularly beautiful. Woodman’s diary begins, “15 May 1978. On the road
to Cheyenne Wyoming: the start of a trip to the Mackenzie River to cast
our lives to fate to give up all fears of the unknown.” They stare at the
stars, and Martin warns, “You won’t find the answers out there.” But, she
adds, “Little children before they are conditioned can show you how we
are supposed to be.”
Three days and 500 miles later, they are both “giddy, and the jokes are
weird.” On May 19, Woodman writes, “Today’s talk was a tirade on the
Hippies and how each of us should do what we want that we will all pay for
our mistakes—justice reigns.” A cold May 22 finds Martin “walking around
bundled up like an Eskimo” and engaging in games of introspective anal-
ysis. “I am struggling with my mental thoughts,’ Woodman writes. “I took
her other psychological test of completing the drawings of 6 squares given
her by Robert Indiana... We talked of how you have to find your own
karma—work in life’s natural direction.” And in another entry on the same
day, “Agnes is spending much time talking to me of methods to work on
yourself. ... The idea of going down the Mackenzie to go over the edge of
civilization so as to show yourself that you do not cling to life - you do not
hold on to anything. You seek the truth you move through life you do not
desire for anything but to seek truth.”
As they travel north, “the sun sets sideways along the northwest hori-
zon’ at the end of 16-hour days. Martin talks about God and goodness, joy,
truth, happiness, innocence; also the Devil and sadness, lies, conceit, and
pride. And she tells stories: there is a variant on the Willie story in which
he cuts a deal with Satan, this time taking a permanent job ferrying people
to hell; there is also a version of “two hearts that are the same“ On June
2 they “talk of art and how to respond to people who say of abstract art
that anyone can do it; the fear that such talk raises.” The next day, Wood-
man writes, “I wonder if I will be able to keep my trust in Agnes—I must

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trust myself only ... we got drunk tonight on the sherry she can be very
unusual—strange.” Woodman documents moments of bracing grandeur
and physical challenge he shared with the then sixty-six-year-old artist:

6 June... the sky and water were one—and the reflections like flying
through the air but on water. ... We landed in a heavy rain—it literally
pelted us with lightning and thunder... it lasted but a few minutes but
the confusion was total we beached, secured the boat and put up tents
in the woods on the muskeg and then a fire to dry out both of us were
totally wet....a lynx eyes us from 100 feet away are we the first humans
to meet his eye this close? How far away are we from other people??

On the other hand, Woodman writes with increasing heat about Martin’s
demands~—and also about her visual sensitivity. By June 10, nearly a month
into their journey, he is admitting, “I guess part of the thing with traveling
with and being with Agnes is to listen to her all the time and not to com-
plain nor say please I wish quiet but to listen to everything unrelenting at
times.” The day before, he had written, “Agnes sees in such subtle colors
I see in colors and black and white.” And yet, “sometimes I want to curse
and shout out what I see and hear from you is noise or contradictions to
what is ‘truth’ - is it respect that I show her or is it the battle to maintain
sanity in this experience?”
For all its rigors, the Mackenzie River trip was broken up by occasional
stops for Chinese food or a popular movie; Martin held no doctrinaire
beliefs about what constituted a proper wilderness excursion. In the fol-
lowing two decades, she traveled widely with David McIntosh, under
less demanding conditions. Often, these journeys—like her earlier one to
India, as well as the trip with Woodman—involved water. McIntosh and
Martin went together to the Panama Canal, first flying to Florida, then
proceeding by boat. Other destinations included Alaska, the Orinoco in
Venezuela, and the Mediterranean. Among overland trips was a two-week
tour of Morocco; they also drove through Scotland, where they visited
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Skye, Martin’s ancestral home. She told McIntosh her forebears had been
whalers and said she felt at home in Skye, although she made no effort to
look for family.
“Agnes said at the end of her life that the ship voyage through Norway
was her favorite,” McIntosh recollects. Lasting more than two weeks, it
included Denmark, the Faroe Islands, and the Norwegian coast; again, she
almost reached the Arctic." Later in her life she enjoyed being a guest on
the yacht of Michael Ovitz, a client of Pace Gallery.*° Her happily remem-
bered childhood in British Columbia and the equally strong connection
she felt to her riverside residence at the New York City seaport provided
anchors for a lifelong love of water that, with characteristic discipline, she
abjured by spending most of her adult life in the desert. Some of Martin's
travels with McIntosh were work-related. They went to Amsterdam, to
see her show at the Stedelijk in 1991. In the catalogue for that show, Marja
Bloem says Martin was then well known in Europe, as much for her writing
as for her paintings.’” The same year, Bloem joined them in Wiesbaden for
the ceremony at which the city awarded Martin the Alexej von Jawlensky
Prize. And Martin continued to lecture, although not as widely.
While the Galisteo years were a period of relative stability for Martin,
in her physical circumstances and personal life, she was not entirely free
from turmoil. She was hospitalized at least twice, in Colorado and at the
psychiatric ward at Saint Vincent’s in Santa Fe. It was at around this time
that Martin wrote to Woodman of her fear that she was dying. Donald
Fineberg began treating her in 1985, and gradually, from that point, her
symptoms decreased; at the same time, the available medications—which
she would continue to take—improved, and the rhythms of her life became
more regular. Her painting—with some notable exceptions—grew progres-
sively more luminous and calm.

The simplest way to distinguish the paintings Martin had begun making
when she resumed work in the early 1970s from those of the New York
period is that the grids gave way—with some initial hesitation—to broad

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stripes. Occasionally (particularly at first) the stripes are vertical but more
often they are horizontal. Sometimes interrupted by a single perpendicular
line or two, the initial stripe paintings are often painted in translucent,
near-primary tones of red and blue. There were also paintings of the mid-
1970s (when she was living in the heatless camper) in shades of gray.
One painting of 1974 (private collection) comprises a trio of vertical
bands, the middle element blue, the others red, each separated by narrow
strips of white; as in other canvases of this time, an even thinner strip
crosses the composition horizontally, suggesting the vestigial axis of a grid.
In another work of the same year, narrower red and blue bands alternate,
all of equal width (pl. 29). The use of primaries, the American-flag palette,
and the simplicity of the organizing schemes all seem to announce a new
visual language. Applied in multiple layers of highly diluted acrylic paint,
the bands are illuminated from behind by the white of the ground, which
she applied in multiple, generally individually sanded, layers. By 1975 the
red has grown warmer, to a very pale shade of adobe, and patterns have
grown more complex. There are paintings employing red alone and also
ones of pale blue alternating with lemon yellow. The minutely calibrated
balance between cool and warm, shape and line, internal variation and
overall image, and the increasing variety of hue—the subtly yellowed reds,
the sun-warmed blues—begin to suggest the breadth of expression this
new vocabulary would make possible.
Sometimes the painted bands are evenly spaced and equivalent; more
often, there is a fairly complicated rhythm of alternating widths, although
always governed by a measured beat. Because the patterns of stripes repeat
from top to bottom rather than mirroring each other from the midline,
the paintings seem to have a new directional force, rather than being fully
self-contained (they may have a broad band at the top, say, and a narrow
one at the bottom). Penciled lines, almost always readily visible on close
inspection, continue to rule the canvases’ divisions. The 6-foot square
remained her paintings’ unvarying dimensions until the last decade of
her life, when they were reduced to 5 feet on a side.

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As before, Martin continued to work on paper as well, often in ink or

pencil and watercolor, her favored dimensions ranging between 9-inch
and 12-inch squares. In one drawing of 1977 (pl. 30), broad bands of watery
blue and red fade to white by imperceptible degrees before reaching their
penciled border, a horizon drawn at the center in the faintest line of graph-
ite; they seem clouds of color-imbued atmosphere. The vellum-like paper
on which this and many other such drawings were made is not absorbent
and so not generally favored by watercolorists because of the difficulty it
presents in controlling the paint. Another drawing of the same year fea-
tures blue and yellow lateral stripes, lucid and hushed, the color saturation
as uniform as it is delicate. The consummate control of these drawings
serves mostly to make skill invisible; the artist's hand, while always visible,
never falters.
Soon after the colored bands appeared, Martin began to construct
images in shades of black and white, painted with acrylic washes or diluted
India ink, sometimes over slightly gravelly surfaces; in some of these, the
grid returns. In one such painting, Untitled #11, 1977 (pl. 31), a grid of
elongated horizontal rectangles is penciled on a matte gray ground. Fairly
assertive and even a little glittery, like mica in a city sidewalk, the black
penciled lines become heavier at regular intervals, creating secondary hor-
izontal rectangles within the grid. The washy ground, of very diluted ink,
picks up the weave of the canvas and its imperfections. The whole is cool,
wintry, lightless. In another India-ink-washed painting of 1977 (Untitled #5;
Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, San Francisco), the canvas is divided
into a series of windowpanes, each vertical rectangle defined by doubled
pencil lines; this is as close to a depiction of mullions as Martin came. A
third in this 1977 series (Untitled #14; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York) is divided into wide rectangles, five across and roughly two
dozen in a column. Cloudy and a little dour, it is marked, again, with a
scatter of dark spots where the slightly gritty surface has picked up ink:
it could be the negative for a photograph of a night sky, the stars sucked
into darkness and darkness itself lost to lightless shadow.
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Gray paintings appeared often in the eighties as well. In Untitled #9,

1984 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), diluted ink was sponged
or wiped across the surface, which was probably prepared with a medium
that had some sand init. The effect is, distantly, of seawater washing across
a beach, in regular laps, gray and chill. In a related painting of the same
year, Untitled No. 11 (pl. 34), with a similarly scumbled surface grayed by
lateral washes of watered-down ink and divided by penciled lines into
eighteen horizontal bands, there is a fair amount of incident in the wash,
which, seen closely, appears to gather and fall like water running over a
rock face. There are also paintings, from the eighties in particular, that are
executed with gray acrylic paint rather than ink wash, in warm, velvety
shades brushed on in horizontal bands of various widths.
But by the end of the 1970s, Martin had created, as well, compositions
that sang with light, achieving a sometimes ecstatic radiance. The Islands,
1979, in the collection of the Whitney Museum, is a cycle of a dozen such
paintings, one of four suites Martin made (the others are at the Harwood
Museum in Taos; Dia:Beacon, in Beacon, New York; and in the Ovitz fam-
ily collection, a promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art, New York).
In its scope and ambition, the Whitney’s cycle is reminiscent (perhaps
deliberately) of the Rothko Chapel in Houston (which opened in 1971),
Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross (painted between 1958 and 1966),
and Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam (1978). Majestic and, seen together
in a dedicated room, faintly ecclesiastic, each painting of The Islands (a
title Martin had used before) is composed of horizontal bands of warm
white or cool white, sometimes verging on yellow or blue. They vary from
five broad bands to a dozen; sometimes the bands are separated by single
penciled lines, more often by a narrow strip of white that is defined by lines
above and below. The color distinctions in these paintings are evanescent.
Up close, the whispered color tends to disappear; it only coalesces at a
distance, ranging from the pale bluish white of old-fashioned skim milk
to the glaring white zenith of a sun-bleached sky at midday, and then
to the solid indoor white of linens and bandages, soothing and warm.
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The patterns of painted bands vary from complex, syncopated rhythms

to steady regular beats; in one or two paintings, there is the implication
of overlapping louvers, light seeping under them, and with it the merest
implication of weight and volume. The penciled lines variously resonate,
like plucked strings, like wires held taut and still, or like the traces of simple
calculation that they are. And, as always, one reads them as one would a
line of text—or an unspoken thought. The final composition, of six bands,
the second from the top and the bottom one dense and creamy, the oth-
ers thinner, has a conclusive force, as of the striking of a tonic chord. As
a whole, the cycle has the uncanny ability to cleanse the air and purify
sight. Perhaps significantly, these paintings (and others of this family) are
even harder to reproduce than the grids of the sixties. Firsthand viewing,
in real time (and lots of it), is imperative.
Of the work that emerged after Martin's retreat from painting, it could
be said that the urban grid gave way, gradually but conclusively, to a rural
vision of open expanses and to sunlit shades of desert, rock, and sky
(although, as always, she would resist such associations to the landscape).
It could also be said that drawing had given way to painting as the work’s
disciplinary basis. Or that voice had ceded to vision: instead of ceaseless,
sometimes querulous lines of rumination, the post-New York paintings
offer more purely retinal and sensual prospects, distilled experiences
of unshadowed light. But the penciled line never disappeared entirely
from Martin’s work. Sometimes vanishingly faint, it always lurks behind
the painted bands, and is increasingly like the always-present—if only
implicit—guiding lines of a musical score.
And as before, the surface is minutely considered, so the presence of
the artist’s hand, and of her relationship to the canvas, is easily sensed
when you stand in front of it. You feel very strongly that when she painted,
Martin saw nothing else: the field of painting was her field of vision. But it
is also somehow evident, perhaps from the clarity and resolution of each
painting, that she had seen it before its execution, as an inspiration, and
had obediently undertaken to produce it as a painted image. The truth

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of this may be only notional, and unconvincing without the support of

her writing, but it presents itself as a powerful lens through which to see
Martin’s work.

With Martin’s resumption of painting, critical attention grew and shifted.

The Philadelphia ICA exhibition that opened in January 1973 had gen-
erated a great deal of favorable criticism, suggesting a pent-up interest.
Because the exhibition preceded Martin’s return to full-time painting, it
brought renewed attention to her grids, now positioned in an altered con-
text. In the years since her work had first been shown and reviewed, the
effort to place it within the contending stylistic, ideological, and social
categories of the 1960s had given way to a near consensus that she was,
in her work as in her person, a committed outlier, fundamentally at odds
with the conceptual and material bases of Minimalism. With this round of
responses, hair-splitting distinctions between varieties of spare abstraction
were largely abandoned-replaced, in part, by equally scholastic disputes
over varieties of the sublime. The shift depended, in no small part, on the
new availability of the artist’s spoken and written thoughts. A special sec-
tion on Martin in the April 1973 issue of Artforum included a text by Mar-
tin, “Reflections,” which was “transcribed and edited” by Lizzie Borden
(who also contributed the article about Martin’s early work cited earlier’’).
It is the text that begins, “I'd like to talk about the perfection underlying
life when the mind is covered over with perfection and the heart is filled
with delight but I wish not to deny the rest.” Also in this issue of Artforum
was an article by Alloway,’ who covered some of the same ground he'd
explored in the ICA catalogue essay; he wrote about Martin that year for
Studio International as well. In Art News, Carter Ratcliff pursued the
new typology, contending that she was not a classicist but a romantic and
invoking Edmund Burke’s distinction between the balanced compositions
of classicism and the “artificial infinite” of romantic pictorial construction,
which instead yields the sublime. Ratcliff, too, quotes the artist to support
his views.?

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Writing in Artin America, Peter Schjeldahl, like others, cited the artist’s
texts, which he found strikingly modest.?3 Schjeldahl proclaimed, more-
over, “the issue of her connection to Minimalism, once seemingly impor-
tant, now seems hardly worth mentioning except to be dismissed.” On
the other hand, in a profile for Vogue, Barbara Rose argued, somewhat
reluctantly, that Martin’s paintings “share sufficient stylistic characteris-
tics with Minimal art” to be seen within its context, although Rose also
noted that, “like Rothko and Newman, Martin uses light as a metaphor
for spiritual radiance” and that “her work is a very contemporary expres-
sion of the classical spirit,” at once surprisingly sophisticated and “oddly
sensual.”*4 Rose, too, quotes Martin’s statements. In the New York Times,
the notoriously dyspeptic Hilton Kramer pronounced Martin's paintings
a “remarkable achievement,’ finding “nothing clamorous in her style. Nor
is there any personal mythology or media celebrity to focus attention on
what she has accomplished” —this despite the growing renown of both
Martin’s work and her character. (Rose asserted the artist had “shocked the
art world by closing her studio at precisely the moment her works began to
achieve widespread recognition.”) Kramer, like Schjeldahl, argued that the
association of Martin’s work with Minimalism was misleading. Instead, he
praised what he termed “an intimism of the spiritual life, at once mystical
and relaxed.”
Three years later, two simultaneous New York shows, one of new work,
at Pace, and the other of work from the sixties, at Elkon, elicited a stronger
shift toward lyrical descriptive language, this in order to embrace the new,
post-New York paintings. In another review for the New York Times, a
downright rhapsodic Kramer noted in the older work, especially, “the qual-
ity of religious utterance, almost a form of prayer”~a phrase that gained
considerable currency—and found that the paintings of the seventies intro-
duced a palette for which the word “color” was “too colorful and sensuous,
too worldly and theatrical... for what is there,” a distilled essence that “we
experience as light.” Thomas Hess, writing for New York magazine, allied
Martin with nineteenth-century American Luminist painters, famed for

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their depictions of preternaturally still, jewel-like landscapes. Hess heard

a mystical note as well, writing that in contrast to the grids, “as calculated
as a Swiss watch,” Martin’s new paintings “have an informal look—like a
God-made desertscape or a man-made inspiration.””’ In a 1978 review of
an exhibition of watercolors , Ashbery compared Martin to Northwest
John
artists Still, Cage, and Tobey, and noted as well the “new luminosity” of
the work that followed her “dry period.” But, borrowing from Norman O.
Brown, he also described, with uncanny sympathy, the “whispered speech”
of Martin’s watercolors, which struck him as “almost distressingly pow-
erful.” Ashbery compared the attention her work requires to listening to
“the whispered sequences of Webern’s music, where one can hear and
distinguish seemingly for the first time a B-flat from an A-sharp.””*
With Donald Kuspit’s 1982 review of a show at Pace of colored stripe
paintings, the effort to discriminate among variants of sublimity pro-
ceeded apace. Borrowing a distinction drawn by Kant, Kuspit compared
the “dynamic” sublime, which he said characterizes Martin’s work, to the
mathematical.”° In a 1987 feature article, Thomas McEvilley countered
with an ascription of “the abstract sublime, with its constant shifting back
and forth between ontological and epistemological terms, between pure
being and pure consciousness.” A scholar of world religions as well as of
classical thought, McEvilley found both Taoist and numerological bases for
Martin’s work, counting the number of vertical and horizontal lines in the
early grids, and also in the later striped compositions, and observing that
“the works tend to cluster around the simple ratios 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4, which
have long been viewed as creative and dynamic.... Pythagoras found that
in music they make up the three so-called ‘perfect’ intervals.” In affirming
the affinity of Martin’s painting with music, McEvilley lends weight to the
contention that Kant’s “mathematical sublime” (rather than the “dynamic
sublime” for which Kuspit argued) stood close to the heart of her work.*°
Holland Cotter’s review of a 1989 exhibition of gray paintings found, in
the ineluctable evidence of Martin’s hand, “a signature without an ego”
and argued, “it is hard to think of any other painting today that makes
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self-identity and self-abnegation so nearly one thing.” More distinctively,

Cotter was among the very few writers who detected profound darkness
in Martin’s sensibility, observing that the work’s formalism was “as much
about desperation as about a deity.” ‘
While Martin continued to avoid contact with critics and neither
endorsed nor opposed their interpretations, she was not disengaged from
the decisions determining how—and where—her work was shown. In an
undated note to Arne Glimcher, whose Pace gallery had opened a SoHo
branch in 1990 (it closed in 2000), Martin wrote:

I have only one worry in the world! It is that my paintings will show
downtown and fail there. They will fail because they are non-aggres-
sive—they are not even outgoing—in a competitive environment, with
big displays of aggressive artwork.... The competitive environment is
made by the huge audience of mostly young (ambitious) painters that
are “making” the “scene.” The “art scene” is really a lot of words put out
by journalists. With its changing trends it bears very little relation to
ART ...I particularly do not want to be on the art scene. If you come
on with the scene you go off with the scene.... 1 am deeply concerned
about this. What I want is... just a little room, just a few paintings,
contemplated quietly. Unaggressive paintings.*

The asterisk from the last leads to “for unaggressive collectors.” Martin
concludes by writing, “hoping you agree with me.” She was surely right.
The brash expressionism, on the one hand, and photo-based postmodern
imagery, on the other, that were then predominant in SoHo galleries would
have provided a much less supportive context than the quieter precincts of
East Fifty-seventh Street that she preferred. She kept her distance, in New
Mexico, but she also kept a sharp lookout for her painting’s best prospects.
For all the close attention paid by critics to Martin’s work in the 1970s
and ’80s, many observers remained stubbornly fixed on the paintings of
her New York decade and on the visual mechanics of the grid, which by

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the early 1980s she had abandoned almost entirely. This focus was sup-
ported by Martin’s inclusion in such exhibitions as Grids (January-March
1972), organized by Lucy Lippard for the Institute of Contemporary Art in
Philadelphia and preceding by a year the Martin survey that Delehanty
assembled. Lippard’s show had represented a broad spectrum: Ad Rein-
hardt and Ellsworth Kelly were included; so were such younger artists as
Eva Hesse, Joan Snyder, Merrill Wagner, Mary Heilmann, and Dona Nel-
son—“perhaps by coincidence perhaps not,” Lippard wrote, “many of the
artists who have drawn a particularly unique interpretation from the grid’s
precise strains are women.” Also shown was work by (among others) Carl
Andre, Jasper Johns, Alfred Jensen, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and Andy
Warhol. Lippard’s catalogue essay began: “The grid per se is of absolutely
no importance to any of the artists in this exhibition,” providing only an
“armature” for various means and ends. Indeed, Lippard embraced the
arbitrariness of her chosen aggregation, since the very idea of a unifying
critical rubric seemed to her suspiciously authoritarian. Although she did
offer that “the grid is music paper for color, idea, state of mind,’ and that
“its perfection is temptingly despoilable,” she mostly let the artists speak
for themselves. Ad Reinhardt was quoted as having said, “If you want to be
left with nothing, you can’t have nothing to begin with.” LeWitt perhaps
spoke best for Lippard’s own interests at the time when he said, “To work
with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.” Martin’s own
writing doesn’t appear in this essay, but Lippard notes, “Agnes Martin’s
channels of nuance... are the legendary examples of an unrepetitive use
of a repetitive medium.”*
If Lippard deliberately refrained from theorizing about the grid,
whether in particular instances or as a generic form, Rosalind Krauss dived
in deep, and in two highly influential essays of the late seventies and early
eighties illustrated her ideas with Martin’s work. “Grids,” written in 1978
and first published in October 9 (1979), begins by arguing that the grid,
emblem par excellence of modernity, installs a barrier between vision and
language, and also between art and reality: it is, Krauss writes, “what art

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looks like when it turns its back on nature,” creating an order “of pure
relationship.” While the orthogonals of perspective-based painting map
space, the grid, “if it maps anything... maps the surface of the painting
itself.” This is a straightforward statement of formalism. But from Mon-
drian and Malevich to Reinhardt, Krauss continued, painters who have
availed themselves of grids have invoked spirituality, initiating a dramatic
opposition of spirit and matter. “The grid’s mythic power is that it makes
us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science,
or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief
(or illusion, or fiction),” she maintained. “The work of Reinhardt or Agnes
Martin would be instances of this power.” In other words, the grid is a myth
in the structuralist sense, in that it allows two contrary views “to be held
in some kind of para-logical suspension.”
At the same time, Krauss suggested, psychoanalysis helps us see that
the grid allows a contradiction to be sustained “in the consciousness of
modernism, or rather its unconscious, as something repressed.” She went
back to the late nineteenth century, with its pioneering studies of light and
of the physiology of perception, to find grids in both neo-impressionism
(in its scientism) and symbolism (insofar as windows were a favorite met-
aphor), and summarized, “I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that
behind every twentieth-century grid there lies—like a trauma that must
be repressed—a symbolist window parading in the guise of a treatise on
optics.” Introducing yet another opposition, she contended that, in centrif-
ugal fashion, the grid is sometimes “an introjection of the boundaries of
the world into the interior of the work.” Martin’s work, she says, falls into
this category, in which the surface tends to be dematerialized.
In conclusion, Krauss proclaims, “Because of its bivalent structure (and
history) the grid is fully, even cheerfully, schizophrenic.’ In defending the
application of clinical terms to a cultural phenomenon (the grid), Krauss
explained that she was tracking a symptom across a range of instances,
rather than scripting a narrative that develops over time. It goes without
saying that Krauss’s use of the term “schizophrenic” in connection with
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Martin’s work entailed not the slightest implication that there was a link
between the artist’s painting and her mental illness (of which Krauss was
almost certainly unaware). But it also suggests the freedom with which
psychoanalytic formulations and diagnostic terms have been applied, by
Krauss and others, to art clearly not motivated by the internal, emotional
experiences for which those terms were coined. On the contrary, psycho-
analysis, for Krauss, was a sharp tool for separating woolly-headed intro-
spection, and its proponents, from scholarly investigation of the patterns
of cultural production.
Like “Grids,” Krauss’s “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” first pub-
lished two years later, opens with an image of one of Martin’s grids from
the mid-1960s. In another wide-ranging consideration of the grid, as an
emblem of novelty “that is constantly being paradoxically rediscovered,”
Krauss contended that some artists became caught in the grid’s meshes,
such that “their work virtually ceases to develop and becomes involved,
instead, in repetition. Exemplary artists in this respect are Mondrian,
Albers, Reinhardt, and Agnes Martin.”* This despite the fact that Martin’s
work had, by 1978, turned toward striped compositions. These essays had
already helped consolidate understanding of Martin’s work as enduringly
grid-based when, a dozen years later, Krauss revisited it, in her catalogue
essay for the 1992 retrospective at the Whitney Museum—the artist’s first
major solo museum exhibition.
Organized by Barbara Haskell (who had been curator at the Pasadena
Museum of Art when the ICA show traveled there), it was among the most
significant exhibitions of Martin’s career. Besides presenting work from
the 1960s, it afforded audiences an opportunity to see little-known early
assemblages, biomorphic abstractions, and black and gray paintings, as
well as the color-suffused striped compositions she had been creating since
the middle 1970s. The catalogue included an essay by Haskell that treated
Martin’s development with great sensitivity, discussing her writing and
beliefs, tracing the outlines of her early life, noting the art communities
in which she participated, and considering the full range of her work in

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relationship to these shaping influences. Another powerful essay, by Anna

Chave, discussed Martin’s work in relationship to her Abstract Expres-
sionist peers and considered the gender politics (of which more later)
that framed its reception. The catalogue also included some examples of
Martin’s writing, among them her views on the response to art, on humility,
and on the question of what is real.
But it is Krauss’s essay in this volume that is most often cited in subse-
quent criticism.** It begins ingratiatingly (‘Do you remember the hilarity,
as achild...”), by way of introducing a discussion of the film Gabriel and
the problem of nature imagery in Martin’s work generally. Soon, however,
Krauss delivers a sharp slap to complacent readers (“In the exceedingly
superficial and repetitive literature on Agnes Martin...”), alighting on
the “arresting exception” of an early article by the little-known Kasha Lin-
ville, which observes (as have many writers, before and since*’) the distinct
experiences Martin’s paintings offer from different viewing distances. In
a bravura performance of criticism, Krauss designates three such expe-
riences—the close reading of “facture and drawing”; the crucial middle-
distance view from which “the paintings go atmospheric”; and the last,
most distant one in which they become opaque shapes—proceeding from
these positions to the formulation, by the theorist Hubert Damisch, of
the bracketed term /cloud/. Krauss paraphrases this /cloud/ as an entity
that doesn’t fit into a given system, but defines it nonetheless. An optical
mechanism developed by the Renaissance master Brunelleschi, along with
a Classificatory system shaped by the late nineteenth-century art historian
Alois Riegl, are called into play to place Martin’s work as both an exemplar
of classicism and of formlessness (a mode of art-making, associated with
Georges Bataille, that Krauss has explored extensively elsewhere). Notably,
Krauss concludes by characterizing not a specific painting by Martin, or
even a body of her work, but rather “the grid,” which in Krauss’s essay still
stands for Martin’s entire oeuvre.
For her part, Martin, who was eighty when the Whitney exhibition
opened, demonstrated little interest in the critical maneuvers of the time.

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She was, naturally, enormously gratified by the recognition the exhibition

offered, and photographs of her at the opening reception—shaking hands
with Chuck Close, standing beside Jill Johnston, Barbara Haskell, and Arne
Glimcher—show her happy if a little distracted; as always, she negotiated
the art world’s social events from a careful distance. (David McIntosh, who
accompanied Martin to New York, recalled that Flora and Sidney Biddle
gave a big dinner party in her honor, which, McIntosh said, she enjoyed
immensely.)
Once again, the critical response was largely favorable.** At the same
time, a number of writers noted, not always happily, the growing impor-
tance of her character. Deborah Solomon disparaged “her image as a guru
of female self-reliance,” while allowing, “Fortunately, Ms. Martin is far more
subtle as a painter than as a cult figure.”2? On the other hand, Kay Larson
observed, respectfully, Martin’s “evident sympathy with Asian medita-
tion and the mind-set that produces it,” while wondering why she wasn’t
a “bigger star.’4° But as early as 1979, John Perreault had complained, in a
review of an exhibition at Pace, “There’s an Agnes Martin mystique and
it annoys me,’ a mystique he attributed to her age, endurance, discipline,
and withdrawal to New Mexico. Such skepticism should be seen against
the growing importance, by this time, of cultural and political reckoning
in the visual arts: by 1992, art that took no social position had become
suspect.
That condition was a long time in the making. In the late 1960s and early
70s, many artists had turned away from conventional disciplines (painting,
sculpture) toward performance, film and video, installation, free-standing
work in non-traditional mediums (including those associated with craft),
and various forms of art-based activism. In many cases, artists who made
these choices were impelled by feminist politics. Martin’s forays into film
and, at least imaginatively, into earthwork suggest that she was aware of
this sea change and interested in testing its waters—although her acknowl-
edged guideposts were mostly works by men. By the eighties, photo-based
work that examined the social and sexual codes operating in commercial

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imagery had gained ascendance, work that again was strongly driven by
women (though this attribution is not always credited). At the same time,
painting was also back in play by the eighties, but the favored mode, given
a boost by the newly open exchange of artists across international bor-
ders, was figurative, expressionistic, big and brash; women were much less
prominent in this cohort. (It was, perhaps, this bold, large-scale painting
that Martin had in mind when she wrote to Arne Glimcher asking that her
work not be shown in SoHo.) Female abstractionists—whether roughly of
Martin’s generation, such as Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, or of slightly
later ones, like Anne Truitt, Jo Baer, and Mary Heilmann-struggled to
achieve anything close to the visibility of such painters as Brice Marden,
Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, and their elders, including the notable survivor
among Martin’s peers, Ellsworth Kelly. The male artists included in Lip-
pard’s Grids show of twenty years earlier continued to draw more notice
than the women. Such disparities would be addressed only slowly and
never completely. The nineties would see an even more polarizing empha-
sis on gender (and racial, and cultural) identity politics, mostly expressed
as before in mediums other than painting and sculpture.
Perreault had situated Martin in this developing lineage when he wrote,
in his 1979 review, “The rise of the women’s movement enhanced Martin’s
status, for women artists, with some justification, could look to her as an
example, a role model.” To his mind, such attribution was false: “Martin’s
use of the grid is sometimes proposed as feminist. Is this because the hor-
izontals and verticals resemble the warp and weft of weaving, which is
considered women’s work? I think this is nonsense.” Martin, of course,
was in full agreement. In any case, she did not even see herself as a woman,
much less as a feminist—as she had long ago revealed in her comment to
Jill Johnston, who'd ventured the thought that Martin might have had a
bigger reputation if she was not a woman, and “she shot back i’m not a
woman and i don’t care about reputations.”* Later, she would say to Mary
Lance that Johnston (who was herself openly gay) had got many things
right but was wrong when she said that she (Martin) was a lesbian.’ Having

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left New York before the feminist efforts of the late sixties and early seven-
ties transformed the art world’s sexual politics, Martin may have found it
easier to dismiss the movement than if she had remained there. Regardless,
her rejection of gender identification was adamant and, in her later life,
sometimes successful enough to fool strangers, as is illustrated in Arne
Glimcher’s anecdote of a visit to a restaurant in Albuquerque, where she
happily accepted being addressed as a man.“4
In her catalogue essay for the Whitney survey,*° Anna Chave had ven-
tured—more or less alone among critics to that point—to consider Martin’s
place among female peers. “Unlike the handful of other female artists
who succeeded in attaining some prominence before the gains won by the
feminist movement in the 1970s,’ Chave wrote, “Martin was hardly ever
termed, and therefore marginalized as, a ‘woman artist’ Nor would the
burgeoning women’s movement rush to enfold her as one of its own, as it
did with other older female artists such as Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois,
or Georgia O’Keeffe.” This was despite, Chave notes, Martin’s early and
consistent support by female critics. Indeed, she argues, Martin’s “aston-
ishing” critical success may have made her later embrace by feminists
seem unnecessary, Perreault’s assessment notwithstanding. Moreover, the
choice of plane geometry and of painting discouraged feminist solidarity:
“Martin has been tacitly viewed by some feminists as a kind of sellout, in
other words, an artist who used a paradigmatically masculine vocabulary
in order to pass as one of the boys, that is, as a mainstream modernist.”
Nonetheless, Chave saw Martin’s work as a deliberate effort to undermine
authority, and in so doing, to engage—at least implicitly—in an anti-patri-
archal effort: “It was not merely in her use of the grid, but in the way she
composed those grids, that Martin implemented her critique of power,’
Chave wrote. Borrowing the artist’s vocabulary, she argued, “Martin’s inter-
est in using rectangles and squares to visualize the defeat of aggression
by mildness put her conspicuously at odds with her Minimalist peers,”
such as Judd and Carl Andre. Widely seen as “quiet, self-effacing, devout,
and de-sexualized,” Martin kept her “unconventional” private life “in the
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shadows” and hence exuded “a kind of egolessness” that set her “apart
from her male peers.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Martin didn’t endorse this reading.*° In an
interview conducted at around the time of her show at the Whitney,
she pronounced, “The women’s movement failed. They”—note the pro-
noun—“aren’t any more free than they ever were.” She reported not the
slightest discrimination against herself or women artists of her acquain-
tance, although she did admit one difference: “Men artists can get married
and go right on being artists. Women artists who get married don’t have
a chance.” Art, Martin went on, shouldn't have a gender. “I’m for keeping
the field of art as it is, neither masculine nor feminine.’#” Nonetheless, in
her 1987 lecture to students at the Skowhegan School, Martin had encour-
aged young women in particular, and—anomalously—she made a clear
statement of her understanding that women faced particular obstacles.
“By questioning your own mind it is possible to have absolutely original
thoughts,” she promised, but cautioned, “Your conditioning has taught you
to identify with others—their emotions and their needs. I urge you to look
to yourself. In our convention it is particularly difficult for women.” And
a decade later, she said to Mary Lance, “I'd like to say to women painters
that they can get married and have their children and when the children
are independent, that they still have years and years to paint—if they live
as long as I do, anyway.’4* But to Michael Auping, in an interview of around
the same time, she insisted, “My art has never been about politics or form.
I’m not a feminist the way some people describe it.”49 Finally, when asked
in a 1999 interview, “Have you ever thought of yourself as a feminist?”
she replied, “No, no, no.”* Clearly, she wanted this question disposed of,
conclusively.
As she grew older, and perhaps less cautious, Martin also made clear her
impatience with the whole noisome business of social injustice and the
activism that resists it. Harmony Hammond considers Martin to have been
“right wing” and recalls Martin referring dismissively to “those women, the
Indians, the poor, that feminist thing.” According to Hammond, Martin was

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against abortion; she believed sex was degradation;* she did not identify
as a woman. And she found some confirmation for her attitudes in her
heterogeneous local community; Hammond reports that people stood
and cheered when Martin said, in a 1989 talk at the Museum of Fine Arts
in Santa Fe, “The political world is a structure conceived and agreed to by
us but it is not reality,” and further, “the political is a negation of life.”
While elsewhere in the art world increasingly thorny debates over theory
and politics prevailed, Martin sustained a commitment to policing the
boundaries between art and everything else.
This is not to say that she spurned social obligations on either a personal
or community level. When she became wealthy, she sought out ways to
share her bounty, from significant acts of philanthropy to taking people
out for lunch. Her acts of non-material generosity were just as important
in sustaining the many deeply loyal friendships she continued to have.
Some of her social judgments seem to have become crude. At best they
were careless. But if she was against the women’s movement, and political
engagement of any kind, it was because she was against anything that
stood in the way of maintaining an innocent, untroubled mind.

N i)Ww
 Chapter 9

CONTOURS REDRAWN

oon after the Whitney show opened, Martin moved back to

Taos, where she remained for her final dozen years. The retro-
spective—and others at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
(1991) and the Serpentine Gallery in London (1993)—along with the 1992
publication of her writings by Hatje Cantz, had brought a new degree of
visibility, which may have spurred her move. So might have her advanc-
ing age. In Taos her daily regimen was simple: she lived in a retirement
residence, painted at a studio in town, and lunched, almost daily, with a
friend or acquaintance.
In the many interviews she gave in her last years, a few themes are
repeated, including her rather vexed relationship to music and the impor-
tance to her of friends, reading and, always most necessary, work. To Rosa-
mund Bernier, in a 1992 interview for Vogue, Martin reported that she still
did not have a TV. “She enjoys music,” wrote Bernier, “Beethoven sympho-
nies, above all—but rarely listens to it. ‘Too stimulating, she says.” And
when she was asked whether she read in the evening alone, she answered,
“I don't read nonfiction. Big thinkers stick to your mind, prey upon you,
and bring destruction. I prefer detective stories.” Which ones, Bernier
wondered? “The same as everyone else, Agatha Christie,” Martin replied.’
In another interview the following year, she again explained her read-
ing habits: “If you read non-fiction like philosophy, history and all that,

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it sticks on your mind and preys on your mind. The next day when you
try to get inspiration you think of the ancient Greeks or whomever. So
what you have to read is what will go through the mind, in one ear and
out the other. For me that’s detective stories. As soon as it’s solved it’s
gone.” Confirming that Christie’s detective novels were her favorite, she
said, “I read them over and over. As soon as I forget who done it, I read it
again. I don’t get any value out of reading them, so there is no use going
on about it,” she added, a warning reminiscent of her injunction against
citing Zen teachings and other spiritual texts in explaining her work or
her character. On the overstimulation caused by music, she explained,
rather confoundingly, “I only listen to Beethoven. But he makes me so
joyful that I weep. I play some Bach everyday. It keeps me balanced.” And
on sociability, Martin offered, “I think we are herd animals. We have to do
a certain amount of talking and being together. I have lots of friends here
and know other artists”; among those she mentioned were Bruce Nauman
and Susan Rothenberg, and Richard Tuttle.’
Her friends were well aware of her interests. Tony Huston says he took
Martin on drives in her last years, often playing Beethoven on the car
stereo. When a chamber group traveled to Taos he arranged for them to
play a Beethoven string quartet for her in a private performance at the
home of Taos residents Happy and Ken Price. Huston said she sat amid
them “like a mountain, and beamed.”3 Suzanne Delehanty, who visited
Martin at Taos, noted her well-kept studio and her regular lunches, taken
at the Taos Inn; as did other friends, she remarked that Martin enjoyed a
cocktail—with Delehanty it was a margarita—and a good steak. Those who
still considered her an ascetic might have been surprised to learn that her
appetites were, as ever, hearty.
Ina telephone conversation in 1997, Martin told Holland Cotter of the
New York Times that her retirement home was “perfect for me. We each
have a small house of our own. People come to clean and to wash my
clothes. I don’t have to think about anything but painting.” Cotter reported
that she rose early and drove herself the half-mile to her studio. “There
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

she works steadily from 8:30 to 11:30. By noon, she’s at lunch at a favorite
restaurant. She spends afternoons reading at home. ‘I don’t read nonfiction
because it sticks in the mind. I have to keep my mind free for painting. I
read mystery stories. In one ear and out the other. I like Agatha Christie
best. I’ve read her so many times Ipractically know the words by heart.” (It
seems her answers to reporters’ questions were equally well rehearsed.) “By
8 pm,” Cotter wrote, “she’s usually asleep.”> An interview seven years later
again reprised these themes, although her day seemed to have shortened
a bit. But it was noted that among the rare breaks in her schedule was a
one-day trip to attend the opening of a gallery featuring her work at the
Dia Art Foundation’s then new home in Beacon, New York.
In other words, the contradictions of Martin’s life remained fairly
breathtaking. Jetting, when the occasion demanded, between the little
insular community of Taos and the cosmopolitan world where her work
had become nearly universally esteemed, Martin had constructed a life in
reliable equilibrium. Although not without its moments of stress, and of
exhilaration, it was kept on an even keel by a routine of her own careful.
devising, for which Agatha Christie (whom she'd been reading in Galisteo
too; a visitor spotted a Christie novel on her bookshelf there’) provided,
like Bach, manageably stimulating background music—and, at the risk
of flouting Martin’s prohibition, some telling comparisons with her own
habits and preferences. Organized around elegantly constructed systems
of perfect and rather stringent logic, Christie’s stories celebrate propriety
and measured fun; there is drinking and sociability; the characters are
psychologically one-dimensional; the moral codes simple. In the early
twenty-first century, for someone who had been newly adult when the
classic mysteries first gained popularity, they would have been deeply
nostalgic. The violence that is at their heart is routine and, by later stan-
dards, bloodless. Bad (or questionable, or simply uninteresting) people are
dispatched, without much fuss. The smart ones live and prosper. Anger,
fear, and death—the last in extravagant abundance—are all shown to be
eminently manageable.

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The establishment of permanent galleries featuring her work at Dia:Bea-

con was not the only honor bestowed on Martin in her later years. In 1997
she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice
Biennale. David McIntosh recalls how pleased she was to receive a National
Medal of Arts award, the following year, during the Clinton administration.
Martin traveled to Washington, D.C., to accept it, and she met the President
and First Lady. McIntosh says she liked Hillary Clinton in particular. Mar-
tin “appreciated her personality,’ he remembers, while adding that Martin
always claimed she did not support women just for the sake of supporting
women’s rights. Although it was sometimes said that she never followed the
news (her opposition to political involvement supports the assumption),
McIntosh recalls that she enjoyed reading the newspaper in the Plaza del
Retiro every morning, and while she “wasn’t involved much in politics,
she did support”—perhaps not surprisingly—“both Clintons.”* She kept
a photograph of herself with the President in her bedroom, along with a
photograph of some local children, and a very few decorative objects: a
stamped tin crucifix, a locally made textile hanging. (As ever, stylish and
comfortable domesticity was not her concern.) In Taos, too, Martin was
a celebrity. Harmony Hammond was among the guests at a dinner cele-
brating Martin’s ninetieth birthday, in 2002, when Martin shared the dais
with other local artists, among them Richard Tuttle, and representatives
of the Pace Gallery, including Arne Glimcher and executive vice-president
Peter Boris. Martin, Hammond recalls, “was wearing a corsage, and one
of her custom-made velvet outfits. Agnes Martin canvas bags were given
out. The mayor of Taos proclaimed it Agnes Martin week. Her name was
in lights on the hotel in town.” A conference was held on the occasion, and
“she went to every talk.”
Among the others on the dais was Bob Ellis, then the director of the
Harwood Museum in Taos. Ellis had a standing weekly lunch engagement
with Martin in these Taos years, which bespeaks a friendship he explains
with disarming simplicity: “So many people approached her in awe. I
didn’t do that” Indeed, his reminiscences about Martin are refreshingly

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frank. “Occasionally, he says, “she’d turn on people, if she didn’t take her
medications. She talked openly about it. She had her depressions, and
periods when she didn’t paint.” At the same time, she was subject, still,
to all the ordinary emotional experiences of a working artist, including
jealousy and-that cardinal sin, for Martin—pride. “Agnes had an ego,”
Ellis says, “despite her philosophy. She used the word envious of Rothko
and Twombly.”
Along with routine feelings and prosaic events, their conversation some-
times turned to spiritual matters. Ellis, who points out that the Bible is full
of people who heard voices, has consulted oracles for his own spiritual
purposes and recalls talking with Martin about receptivity to such sources.
On occasion, he says, she would make “spiritual ratings of people. We went
to lunch one time and as we sat down she said, let’s check your spiritual
rating. Her head went to one side, her eyes glazed over, she twitched a little,
and she came out with a number, and then she said, ‘wow, that’s higher
than what I thought it would be.” The unselfconsciousness with which
she approached this evaluation, seemingly made with no more fuss than
measuring a person’s feet for shoes, is striking. It was in a similar spirit that
she told Ellis she had been on the planet many times before, as men as
well as women, and also as children. She liked to sit in silence, he reports.
And she didn’t like to be touched.”
The easy transition Ellis conveys between Martin’s references to states
of communion—whether spiritual or social—and of isolation is also strik-
ing. It seems she never stopped negotiating between engagement and
withdrawal, although in her later years the two conditions seemed less
starkly opposed. In a 1993 interview, she said, “I’ve always meditated a bit.
It’s a pleasant experience. I don’t meditate for hours, just twenty minutes
twice a day. A lot of days I don’t do it twice.” When asked about her tech-
nique, she replied, with characteristic matter-of-factness, “I just gradually
learned to stop thinking. It doesn’t help to try to shut it off forcefully.”
Similarly, she admitted to having relaxed her standards for suppressing

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vanity. When asked if egolessness was her goal in meditating, she answered,
“No. It’s not possible to be egoless in this world. It’s ego that makes us
what we are.”
Bob Ellis’s friendship with Martin was of considerable benefit to the
Harwood. Long a shoestring operation, it had started as a cultural center,
not a museum, and was taken over by the University of New Mexico in the
1930s, not long before Martin arrived at the Field School there. By the early
nineties the university was looking to leave Taos, but couldn’t shut the
museum and deaccession its collection because of the terms of the found-
ing gift. “We started to show local artists—Larry Bell, Kenny Price—and
were always scrounging for shows that wouldn’t cost much money,’ Ellis
says. “One day I said to Agnes, if you ever want to show some paintings
before they go to New York, we'd be happy to show them. This was around
1994,” Ellis continued. “She had just finished ten paintings—she’d recently
been to Greece, and they were blue and white. She said, you can show
seven of them. Right now. So we did.” The gallery designated for the exhi-
bition was square, “but we built additional walls spanning the corners
to make it octagonal, so each painting would have a wall. Agnes came. I
brought a rocking chair in, and she sat in it while we hung the paintings.
She said, the Whitney doesn’t let me do this. I had an epiphany that if she
would give us the paintings we would build a gallery. No one had ever
asked. She said yes.” With Arne Glimcher’s agreement (and some nego-
tiation over which paintings would be part of the gift), the donation was
made, and a permanent gallery built, with an octagonal floor plan and
an oculus in the center of the ceiling that admits natural light. A cluster
of Minimalist seats, designed by Donald Judd, sits at the center (pl. 36).
According to Ellis, “Peter Boris [of Pace Gallery] and his wife offered to
donate the Judd benches. Unfortunately he sent color samples to Agnes,
in red, green, brown, and ocher. Agnes wanted one of each. I had to fight
that with Agnes. I told her they’d clash. She said, the paintings will hold
their own. I had to practically tell lies to convince her” to accept a single

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color (ocher). “Afterward, I went to pick her up for lunch, and she climbed
in the car and said, well, I lost that. She didn’t like to lose.’” Nor did she
care to refine her taste in furnishings.
In her later years Martin exercised her will less by her stubbornness
than by her generosity—her always anonymous philanthropy extended to
support for two parks in Taos and a public swimming pool there as well
as a substantial financial gift to the Harwood—though hardheadedness
persisted. In 2000, when she was nearing 90, she was asked if she still drove
much. “Oh yes,” she answered. “It’s so easy to drive my car. When I first got
it, Idrove for six hours. Up to Questa, Red River, Eagle Nest, then I went
down to Cimarron, Canyon, Springer, and then came back to Ocate, then
Mora, and then I came home. In one day. I drove it to see if I'd get tired.
Everybody tells me I’m too old to drive. So I checked to see if I'd get tired,
but I didn’t.” And then, replying to a question bearing on her interest in
other artists, she said that when she was in Los Angeles, where she had
gone to see a show of her own work, she also went to a David Hockney
exhibition that included the big painting Grand Canyon, which she pro-
nounced “a knockout.” Laughing a little, as she so often did in interviews,
she added, “You just wonder how he can ever make so many colors look so
good.” The year before she died Martin was still driving, in what Lillian
Ross, writing for the New Yorker, described as a “spotless” E320 Mercedes.
“I don’t eat supper,’ Martin told Ross, nor did she listen to the radio or
watch television. But she was still listening to music; this time, she said it
was Beethoven's Ninth. “Beethoven is really about something,” she said
to Ross. And then, as if to clarify, “I go to sleep when it gets dark, get up
when it’s light. Like a chicken. Let’s go to lunch.”

Martin’s delight in Hockney’s rainbow palette bespeaks the same joy she
took in the range of color choices available for the Harwood gallery seat-
ing. Her own work’s color spectrum remained narrow, although some
liberties were ultimately taken there too. The Harwood paintings are, as
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Ellis observed, executed exclusively in various shades of Mediterranean

blue and white, all powerfully sun-bleached. Shortly before making them,
as Ellis noted, Martin traveled to Greece, a trip that Suzanne Delehanty
says was particularly important, because of the artist’s commitment to
classicism. At the same time, the filmmaker Mary Lance says that in her
late eighties, Martin admitted she was influenced by the blue sky of Taos.
And she also said, “I was brought up on the ocean and I tried to convince
myself that I like the mountains as much as the ocean, but I don’t. I like
the ocean better.” Both bracing ocean air and the sharp light of the Taos
high-desert landscape can be felt in these seven Harwood paintings, all
made in 1993 or’94, and all in her late, 5-foot-square format. The octagonal
shape of the room in which they hang encourages the viewer to experience
them as a group, and the oculus admits unifying light, but the paintings
themselves do not produce, together, the sense of an environment, nor
even of a specified sequence. Despite their shared palette and composi-
tional elements—horizontal bands of varying width and pattern—each
requires dedicated, individual face-to-face contemplation: a lunch for two.
A few have the rhythm of slow ocean waves, with broad bands of pale
blue alternating with white, edge to edge across the canvases. The penciled
lines that rule the divisions are sometimes scarcely visible and, in other
cases, more insistent. In some, the whites seem pure oxygen and the blues
crystalline, while in others there is a heavier, heat-struck atmosphere, and
the blues range from radiant and liquid to nearly lightless. In one, the blue
goes quite flat, almost gray, like water on an overcast day. There are lively,
even agitated canvases—with narrow stripes, more saturated colors and
visibly brushy paint application—and quieter ones. In Playing, a strong
illusion of volume is created where bands of blue are bordered below with
shadow-like strips of darker blue, and above with narrow strips of bright
white, which—as in a couple of paintings in The Islands series at the Whit-
ney Museum-creates the impression of substantial horizontal louvers,
their top edges here sharply illuminated. The titles of the other paintings
are unabashed declarations of purpose: Lovely Life, Love, Friendship,

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Perfect Day, Ordinary Happiness, and, inevitably, Innocence, this last a

calm composition in which there are six even, broad bands of blue so
pale and hushed they nearly register as white. The experiences identified
by some of these names (Lovely Life, Perfect Day), and by other titles like
them attached to many later works, can be dismissed as naive. Believing
in the possibility of realizing such experiences in images is the hard work
of a long lifetime.
A related series of eight paintings, in the collection of Dia Art Foun-
dation and on semi-permanent display in its Beacon, New York, facility,
is dated 1999 and titled, as a group, Innocent Love (pl. 37). These 5-foot
squares, all again composed of horizontal bands, add yellow and a pale
orange to the dyad of blue and white. The fourth work in this series is
banded at the center with a heraldic pair of stripes, one orange and the
other a surprisingly electric blue; the whispery yellow ground that these
stripes cross is a luminous wonder (especially lit by shifting daylight admit-
ted from overhead, as it is, again, at the skylit Dia:Beacon). Sometimes the
blue is watery, like satin ribbon. Several of the bands are broad enough to
constitute fields; in one case, two such areas of blue create a quite breath-
taking sense of open, cloudless sky. The final canvas brings together pale
red, yellow, and blue bands, two of each, all the same width, in a sunset
spectrum that is unabashedly simple and almost absurdly beautiful.
Other late paintings experiment further with colors new to Martin’s
work. Still opposed to depicting the landscape, she remained, as ever, an
ardent observer of her natural environs, and her descriptions of them are,
as before, easily tied to her work, as when she said of Taos, in 2000, “It’s still
a little town. You can be in the scenery right on the edge of town.” Unlike
regions where “the mountains are jammed up together... here you have
mountain, plain, mountain, plain. It’s a great experience of space.”"* It’s
also a great account of the rhythm of much of her late work, the palette of
which began to change with the turn of the century. A group of paintings
exhibited at Pace in April of 2000, all dated that year, introduce a range
of greens; a fairly saturated orange appears as well. In Innocence, pale
 CONTOURS REDRAWN

forest-green bands course across a creamy white ground. Mossy greens

also appear in Everyday Happiness and Love. In Happy Holiday, single
green stripes appear at top and bottom; between are pale orange stripes
alternating with white, but an unusual calculation results in a striking
asymmetry, with white bordering green at the bottom and, at the top,
orange with green. The Christmassy combination of reddish orange with
piney green hints at an explanation of the painting’s title, but it may be
more easily explained by Martin’s 1973 statement, “Although helplessness
is the most important state of mind the holiday state of mind is the most
efficacious for artists: ‘Free and easy wandering’ it is called by the Chinese
sage Chuang Tzu.””” Infant Response to Love combines nursery shades of
very pale yellow and baby blue, in pairs of bands each separated by white.
Buttery yellow stripes appear in others of these paintings, along with pale
red-oranges.
Over the next few years, anomalies multiplied and old motifs reap-
peared. Vertical stripes return after 2000, as do the occasional intersec-
tion of vertical and horizontal. In Untitled #3 of 2003, the top half of the
canvas supports a fine grid, hearkening back to earlier paintings; below is
a solid field of pale greenish yellow. Untitled #22 of 2002 features two blue
vertical stripes at the margins and a field of very warm off-white between
them; this wall-eyed composition, a kind of inside-out Barnett Newman,
creates the sense of a field too big to see at once. Benevolence, 2001, features
six yellow bands separated by narrower white ones, the color so pale it
disappears as you approach. Gratitude, 2001, presents a deep, fresco-like
orange field at the center, paired with white; light pea-green stripes appear
on either side. Pale orange bands, bordered and separated by white, con-
stitute I Love the Whole World, 2001. The quiet ecstasy of these paintings
is as plain as their titles.
Not all of Martin’s late paintings are buoyant. There are a number of late
paintings that employ black or shades of gray. Most of these are untitled;
they represent states of mind Martin chose not to name. Among them is
a vertically striped gray canvas, Untitled #4, 2002, a baleful planked wall.
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

Untitled #17, 2002, is banded at the top with a washy gray that is repeated
in two squares at its bottom corners. The field in which they float is of the
very densest black, the matte paint apparently both brushed and knifed
on, with a ruthless, rather frenzied determination in which it is not hard
to discern something like terror. In Untitled #21 of 2001 there are also two
squares, this time black against a gold-toned ground; a gray band runs
horizontally beneath the tops of the squares: darkness held in balance
against radiance. A black trapezoid looms in the center of Homage to Life,
2003, floating in a field of grainy gray like the pitch-dark shadow of a New
Mexico mesa. In Untitled #1, 2003, two equilateral triangles sit side by
side, precisely spanning the canvas, each topped by a yellow point. Again
black as tar, they suggest the ghosts of mountains or, more whimsically,
pencil tops. In one of Martin’s last paintings, Untitled, 2004 (pl. 38), two
black squares float on a pale gray ground, one rising up on the left toward
a pair of bands, yellow and royal blue, that run across the top edge. The
second square drifts toward the bottom, but doesn’t reach as close as the
other to the canvas’s edges. In the context of Martin’s oeuvre as a whole,
the asymmetry of this composition and its unfamiliar forms and colors
have the pull of an incipient narrative.
The reintroduction of floating geometric elements, not seen in Martin’s
work since the 1950s, suggests retrospection and also, maybe, a ferociously
determined effort to look into the future: to picture the black door through
which she would soon be going. Perhaps, as she sometimes said, she
expected to return—reentering, even more speculatively, through one of
the paired abysses she pictured. But of course such literal (and admittedly
reductive) symbolism was anathema to her. In any case, as other late paint-
ings indicate, she may have expected only the most transcendent radiance.
What seems likeliest is that she considered the alternatives, actively, and
fought to conquer sometimes harrowing fear with clear-eyed curiosity.
Among the notes that the filmmaker Mary Lance took during her con-
versations with Martin is the transcription of a poem she spoke. It reads:

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My old eyes and the fields looking back

Praying in the summer sun
Speaking the low hum of stretched out time
My old eyes tell me the long happening of it.

In this late-life conversation between vision and thought, the volume

of internal speech has been lowered. It is time that has accomplished this
attenuation, which seems to have brought peace and the joyful states
named in the light-suffused later paintings. Martin had told Bob Ellis that
even when she was living in Cuba she would come up to Taos to write talks,
and it is clear she continued to find sustenance in the landscape there
with its surrounding mountains, the majestic Taos Mountain preeminent
among them.
Martin’s last, unexpected work is a slightly wobbly line drawing in ink
of a small, unremarkable potted plant (pl. 39). It is 34% inches high. Here
is the rose whose beauty does not die with it, the simple, humble face of
nature, unsublimated and nonetheless perfect. She had resisted descrip-
tive representation for decades, and at the last, in an image that looks like
a blind contour drawing—she seems to have been looking at the potted
plant, not the paper—the struggle that she (like Ellsworth Kelly) had long
waged against the lure of the glorious natural world is resolved to a single,
delicately meandering line.

Martin died on December 16, 2004, at 92, of congestive heart failure. She’d
been in sharply declining health for six months, during which time she
had ceased to work. With her passing, new aspects of her life came under
consideration. And along with the opening of new perspectives, a certain
fractiousness arose, starting with the circumstances of her burial. Her old
friend Kristina Wilson reports, “on her deathbed, I asked if she’d like to
be buried in a park she'd created—she’d planted oak trees there—north of

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Taos on the Rio Grande. She was very weak and wasn't able to talk but she
beamed and nodded. I asked if she’d sign a statement to that effect, and
she barely scribbled her name. Then she said something barely audible to
the nurse, who understood her to mean she wanted it notarized.”
In Arne Glimcher’s telling, Martin had said she wanted to be buried
next to the gallery at the Harwood where her paintings are installed; he
notes that New Mexico prohibits burial on government land, and that the
museum and its property are owned by University of New Mexico, a state
institution. Hence, he says, the cloak-and-dagger nature of the interment
that transpired, under an apricot tree beside the museum. The concerned
parties waited for the spring thaw, and at midnight under a full moon
Glimcher, David McIntosh, Bob Ellis, and Derek Martin, her nephew, all

scaled the adobe walls of the garden with a ladder. David had brought
a shovel and Agnes’s ashes, and we cleared the earth of last fall’s apricot
leaves and dug a deep hole among the roots of the tree. David had also
brought a Japanese bowl with a gold leaf lining to receive her ashes.
The sky was clear and just before we placed the ashes in the bowl its
gold lining reflected the moon. With handfuls of ashes we took turns
putting Agnes to rest underneath the tree. We covered the grave with
earth, replaced the fallen leaves and covered our tracks."9

As these conflicting accounts hint, it was not clear until she was gone
how vigorously, and how successfully, Martin had constrained discussions
of both her life and work, not just by inhibiting catalogues but also by
eliciting pledges of silence from friends. In the decade following her death,
her paintings and her persona began to be framed in contexts that sig-
nificantly challenged previous understandings. In 2004 the first of three
exhibitions surveying Martin’s career opened at Dia:Beacon. A long-term
installation of Martin’s work now occupies several galleries at the big, spare
museum in a riverfront town north of New York City. On the face of it,
this presentation, at an institution sometimes called the high church of

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Minimalism, consolidates Martin’s position within the pantheon of late

twentieth-century abstractionists, while emphasizing her important link
to the generation that succeeded her—and from which she had made such
strong efforts to distance herself. But it is not simply by its association with
Minimalism that Dia’s support for Martin complicates the understanding
of her work. As Anna Chave has pointed out, “church” applies to Dia as
more than a figure of speech;” its founders, Heiner Friedrich and Philippa
de Menil (later Fariha Friedrich), are adherents of Sufism (Islamic mys-
ticism), a sect that “has tended to value an aniconic and ‘contemplative’
visual art that ‘expresses above all a state of the soul that is open toward
the interior, toward an encounter with the Divine Presence.” In Islamic art
generally speaking, and more specifically within Sufi poetry, beauty, Chave
writes, “is considered of the essence, as beauty is tantamount to the ‘face of
God.” These priorities are strikingly close to Martin’s, even if the specific
practice of Sufism was foreign to her. If the Dia foundation “ensured a fuller
development of a spiritualized and epic chapter to the Minimalist story
than would otherwise have been possible,” then its support for Martin has
confirmed that her work will continue to be seen through a screen of ideas
and associations, from Minimalism to mysticism, from which—despite her
early affiliations—she also took pains to distance herself.
The Friedrichs were hardly alone, in the 1970s, in their devotion to eso-
teric spiritual practices and an art of transcendent experience. Chave cites
founding Minimalist Robert Morris, who wrote in 2000, “Minimalist art
at its zenith in the sixties was a kind of religious art. Unfrocked, perhaps,
but religious nevertheless.” In Minimalism, “that old-time religion of Puri-
tanism and transcendentalism grafted to Deweyan pragmatism’s aesthet-
ics of wholeness achieves its full blown ideological synthesis.” (Again,
these references perfectly describe the range of ideas that shaped Mar-
tin’s sensibility early on.) And the early twentieth century’s links between
various spiritual regimens and geometric abstraction, never entirely lost
to sight, were reinforced by the ambitious—and, admittedly, unevenly
received—1986 exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985

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at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Its omnivorous catalogue refers
to many of the spiritually inclined artists with whom Martin had had con-
tact, from the Transcendental Painting Group formed in Taos in 1938 to
Martin’s friends Reinhardt, Kelly, and Nauman.
Martin was not included in The Spiritual in Art. But it provided the
art-world debut for Hilma af Klint, who, along with Emma Kunz,” joined
Martin in a notable 2005 exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York,
“3X Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing,” which provided a quite rad-
ical repositioning of her work. Af Klint (Swedish, 1862-1944) and Kunz
(Swiss, 1892-1963) were both healers as well as artists and considered their
drawings and paintings tools of their spiritual, diagnostic, and therapeutic
practices. Little known in the upper reaches of the art world during her
lifetime, af Klint in 1892 formed a group with four other women called The
Five; they engaged in weekly séances during which automatic drawings
were made as early as 1896. Highly influenced by mystical ideas that had
wide credence at the time, they believed their drawings and watercolors
could “lead the viewer into other levels of awareness... through glimpses
of the fourth-dimensional.”> Af Klint’s compositions, organized around
concentric circles and other geometric figures and executed in symbol-
ically significant colors, can be said to be among the very first examples
of non-figurative abstraction—although perhaps the term should be qual-
ified to reflect that these images were about something: they referred to
a system of belief.
Similarly obscure, Kunz by 1910 had begun to experiment with telepathy
and prophecy and had taken up radiesthesia, the practice of divining with
a pendulum. In single sessions with patients that could last more than
twenty-four hours, Kunz traced on graph paper the tracks of a swinging
pendulum, with which she claimed to channel “external forces.’2® The
drawings provided the basis for diagnoses; they also served to locate
the patients’ lifelines and aid meditation.” Her drawings can, again, be
called remarkable early examples of geometric abstraction. Their multi-
tudes of radiating and parallel lines, inscribed within various geometric

250
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figures—stars and circles, primarily—establish vibratory fields meant to

engage the viewer on every level of perception. But even more than af
Klint, Kunz considered her drawings to be inseparable from a psycholog-
ical and spiritual regimen.
Catherine de Zegher, the exhibition’s curator, states in a catalogue essay
that the three women are connected primarily by their commitment to
geometric abstraction, but they also, she wrote, share “a concern for art as
a transformative project related to therapeutic precepts for living, their
drawings often inducing restorative feeling and healing.” Alike, de Zegher
argued, in pursuing “a rational model of perfection” and also “an emotional
model of relinquishment (the renouncing of egotism),” the three artists
were, she said, similar in their lives and characters as much as in their work.
“Not only do their drawings ... relate the substantial to the immaterial
and invisible, but the solitary humble lives the women led also manifest
significant affinities,” de Zegher contended. “Living in seclusion, af Klint,
Kunz, and Martin shared a remarkable work ethic aimed at achieving (self-)
knowledge through assiduous diligence and contemplative reflection’;
using drawing as “the sages” do, they offered “an opening to a plane of
bliss.” Their shared Protestant background is noted, as is the extensive writ-
ing that each produced, and also that “Each renounced marriage, disciples
and society.” In short, “The work of af Klint, Kunz, and Martin flows from
the intuitive perception of force fields that cannot be seen. Their unique
contribution is to give concrete form to their own bodily and spiritual
experiences.” **
Perhaps it goes without saying, by now, that almost none of this is quite
true of Martin. While she could be said to have pursued a “rational model
of perfection,” nothing could be further from her intention than that art
should serve a “therapeutic precept for living.” Some of the other contrib-
utors to the exhibition’s catalogue distance themselves from de Zegher’s
stance. Sounding a little wary, Richard Tuttle writes, in a short text dated
the day Martin died, “She was a person and a painter who knew that a
reality based in art also has to be based in life. For this reason, you find

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her on the mid-path, no easy journey, where she has little patience for
spook, witchcraft, agendas, etc.” While he seems equivocal at best about
whether the spiritual practices of af Klint and Kunz—and by extension, the
work produced in their service—are relevant to Martin, Tuttle endorses—if,
again, a little murkily—another important notion that is implicit in the
exhibition: “If one read her paintings, one would find a feminine to enjoy,
one which could be identified from having been able to recognize it in
feminine animals, previously.” In a less elliptical statement, de Zegher
reports that (presumably in the course of preparing this exhibition and
its catalogue), “Richard Tuttle came to me to tell me that Martin had said
to him in a conversation: ‘You will never know what abstraction is unless
you ask the women.”°
Whether there is something specifically female (if not feminist) in Mar-
tin’s work is a question taken up in the catalogue by Griselda Pollock, a
feminist scholar who like Rosalind Krauss is committed to bringing psy-
choanalytic theory to bear on her subject.‘ But Pollock is diverted from an
interpretative trail whose signposts are Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Barthes
by a visit to Martin in Taos in 1995. The account Pollock provides of their
conversation is amusing: “How long does it take to make a painting?’ I
asked. ‘Three hours or so, she replied. This surprised me. I had imagined
that each painting was the product of a lengthy, contemplative process....
‘Why do you want to make another?’ I then asked. ‘I have a dream,’ she
says. ‘A dream?’ The Freudian is immediately intrigued. ‘And what do you
dream. Was I hoping for the revelation of the iconographic meaning of
the paintings of Agnes Martin? She replied, ‘I dream another grid?”? One
has to take this with a grain of salt—Martin wasn’t then painting grids, and
there are no other references, in interviews, to dreams as creative sources.
Still, one gets a clear picture, sketched with self-deprecating charm by
Pollock, of a painter fully competent to deflect the most determined of
exegetes.
Ultimately, the most significant boundary reconfigured by the Drawing
Center show was not between the material and the spiritual but between
 CONTOURS REDRAWN

two draftswomen not trained in academic or professional art programs

nor affiliated with mainstream art institutions and one who was. Martin
is alone, in this grouping, in her formal training, art-historical knowledge
and cultural sophistication. The overriding of this distinction presaged a
trend that has since flourished. Moreover, to associate Martin with artists
who could be called “outsiders” was to exploit a fuzziness the art world
accepts—as does the broader culture—concerning the distinctions between
eccentricity and illness. While there had been publicly available evidence
for years, primarily in her own writing, that she suffered from profound
emotional disturbances, it was only after Martin’s death that changing
social norms began to enable a somewhat less-guarded acknowledgment
of her difficulties. In 2011 the Dia Foundation published a book of essays
about Martin in which Douglas Crimp wrote that, while he didn’t doubt
that freedom, innocence, happiness, and perfection were Martin’s subject,
“surely it is the turmoil away from which Martin turned... that constitutes
the tension so many of us see in her paintings.”3 Arne Glimcher’s 2012
book announces her illness at the outset: “Agnes had always suffered from
schizophrenia and from time to time required hospitalization.” In Jill
Johnston’s obituary for Martin, she wrote, “I had not known her very long
when she told me about her ‘trance’ states, clinically called catatonia.”»
A similar shift has loosened discussion of Martin’s romantic life. At a
2012 symposium at the Harwood museum honoring Martin on the cen-
tenary of her birth, her longtime friend Kristina Wilson, a Taos resident,
said publicly for the first time that they were lovers in the 1950s;*° she
recalled having met Martin at Columbia sometime around 1950. “I was
in a design class,’ Wilson said, and “there was someone painting at an
easel at the back of the class. She introduced herself.” They met again
a few years later in Taos and remained friends until the end of Martin’s
life—one of the very few relationships that Martin sustained for so long.
Kristina Wilson’s brief presentation, which included a frank discussion
of Martin’s mental illness, was delivered, with considerable hesitation, as
a video-recorded statement; she was present to take questions after the
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

recording was shown. Her reluctance was understandable; many Martin

supporters in the audience were dismayed at the revelation, evidently
less because of homophobia than because of a perceived violation of the
artist’s privacy, eight years after her death. Wilson said at the time that she
struggled “with whether I was betraying her, by talking about her illness,
and our affair.”
But others had already broached this issue too. In 2004, Anna Chave
wrote, “Martin’s fixation on ‘innocence’ assumes other overtones in the
context of a society that systematically pathologized and criminalized
her sexual orientation,”® and contended that although Martin rejected
physical passion, her paintings’ “extraordinary sparseness and reticence”
might be seen to “quietly inscrib[e] a form of feminine and lesbian identity
willfully aligned with, yet willfully apart from, masculine norms.” Mar-
tin’s inclusion in Jonathan Katz and David Ward’s widely discussed 2010
exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, was
a conspicuous bid for her identification as an admitted lesbian; she was
represented by a very early portrait of awoman shown nude from the waist
up (pl. 6), which Katz claimed was an expression of same-sex desire.*° In
a separate, recent essay that expands on the theme of Martin’s sexuality,
Katz describes what he believes to have been the openly gay community
of Coenties Slip and states that Lenore Tawney was Martin’s “partner.”
Most provocatively, Katz believes that Martin meant her work to be a call
for solidarity and a gesture of support: “Martin never understood her pic-
ture making as mere aesthetic activity but always saw it as a kind of social
service,’ insofar as it invited others to recall their own “free moments.”
The portrait of Martin as a healer is thereby given another turn.
All of these claims have been disputed, often by using Martin’s own
words, as when she said to Mary Lance, “Jill Johnston wrote that I’m a
lesbian but I am not.” But, again, Martin is not an infallible narrator of her
own story. And the many artists who reflect her influence, with and without
explicit acknowledgement, continue to broaden the narrative. Martin’s
influence can be felt in the work of peers who shared exhibitions with her in

254 |
 CONTOURS REDRAWN

their lifetimes—from LeWitt (1928-2007), whose work was restricted to rec-

tilinear abstraction only early in his career, to Eva Hesse (1936-1970), whose
grid-based works were also confined to a limited but nonetheless crucial
body of work—and also in that of such younger artists as Hanne Darboven,
whose concern was with the marking of time; Mary Heilmann, who is far
freer than Martin with color and pattern; Jennifer Bartlett, who gained rec-
ognition with epic cycles of imagery inscribed on gridded, baked enamel
tiles; and Ellen Gallagher, who gave a sharp edge of racial politics to very
Martin-like stripes. In an exhibition review of 2014, the painter Dan Walsh
is quoted as saying, “My joke early on about how to describe myself was
‘Philip Guston paints an Agnes Martin’; indeed a zesty fusion, Walsh’s
paintings now are color-soaked, fat-brushed, Indian-influenced geometries
that mate prayer rugs and paintings. And as part of a belated recognition
that modernism’s adherents and their descendants were not exclusively
Western, certain realignments have been made in major exhibitions, so
that at Documenta 12, the regular international roundup, Martin’s work
was paired with delicate ink-on-paper and also graphite linear abstractions,
photographs, and diary pages by Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990). Born
in India, to which she returned in the early 1960s, Mohamedi studied in
London and Paris, but the eastern spiritual influences that her peers in the
United States were grasping at from a distance were her birthright. At the
same time, a melancholy verging on despair, which Mohamedi records in
her diary in nearly illegibly micrographic lines of urgent inner thought,
reflects an inclination to explore states of turmoil with a candor that seems
affiliated with the twentieth-century West.
Some of the most fervent homages to Martin arise from those most at
odds with her spirit. The German artist Jutta Koether’s public presentation
on Martin, at Dia’s New York City venue in 2013, began with a projected
image of the slightly mad-looking pencil calculations that Martin made
when translating an image received by inspiration into a painting—repro-
ductions of such calculations serve as endpapers in Arne Glimcher’s book,
which was a touchstone for Koether’s talk. At the outset, she explained that
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

what interested her in Martin’s work was “a logical process haunted by psy-
chosis.” As if to illustrate, Koether passed around to the audience a num-
ber of her own small paintings, the various bruised-looking grids going
hand to hand with an undiscriminating intimacy—and a lack of concern
for the work’s physical safety—that would have horrified Martin. Koether
documented projects she had organized to honor Martin’s work in which
drawings were created collaboratively (although Martin never had so much
as a studio assistant), explaining that her effort at “reenacting another
artist’s practice” was akin to “entry into a mirror stage.” Along with this
reference to Lacan, she also cited Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism, and
his concept of the “Double Session” in particular. Yet, Koether said, “What I
learned from Agnes Martin is that there is in painting a dimension beyond
the discursive.” At the conclusion of her lecture-cum-performance, Koether
undertook a wild but straight-faced dance with a champagne-bottle-shaped
cardboard partner, swirling to big-band music, which, Glimcher writes,
Martin loved.
Nothing if not passionate, Koether’s presentation drew a large, rapt audi-
ence—to each of whom, it is safe to say, Martin meant something altogether
different. Martin’s writing as well as her work remains enormously compel-
ling for students; she is revered for her metaphysical insights (her demur-
tals about mysticism notwithstanding) and as an exemplar of steadfastness
in the face of obscurity and poverty. The fact that she was in her middle
forties before she began making the paintings she felt were resolved, and
in her fifties by the time she received recognition for them, has continued
to give struggling artists hope.
So does her amply manifest independence—and her many contradic-
tions. The way Martin lived, the way she dressed and ate, socialized and
spent her private time, the way she furnished her homes and traveled, con-
formed to no one’s notion of high style. She didn’t wear black, she wasn’t
svelte or soignée. While she never owned a television (or a computer),
neither did she live off the grid in a way that meets the favored standards
of self-sacrificing austerity. She loved fancy cars and ocean liners. She liked
 eee 9 20042

32 (ABOVE) 33 (BELOW)

Donald Woodman. Agnes Martin Donald Woodman. Agnes Martin’s home

in New Mexico, 1988. and studio, Galisteo, New Mexico, 1979.
Courtesy the photographer Courtesy the photographer
 SS 34
Untitled No. 11, 1984.
Acrylic, gesso, and pencil on linen, 72% x 72% in.
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
=

35
Untitled #2, 1992.
Acrylic and graphite on linen, 72 x 72 in.

‘ Private collection

J
..
’
>

“
a

a z
 36

Tina Larkin. Agnes Martin Gallery,

The Harwood Museum of Art, 1994.
Courtesy of The Harwood Museum of Art
of the University of New Mexico, Taos
Happiness (panel four of eight in the series Innocent Love), 1999.
Acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60 x 60 in.
Dia Art Foundation, New York
 38

Untitled, 2004.
Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 in.

Private collection
 39
Untitled, 2004.
Ink on paper, 3% x 2% in.
Private collection
 CONTOURS REDRAWN

being honored. She valued humility above all else. She was at once a con-
summate insider and a lifelong outsider, a devoted student of Zen and
Christian mysticism, and a sworn skeptic. She was of sound mind at times
(and to the extent that such a state can be defined), and at times she was
not. Her most reliable testimony remains her majestic work.
Painting, for Martin, was the expression of a state of mind, just as it was
for the Abstract Expressionists. She did not believe that it puts one in con-
tact with unseen forces, even less that it cures one’s ills. While her reliance
on inspiration can be usefully compared with the solicitation of subcon-
scious—or trans-conscious—sources, and thereby with automatist drawing
exercises, she opposed any suggestion that her inspirations derived from
a place of either psychic conflict or spiritual authority. Inspiration was
simply the channel on which she received her vision—her orders for paint-
ings, one ata time. She resisted anything that distracted from focus on the
visual experience her art offered. And that experience, which she was not
shy of naming Joy, or Love, or Innocence, is of a kind encountered rarely.
As riven with contradictions as the artist herself, it was born as thought,
transcribed by hand, and addressed with fervent intimacy to everyone.
 Epilogue

COMPOSURE

most all artists, I think, sometimes feel that their integrity and
credibility rest on beliefs that are frail as a spider web; this may
be particularly true of abstractionists. Martin spoke over and
over of doubt, of accepting it and using its lessons to move forward. “I
want particularly to talk to those who recognize all of their failures and
feel inadequate and defeated, to those who feel insufficient—short of what
is expected or needed,” she said. “I would like somehow to explain that
these feelings are the natural state of mind of the artist, that a sense of dis-
appointment and defeat is the essential state of mind for creative work.”
She also wrote, “helplessness, when fear and dread have run their course,
as all passions do, is the most rewarding state of all.”? And she told an
interviewer, “There’s a lot of failure. I’ve said that the ability to recognize
failure is the most important talent of an artist.”3
In the face of such rampant dread, helplessness, and failure, the reso-
lution she sought might best be called composure: it is a quality recog-
nized equally in the arrangement of lines and color on canvas (that is, in
composition), of tone and measure in music (again, composition), and
of heart and mind in human experience. Martin believed that all living
things share the capacity for such harmony; the lines she drew mapped a
transit of power that fuels happiness, beauty, and innocence—and danger
as well. In seeking to express the vibrancy and joy inherent to animate

258
 EPILOGUE

beings, she also strove to regulate an energy that was not always easy to
tame. Sometimes she was unable to control these currents, and they over-
whelmed her; sometimes they fizzled and went dead. Such struggle may
be common among artists, but Martin waged it with special vigor.
The sense of doubt of which Martin so often spoke can threaten view-
ers as well. Lawrence Alloway strikes a plaintive note in his 1966 essay
“Systemic Painting” when he writes, “What is missing from the formalist
approach to painting is a serious desire to study meanings beyond the
purely visual configuration.” He is impatient with writers who find emo-
tional expression in the work, noting drily, “this ‘sometimes-I’m-happy,
sometimes-I’m blue’ interpretation is less than one hopes for.”4 Yet his solu-
tion, to look at fixed formal systems as distinctive fingerprints of artists’
intentions, doesn’t take us much farther. Similarly, William Seitz, after
hailing the advent of a brand-new art form based on enlisting perceptions
that take place between cornea and brain, wondered in print, “can such
works, that refer to nothing outside themselves, replace with psychic effec-
tiveness the content that has been abandoned?”>
In the decades since these critics wrote, particularly the past few, notions
of faith that were once banned and ascriptions of analogy and metaphor,
of biography and self-expression, have returned in force to discussions of
abstraction. Yet many critics of Martin’s work have continued to argue that
its meaning relies wholly on the shifting experience yielded by viewing
it from near and far, without really explaining why that is noteworthy.
Doesn’t Impressionism, too, demand that we come close then step back?
Doesn’t Rembrandt? The famous Landscape with the Fall ofIcarus, associ-
ated with Pieter Bruegel the Elder, depends on it, as a kind of metaphysical
joke.
Such questions and quibbles are probably inevitable. Our position, as
viewers, can hardly be more secure than that of artists. And no ardent
admirer of abstract painting can avoid moments when, for whatever rea-
son, the current of energy breaks. Martin’s The Tree (1964), in the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, was the first of her paintings I encountered.
 NANCY PRINCENTHAL

I was a teenager, and it has stayed with me ever since. Returning to it

when I began writing this book, I found it static and coldly white. It was
a dismaying moment; Isat on a bench with pad and pen in hand and saw
nothing but pencil lines and paint. Was it the lighting? A recent cleaning?
Did The Tree have bad company on the walls that day, or—a more selfish
thought-—in the gallery, with its noisy throngs of careless viewers? Martin
believed firmly that her work was dependent on the observer’s response,
and I was failing it. And to Martin it was no minor painting. Describing it
when it was acquired by MoMA, the year after it was completed, she said,
“When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of
trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented
innocence, and J still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I
thought, this is my vision.”
On a subsequent viewing, The Tree came back to life for me. 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 mov-
ing 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.
The relationship between an artist and a writer, or an artist and a viewer,
is complicated. In her letter to me, Martin implored, “Write your true
response instead of stirring around in knowledge or quoting responses
made by others (the past) and your thesis will be effective because it will
be the truth. Only the truth is effective. All ideas are false. They are conjec-
ture. False because by the time you have them they are the past and false
besides!” Although I’ve tried to honor the spirit of her advice, I haven’t
been entirely faithful to her injunction. And naturally she, too, was full of
ideas, produced and acquired by her singularly complicated and hungry

260
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ighRae ACCT falZa

mind. If it is not easy to assemble a cohesive, comprehensive story of Mar-

tin’s life, neither is it simple to explain why it should matter.
She herself was perfectly clear that biography is meaningless. “Almost
everyone believes that art is from the experience of the artist meaning
the intellectually grasped experience. They believe that it is affected by
where you live and what you do. But one’s ‘biography, character, abilities,
knowledge all of that has nothing to do with art work. Inspiration is the
beginning the middle and the end.”® She went further. “I want to repeat:
there are no valid thoughts about art. If your sensibilities are awake you
will respond. It will be a pleasant experience recalling happy times. You
must see that no talking will help and that no defence is necessary and
that you must not answer your critics. But most important you must have
no contact with them.”
This can give a critic and biographer pause. Indeed, there are no lurking
symbolic images in her paintings begging for interpretation in light of her
varied life experiences. But visual art, by its nature, does not reduce to
words. I believe that, insofar as words are part of the current of her thought,
they hum along the lines of her painting. More than anything else, Martin’s
work brings her particular spirit into clearer focus. The work is, of course,
also the reason we care to make that spirit’s acquaintance, and it is our
invitation. Incomplete (as she insisted) without us, the paintings are the
extension of a hand, an opening to understanding, and the expression
of an optimistic conviction that such an understanding, as intimate and
powerfully transformative as it is impersonal, can be achieved.

261
Introduction
i Ann Wilson, “Agnes Martin: The Essential Form: The Committed Life,” Art International / The Lugano Review, Decem-
ber 15, 1974, 50.
. Undated letter to Suzanne Delehanty, in Institute of Contemporary Art Archive, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Annen-
berg Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
. See Jonathan Katz, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” in Katz and David Ward, Hide/Seek:
Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2010), 45.
. Rosamund Bernier, “Drawing the Line,” Vogue, November 1992, 306, 360.
5. Mary Lance, unpublished transcript of Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, produced and directed by Mary
Lance, 2003.
. Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall (New York: Picador, 2010), 183.
. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles ofRadical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 32.
. Conversation with Richard Tuttle, June 8, 2013.

Chapter 1
iy Suzan Campbell, “Interview with Agnes Martin, May 15, 1989,” transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Insti-
tution, Washington, D.C., p. 1.
2. Susan Conly, Prairie Views from Eye Hill (Macklin: Macklin History Book Society, 1992), 3.
w . Jack Stabler and Rose Olfert, “One Hundred Years of Evolution in the Rural Economy,” in ed. Jene Porter, Perspectives of

Saskatchewan, (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2009), 127, 129.

. John Archer, Saskatchewan:AHistory (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1980), 148.
. Archer, Saskatchewan, 134.
. Susan Conly in conversation with the author, October 18, 2014.
. Jenny Attiyeh, unpublished interview. In this recollection, Martin explains, “We really had a peculiar family, because my
NOW

younger brother was brilliant and then my older brother wasn’t, and then my mother and my sister were below average,
I think, in intelligence. He and I were brilliant, and they were dumb.”
. “Do you have any recollection of Macklin, or do your memories begin in Vancouver?” Campbell asked her. “No, I don’t
remember Macklin,” she replied. Campbell, “Interview,” 2.
. Mary Lance, producer and director, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World (Corrales, New Mexico: New Deal Films,
2003).
. Archer, Saskatchewan, 148. .
. Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 6-8.
. Benita Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,’ The New Yorker, January 25, 1993, p. 72.
. Donald Woodman, by phone to the author, October 31, 2011.
. Conly, Prairie Views from Eye Hill, 496.
. Bruce Russell, conversation with the author, October 16, 2014.
. In 1922 the properties were still in the Martin name; by 1930 title had transferred. By then, the family had long since
moved. Saskatchewan homestead files: http://sab.minisisinc.com/sabmin/scripts/mwimain.dll/144/HOMESTEADS?-
DIRECTSEARCH. Trying to decipher homestead records, with their arcane legal terms, offers a good sense of what the
Cree and others faced in negotiating the terms of Treaty 6.

262
 ENDNOTES

17. Stabler and Olfert, Perspectives ofSaskatchewan, 131.

18. As in Campbell, “The Interview,” 2, where she said she was three years old when she left.
19. This information from Bruce Russell,ina conversation with the author, October 19, 2014.
20. Benita Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,’ The New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 72.
21. Joan Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,’ Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996): 87.
22. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 72.
23. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (London and New York: Phaidon, 2012), 106.
24. Jill Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” in Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years (1970-75)
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), 301.
25. Lance, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
26. David McIntosh, by phone to the author, January 31, 2013.
27. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 104.
28. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 72.
29. Ibid.
30. Martin continued, “I started young, too young to get into trouble. I didn’t menstruate till Iwas about 16 and a half, and
so I never got pregnant or anything, but I just, ... I didn’t care what they thought.” Jenny Attiyeh, unpublished interview
with Agnes Martin.
31. Harmony Hammond, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” in Aline Chapman Brandauer with Harmony Hammond and Ann
Wilson, Agnes Martin: Works on Paper (Sante Fe: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, 1998), 40.
32. Jenny Attiyeh, unpublished interview with Agnes Martin.
33. Ann Wilson, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” in Agnes Martin: Works on Paper, 22.
34. “Stars of Eastern Swim World Too Good for Coasters,” The Vancouver Sun, July 19, 1932, 10; and “Swim Team is Selected,”
Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, July 19, 1932, 11.
35. Lance, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
36. Unpublished interview with Judith Kendall and Bill Davis, February 2, 1999.
37. Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (London and New York: Blue Rider Press, 2012), 33.
38. Ibid., 188.
39. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 73.
40. The first is from Mary Lance, ibid; the second from Bob Ellis, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
41. Bob Ellis, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
42. Tony Huston, by phone to the author, July 17, 2014. Not yet born at the time of Martin’s employment by his family, Tony
Huston was introduced to Martin in Taos by Bob Ellis; Martin told Huston that she'd worked for his father.
43. Campbell, “Interview,” 2.
44. Tom Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art and Life,” Geronimo 2, no. 1 (January 1999), accessed online: http://taos-
webb.com/geronimo/january99/visualart.html (via Internet Archive).
45. On college entrance tests, she received a C+ in general aptitude for higher education. Her other entrance grades were
undistinguished: Cs and Ds in spelling, math, and history, and two Fs, in English usage and, oddly enough, in penman-
ship. (Throughout her adulthood, she would write copiously, in longhand; the manuscripts and letters are executed in
what recommends itself, by contemporary standards, as graceful and blameless script.)
46. Annie Dillard, The Living (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 3-4.
47. On her second application to Teachers College, she listed, under Record of Employment, three schools in Washington
(Country School, Livingston School and Burley School) at which she'd taught “all grades 1-6.” Document courtesy of
Teachers College registrar's office.
48. McIntosh, phone interview, January 31, 2013.
49, Kristina Wilson, “A Contribution to a Further Understanding of Agnes Martin,” at symposium accompanying Agnes
Martin: Before the Grid, Harwood Museum of Art, March 24, 2012.
50. From a conversation with the historian Bruce Russell, October 19, 2014.
51. William C. Seitz, Mark Tobey (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1962), 27.
52. Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life ofArtists (New York: Penguin, 2012), 81.
53. Ibid., 69.

Chapter 2
1. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 87. Similarly, Martin said to Suzan Campbell, “I asked what was the best university in
the country and somebody told me Columbia, so I went to Columbia.” Campbell, “The Interview,’ 3.
2. Transcript, Washington State Normal School, Bellingham. Courtesy registrar's office.
3. Mary Lance, in conversation with the author, October 15, 2012; Bob Ellis confirms that she was at USC.
4, Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker & Co., 1969), 16. Undeterred, Newman worked as a substitute
teacher for $7.50 per day in New York City public high schools in the periods 1931-35 and 1933-39. From 1939-45, he
worked two days a week at an adult art school, earning $15 per week.

263
 ENDNOTES

. Merle Curti, “The Schools and the Defense,” Teachers College Record 43, no. 1 (1942): 21-23.
_ L.A. Cremin, David A. Shannon and Mary Evelyn Townsend, A History of Teachers College, Columbia University (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 188-89.
. Orientation in Current School Practices; Educational Psychology; Teacher Preparation and Supervision in Fine Arts;
Educational Foundations; Ind. Arts for Intermediate Grades.
. Elise Ruffini and Harriet Knapp, New Art Education: Book 9 (Sandusky: American Crayon Company / Dallas: Practical
Drawing Company, 1947).
. Arthur Young, “Art Education in Our Culture,” in ed. Young, This is Art Education 1951 Yearbook (Kutztown, Pa.: State
Teachers College / National Art Education Association), 15. Young cites, timorously but diligently, the wealth of diver-
sity brought by various immigrants, in an odd list that begins with the Japanese and includes Swedes, Finns, Hollanders,
Africans, Irish, but not French. “And even the most cursory knowledge of the arts in our culture provides evidence of
the great contributions of the Jew. The Negro has likewise done much to change our musical idioms.” Young, “Art Educa-
tion in Our Culture,” 25.
. Ibid.
. Cremin, Shannon and Townsend, History of Teachers College, 45.
. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee, 1980), 4-5.
. Ibid, 81.
. Ibid., 100.
. Ibid, 74.
. Ibid., 48.
. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 44.
. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 87.
. Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art and Life.”
. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 106.
. McIntosh, phone interview, January 31, 2013.
. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88.
. Campbell, “The Interview,” 5. Again, “My mother was a great disciplinarian—and I may have inherited some of that.”
Bernier, “Drawing the Line,” 306.
. David McIntosh, phone interview, January 31, 2013.
. Campbell, “The Interview,” 7.
. David Witt, Modernists in Taos: From Dasburg to Martin (Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 2002), 151.
. Campbell, “The Interview,” 5.
. Earl Stroh, “Notes on Watching Art in New Mexico 1947-1989,” Voices in New Mexico Art (Santa Fe: Museum of Fine
Arts, Museum of New Mexico, 1996), 33.
BASE. Taoseno and Taos Review, August 7, 1947. Quoted in David Witt, Modernists in Taos, 151. Witt speculates the writer could
have been either Mabel Dodge Luhan or Rebecca James, both of whom wrote for the paper.
30. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88.
31.=Joanna Weber, “Making Space for the Sacred: The Agnes Martin Gallery in Taos, New Mexico,” unpublished draft essay.
32. Rosamund Bernier, “Drawing the Line,” 306.
33h Wise, brave, stoic and quietly passionate (though of course celibate), Cather’s French archbishop spends most of his life
happily exiled in a place where outliers have for centuries seemed particularly at home. It is hard not to see him asa
paradigm for the equally mythologized persona by which Martin would come to be known.
34. Ed. Lois Palken Rudnick, Intimate Memories: TheAutobiography ofMabel Dodge Luhan (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press,
2008), 192. She asked Cather to read it before its publication.
35. Maurice Tuchman, “Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art,” in ed. Tuchman, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting
1890-1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum ofArt / New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 43.
36. Witt notes, “While most Taos Modernists identified themselves as leftists, Bisttram, like Agnes Martin at a later time, was
at the same time politically conservative and of a mystical bent. He traveled effectively through all parts of the artistic
and political continuum, at home with both right-wing businessmen and bohemian artists.” Witt, Modernists in Taos, 67.
37. Eastern thought also flourished in California. In the 1940s, the British-born Gordon Onslow Ford, native Austrian
Wolfgang Paalen, and American Lee Mullican founded the Dynaton group, “a West Coast alternative to Abstract Expres-
sionism [that] was characterized by a central attention to Zen, the I Ching, and the tarot.” Automatism was important for
all three, and in particular for Onslow Ford, who later enthused, “automatism was a luminous word... synonymous with
the spirit of creation.” Tuchman, “Hidden Meanings,” 49.
38. Conversation by phone with the author, March 25, 2014.
39. Sharyn Udall, “Spirituality in the Art of 20th Century New Mexico,” Voices in New Mexico Art (Santa Fe: Museum of
Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, 1996), 40.
40. As cited in Dore Ashton, About Mark Rothko (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 69.
41. Quoted in Udall, “Spirituality in the Art of 20th Century New Mexico,” 42.

264
 ENDNOTES

42. Ibid.
43. David Witt, interview with the author, October 19, 2012.
44. Ibid. “
45. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 73.
46. O'*Keeffe attended Teachers College's 1915 summer program in South Carolina, where she studied with Arthur Dow, a
modernist who had been to Japan and was thus doubly influential, There is no indication that Martin had met O'Keeffe
before attending Teachers College, but she may have known that the older painter, already a prominent figure, had
preceded her to the school.
47. Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art and Life.”
48. Ibid. Their friendship was sufficiently sustained that Juan Hamilton, O’Keeffe’s companion and assistant, visited Martin
after O’Keeffe died in 1986.
49. Lance, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
50. Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman, preface, Agnes Martin: Before the Grid (Taos: The Harwood Museum of Art of the
University of New Mexico, 2012), 4-5.
51. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 74.
52. It is identified on the Harwood checklist as oil on canvas, although Martin scholar Christina Rosenberger believes
that, like other early works, it was painted with encaustic, as she explained in a gallery talk on March 24, 2012, at the
Harwood Museum. The painting is reproduced in Agnes Martin: Before the Grid, 44.
53: Mary Lance, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
54. Lizzie Borden, “Agnes Martin: Early Work,’ Artforum, April 1973, 41.
55: Enrollment in 1951-52 was roughly 6,500. Cremin, Shannon and Townsend, History of Teachers College, 201.
56. Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 229. The subjects were: “The Development of Buddhist Philosophy in China,’ “Kegon
(Hua-yen) Philosophy,” and “Kegon Philosophy and Zen Mysticism.”
Di Ibid., 223.
58. Witt, Modernists in Taos, 152.
59: Robert Goff, “Agnes Martin: In Taos, New Mexico,” Western Interiors and Design Magazine, July-August 2003, 86
60. David Witt interview with Agnes Martin, Galisteo, New Mexico, April 7, 1987 (unpublished).
61. Interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon for the Mandelman Ribak Archive, June 24, 2000, author’s transcription.
62. Campbell, “The Interview,’ 9.
63. Dreishpoon interview, June 24, 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Archive.
64. Ibid.
65. Mildred Tolbert, unpublished manuscript.
66. Witt interview April 7, 1987.
67. Bell and Brenneman, Agnes Martin: Before the Grid, 5.
68. Campbell, “The Interview,’ 8.
69. Quoted in David Witt, “Agnes Martin’s Enigmatic Grids,” Taos Magazine 7, no. 4 (July 1990): 8-9.
70. Borden, “Early Work,” 42.
cae Campbell, “The Interview,’ 8.

Chapter 3
ile Stephanie Barron, “Giving Art History the Slip,” Art in America 62, no. 2 (March-April 1974): 80.
2. Joseph Mitchell, “Up in the Old Hotel,” The Bottom of the Harbor (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 8.
3. Mildred Glimcher, Coenties Slip (New York: Pace Gallery, 1993), 12.
4. Jack Youngerman, conversation by phone with the author, October 3, 2012.
5 . Ibid.
6. When the building it occupied was torn down and the Institute relocated, an office tower was built that would ulti-
mately house the first off-site branch of the Whitney Museum; an exhibition of Coenties Slip artists was held at the
branch in 1974; another was held at Pace Gallery in SoHo in 1993, coinciding with Martin's retrospective at the Whitney
Museum uptown.
7. Charles Hinman, interview with the author, October 6, 2012.
. Ann Wilson, interview by phone with the author, January 10, 2013.
. Faye Hammel, “Bohemia on the Waterfront,’ Cue, March 22, 1958, 16-17.
. Campbell, “The Interview,’ 14.
. Eisler, “Life Lines,’ 75.
. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88.
. Irving Sandler, ‘Agnes Martin Interviewed by Irving Sandler,’ Art Monthly, September 1993, 9.
. Robert Indiana, conversation by phone with the author, August 11, 2013.
. E.C. Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 49.
. Ann Wilson, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 19.

265
 ENDNOTES

. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 75.

. Mildred Glimcher, Coenties Slip, 13.
. Ibid., 10.
. Campbell, “The Interview,” 14.
. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88.
. Eisler, “Life Lines,’ 75.
. From a 1963 interview with Henry Geldzahler, quoted in Barron, “Giving Art History the Slip,’ 84.
. David Hayes, “Agnes Martin: Lines in the Desert,” Saturday Night, December 1997, 83.
. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 75.
. Ibid., 78.
. Youngerman, phone interview with the author, October 3, 2012.
. Witt, interview with the author, October 19, 2012.
. Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 209.
. Paul Cummings, interview with Lenore Tawney, June 23, 1971, transcription, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C., p. 12
at, The Guggenheim Museum’s acquisition record for White Flower (1960) says it is a gift of Lenore Tawney, although it is
credited as anonymous.
32. Kristina Wilson, interview with the author, October 20, 2012. Wilson added, “I don’t believe they had an intimate rela-
tionship.”
33) Paul Cummings, interview with Lenore Tawney, June 23, 1971, transcription, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, D.C., p. 9.
34. Paul Smith, “A Tribute to Lenore,” in Lenore Tawney:A Retrospective (New York: American Craft Museum, 1990), 21.
hes Paul Cummings, interview with Lenore Tawney, 17.
36. Ibid., 27.
37. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 76.
38. Lenore Tawney (New York: Staten Island Museum, 1961).
39. Facsimile handwritten note, insert in Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, between pages
124 and 125.
40. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88.
41. Chryssa, whose last name was Vardea-Mavromichali, died on December 23, 2013. An obituary in the New York Times,
published a month later, noted, “her death, which was reported in the Greek press, was not widely publicized outside
the country. Perhaps fittingly for an artist whose work centered on enigma, the place of her death could not be
confirmed; the Greek news media reported that she was buried in Athens.” Margalit Fox, “Chryssa, 79, Artist Who Saw
Neon’s Potential as a Medium,” New York Times, January 18, 2014, A28.
42. Barbara Rose in Chryssa: Cycladic Books 1957-62 (Athens: Nicholas P. Goulandris Foundation / Museum of Cylcadic
Art, 1997), 13.
43. Rose, Chryssa, 17.
44. Sam Hunter, Chryssa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974), 5.
45. Pierre Restany, Chryssa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 25.
46. Ursula von Rydingsvard, by phone with the author, June 3, 2013.
47. Chryssa, comments transcribed by Annelliesse Popescu in e-mail to the author, November 26, 2012.
48. Pat Steir, interview with the author, November 28, 2011.
49. Von Rydingsvard, by phone to the author, June 3, 2013.
50. Annelliesse Popescu, by e-mail to the author, November 26, 2012.
51. Von Rydingsvard, by phone to the author, June 3, 2013.
52. Chryssa, as transcribed by Popsecu in e-mail to the author.
53. Hunter, Chryssa, 9.
54. Chryssa, as transcribed by Popescu in e-mail to the author.
55. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 8
56. Paul Cummings, “Interview with Betty Parsons,’ June 4 and 9, 1969, transcription, Archives of American Art, Washing-
ton, D.C., n.p.
ST Jack Tilton, by phone to author, September 10, 2012.
58. Ann Wilson, by phone to the author, January 10, 2013.
59: Mildred Glimcher, Coenties Slip, 12.
60. Martin to Suzanne Delehanty, undated letter, Institute of Contemporary Art Archives, Annenberg Library, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
61. See Christina Bryan Rosenberger, “A Sophisticated Economy of Means: Agnes Martin’s Materiality,” in ed. Lynne Cooke,
Karen Kelley and Barbara Schréder, Agnes Martin (New York: Dia Art Foundation / New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2011), 110.

266
 ENDNOTES

62. Martin, “Reflections,” in ed. Dieter Schwarz, Agnes Martin: Writings/Schriften (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 32.
63. Martin, “The Still and Silent in Art,” in Writings, 89.
64. Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,’ in Writings, 36.
65. Object records, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
66. Lawrence Alloway, “Agnes Martin,’ Artforum, April 1973, 34.
67. The original Guggenheim Museum acquisition record and the label from the Elkon gallery on the work’s stretcher both
give the work's date as 1962. The last correspondence on the issue in the Guggenheim object file, from Lisa Dennison to
Michael Govan, by e-mail on April 6, 2004, concludes: “Vivian Barnett says ‘When the picture came here early in 1963 it
was dated 1962, but we later determined that it had been painted in 1960 Unfortunately there is nothing in our file that
indicates the reason for this earlier date.” Guggenheim object records.
68. Completed in 1958, the Mies van der Rohe tower was, perhaps apocryphally, meant to subliminally suggest-this was the
dawn of corporate image manipulation—Seagram’s gold-brown whiskey. Its exterior glass was gridded by bronze-toned
I-beams.
69. The work, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, has water damage that would be very difficult to repair, and
it is seldom shown.
70. Campbell, “The Interview,” 11.
71. Interview with Douglas Dreishpoon, June 24, 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Archive.

Chapter 4
1. Aconnection between Martin's inspiration and automatism has been remarked by Suzanne Hudson, who writes, “her
privileging of involuntary transmission represents a familiar stance, which is reminiscent of Surrealist automatism. ...
Yet where these artists willfully mined the unconscious, Martin understood herself transitively; she was a sort of con-
duit, receiving directions for creation from afar.” Hudson, “Agnes Martin, On a Clear Day,” in Agnes Martin (New York:
Dia Art Foundation, 2011), 121. I have previously made the point as well, in “Agnes Martin: L’oeil intérieur,’ Art Presse,
October 1999, 28-33, and “Off the Grid: Louise Bourgeois’s Recent Drawings,” art US 7 (March-April 2005): 18-21.
2. “When it comes, I see it completely in color.... MA: But your early paintings don’t have color. AM: No they didn’t.
There was no color in the inspiration in those days. So I didn’t put any color in the paintings.” “Interview with Michael
Auping” in Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 1998), 6-7.
3. “Interview with Michael Auping,” 7.
4. Campbell, “Interview,” 17.
5. Martin, “Lecture at Cornell University,” in Writings, 61.
6. Martin, “What We Do Not See If We Do Not See,” in Writings, 115.
7. John Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, everything is about feeling... feeling and recognition,” Art News, September
1976, 94.
8. Martin, “Beauty Is the Mystery of Life,” in Writings, 154.
9, Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,’ 5.
10. Martin, “Lecture at Cornell University,” in Writings, 61-62.
11. Lecture at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1987, transcription by the author.
12. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” p. 85.
13. In response to a question from the audience after delivering the lecture “Beauty Is the Mystery of Life” at the Museum of
Fine Arts, Santa Fe, in April 1989, transcribed in E/ Palacio 6 (Fall/Winter 1989): 22.
14. It began: “SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism by whose means it is intended to express, verbally, or in writing,
or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of all control by reason
and outside of all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. |ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief
in the superior reality of certain forms of associations hitherto neglected, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinter-
ested play of thought. It tends to ruin, once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms ad to replace them in solving the
main problems of life.” In ed. Marcel Jean, TheAutobiography ofSurrealism (New York: Viking, 1980), 123.
15. Yve-Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-composition in its Many Guises,’ in Bois, Jack Cowart, and Alfred Pac-
quement, Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France 1948-1954 (Munich: Prestel / Washington, D.C.: National Gallery ofArt,
1992), 16.
16. Goossen, Ellsworth Kelly, 19.
17. Jack Cowart, “Method and Motif: Ellsworth Kelly’s ‘Chance’ Grids and His Development of Color Panel Paintings,
1948-1951,” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France 1948-1954, 39.
18. Madeleine Grynsztejn, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco (San Francisco Museum ofArt, 2002), 11. In this “allover ran-
domized grid,’ the palette is based on papers from a Parisian stationery store.
19. Colors for a Large Wall, 1951, Bois writes, is the last important work to make room for chance and, for that matter, for the
principle of the modular grid. In Paris, Kelly was understood to be a descendent of Mondrian and ofMalevich, of their
rigorous forms of geometric abstraction based in fundamentally utopian visions. Bois believes instead that Kelly relied
on “de-automatization,” which he equates with the Modernist de-familiarization meant to refresh perception of ordinary

267
 ENDNOTES

sights; on “already-made” compositions that he links to Duchamp’s ready-mades; and on indexical imagery, claiming
that the monochrome panels which followed Kelly’s grids, and with which he was occupied while living in the seaport,
are “an index of color as such” (Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France 1948-1954, 28). In making these connections, Bois
establishes a lineage that consolidates Kelly’s direct relationship to the various abstractionists who followed him, and to
arguments made on their behalf. It is, however, clear that Kelly actively pursued classically Surrealist automatist strate-
gies, including the “scribbling” Bois disdains, though it is also clear (as Bois notes) that he did so, not in order to deepen
his access to interior states, as the Surrealists did, but to elude the expression of personal inclination.
20. Reinhardt shared with Martin a less-than-privileged background. Like Mark Rothko, who went to Yale but dropped out
after two years, Reinhardt had a complicated Ivy League education. Reinhardt was close to Rothko, and also Barnett
Newman, in the late 1940s and early ’50s. Both artists were important to Martin.
21.— Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 85.
22. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 51.
23e Barbara Rose, editor, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 48-49.
24. Ibid., 24.
25. For instance, Barnett Newman wrote, “I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European
culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where
to find it.... We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute
emotions. ... We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have
you.” Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now,” reprinted in part in ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory
(Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 574.
26. Dore Ashton, About Rothko (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 70.
276 Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,” 12.
28. Rose, Art as Art, 51-52.
29: Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 93.
30. Ibid., 109.
3 par. Michael Corris, Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 97.
32. Ibid., 164
oo8 Rose, Art as Art, 58.
34. Corris, Ad Reinhardt, 99.
35) Ibid., 124.
36.Campbell, “The Interview,” 17.
37 Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,” 5.
38. Corris, Ad Reinhardt, 87.
39. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 93.
40. St. Teresa of Avila, The Way ofPerfection (New York: Image Book, 1964), 5-6.
41. One priest who was sympathetic nonetheless warned, “Imaginary or bodily visions are those which are most doubtful,
and should in no wise be desired, and if they come undesired still they should be shunned as much as possible.” But, he
went on, “if the visions continue after all this is done, and ifthe soul derives good from them, and if they do not lead to
vanity but to deeper humility... there is no reason then for avoiding them.” Benedict Zimmerman, Introduction, The
Life of St. Teresa ofJesus, trans. David Lewis (Westminster: Newman Book Shop, 1943), xxiii.
42. Martin, “What is Real,” in Writings, 98.
43. Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 192.
44. Ibid., 194.
45. Along with Merce Cunningham, Cage—in Paris to meet with Pierre Boulez—appeared at the hotel where Kelly was
staying. “I was just beginning to do abstract painting and John and Merce were the first people from New York that had
some kind of authority and enthusiasm. And they gave me a great feeling that I was doing something that could be
important.” Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 405.
46. Corris, Ad Reinhardt, 87.
47. To Irving Sandler, Martin explained that she was acquainted with Cage, but “I don’t agree with him.” One of her argu-
ments was with his notion ofsilence, which he insisted was never absolute. Martin didn’t disagree about nature's aural
richness, but rather about how it is experienced: “When you walk into a forest there are all kinds of sounds but you
feel as though you have stepped into silence. I believe that is silence.” Moreover, she continued, “John Cage believed in
chance, and I very strongly disagree.” Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,’ 5.
48. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 304-5.
49. Martin, lecture at Skowhegan School, 1987, transcription by the author.
50. Quoted in Jacquelynn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 215.
Sl. Holland Cotter, “Like Her Paintings,” New York Times, January 19, 1997, 45.

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52. David McIntosh, phone interview with the author, January 31, 2013.
53. Rick Smith, proprietor, Brodsky Bookshop, Taos, conversation with the author, March 25, 2012.
54. Daisetz Suzuki, “Lectures on Zen Buddhism,” in Suzuki, Erich Fromm, and Richard De Martino, Zen Buddhism and
Psychoanalysis (New York: Harper Colophon, 1960), 3.
55s Zen teaches that each of the earth’s beings is to be allowed the language in which it speaks, dogs as well as flowers, as is
demonstrated by “a classic anecdote” offered by Jung, who also became one of Zen’s more important spokespersons in
the West: “A monk once asked the master, ‘Has a dog Buddhist nature, too?’, whereupon the master answered ‘Wu. As
Suzuki remarks, this ‘Wu’ means quite simply ‘Wu; obviously just what the dog himself would have said in answer to
the question.” Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York: Evergreen Black Cat, 1964), 20.
56. Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,” in Writings, 35.
57. Martin, “Beauty Is the Mystery of Life,” in Writings, 153.
58. Baas, Smile of the Buddha, 11.
59. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 116.
60. Martin, Skowhegan lecture, 1987, transcription by the author.
61. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, 41.
62. Martin, “The Still and Silent in Art,” in Writings, 90.
63. Baas, Smile of theBuddha, 58.
64. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, 119.
65. Ibid., 64.
66. Ibid., 38.
67. Trans. Witter Bynner, The Way of LifeAccording to Lao Tzu (New York: Perigee, 1994), 16.
68. Martin rarely used the term fate, and when she did, it was to describe a rather harsh form of justice: “When we see some-
one who has been poor all his life we think that he has been deprived but in reality he was unable to want more than he
had. His lack of potential for life limited his life. He lacked energy, zest and gratitude. / Fate is kind. / At every moment
we are presented with happiness, the sublime, absolute perfection. We are unable to grasp it due to the pull of death,
commonly known as weakness. / Fate is kind” (italics Martin’s). Martin, “The Current of the River of Life Moves Us,’ in
Writings, 139. This notion of fate seems to have little connection to her inspirations, although they might also be called
fated.
69. Cage, Silence, 57.
70. Ibid., 111.
71. Ann Wilson, interview by phone with the author, January 20, 2013.
72. Jonathan Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,’ in Agnes Martin (Dia Art Foundation, 2011), 177. Said
Cage, “I was never psychoanalyzed, I'll tell you how it happened, I always had a chip on my shoulder about psychoanal-
ysis. I knew the remark of Rilke to a friend of his who wanted him to be psychoanalyzed. Rilke said, ‘I'm sure they would
remove my devils, but I fear they would offend my angels” 2” (Silence, 127). The idea that psychiatric treatment spelled the
end ofcreativity was by Cage’s time a canard, but obviously the prospect seemed noxious. One thinks ofaZen parable
cited by Cage, of a master who admonished a supplicant to “cast out from you your power of hearing and sight; forget
what you have in common with things; cultivate a grand similarity with the chaos of the plastic ether; unloose your
mind; set your spirit free; be still as if you had no soul” and, above all (this is the advice with which the master begins),
“neglect your body” (Silence, 55). Personal history and physical attractiveness found no expression in Cage’s work or
thinking, and the same was certainly true for Martin.
13s Baas, Smile of theBuddha, 215.
74. Martin, Skowhegan lecture, 1987, transcription by the author.
75. Bynner, The Way of LifeAccording to Lao Tzu, 31.
76. Barbara Haskell, phone conversation with the author, June 3, 2013.
Tis Cage, Silence, 40.
78. Brendan Prendeville, “The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans,” Oxford
Art Journal 31, no. 1
(2008): 72.
79; Jonathan Katz writes that the painting Cow, in addition to referring (as he also believes) to Zen Oxherding pictures,
also points to Stein’s erotic poetry, where “the term cow is a repeated motif. ... Two poems in particular, Lifting Belly
(1915) and As a Wife Has a Cow—A Love Story (1926), both feature the word ‘cow’ in numerous specifically lesbian
contexts [and]... are among the most erotically charged lesbian literature of the first halfofthe twentieth century.” He
concludes, “Strange as it may sound, in Martin’s own pictorial private language, Zen meditation and lesbian orgasm
merge under the sign ‘cow, as different facets of a similar transcendent impulse.” Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality
of Abstraction,” 189. The claim strains credibility, or at least available evidence.
80. Prendeville, “The Meanings of Acts,” 69.
81. Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” in ed. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), 286.
82. Cage, Silence, 108.

269
 ENDNOTES

83. Indiana's The Figure Five, 1963, looks back to a 1928 precisionist painting by Charles Demuth, itself an homage to a
nocturnal, urban poem by Williams that begins: “Among the rain / and lights / I saw the figure 5 / in gold / ona red /
firetruck.”
84. Barbara Haskell, “Robert Indiana: The American Dream,’ in ed. Haskell, Robert Indiana: Beyond Love (New York: Whit-
ney Museum of American Art, 2013), 23.
85. Born in 1903, Jensen had a complicated upbringing and, like Martin, was a late starter as an artist; his first one-person
show was in 1952 in New York, where Mark Rothko was among his close friends.
86. Roughly half of the 43 objects shown were Tawney’s; other artists represented included Alice Adams, Sheila Hicks, and
Claire Zeisler. Helping to define a field still nascent in 1963, all were to become major textile artists.
87. Kathleen Nugent Mangan et al., Lenore Tawney:ARetrospective (New York: American Craft Museum, 1990), 41.
88. Barron, “Giving Art History the Slip,” 82.
89. Futurist and visual poetry have been invoked in discussing this work, which has also been compared to paintings by
Jasper Johns (his Newspaper, 1957, for instance). Restany, Chryssa, 35-36.
90. Ibid., 63.
OT It is tempting to read romantic disruption into this history. In discussing Chryssa’s focus on one letter at a time in
her various wall-works and sculptures of this period, Restany singles out “A, for example, which one finds at all levels
of Chryssa’s work: A for Analysis, A for America, A for Advertisement, the inverted A of the Arrows, the A that is the
structural basis of the Gates, the A in Automat. We see it once again in a monumental piece executed between 1970
and 1973: Construction A.”Restany, Chryssa, 89. He says nothing of A for Agnes, though one can’t help wondering at its
conspicuous absence.
92. Ibid., 18.
O83: Chryssa’s neon work anticipates the language-based, plugged-in contributions to the 1970 exhibition Information at
MoMA (which included such work by Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, Mel Bochner, and others), and it looks beyond to
neon works by Bruce Nauman and his peers. It is also relevant to Chryssa’s work that Al Held was making enormous,
letter-based abstract paintings at this time.
94. Hunter, Chryssa, 9.
95. Briony Fer, “Drawing Drawing: Agnes Martin’s Infinity,” in ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, Women Artists
at the Millennium (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 178.
96. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 39.
97. It has also recently been argued that writing by hand, a waning discipline, is associated with the development of cogni-
tive ability not matched by keyboarding. “When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” according
to psychologist Stanislas Dehaene. In Maria Konikova, “What's Lost as Handwriting Fades,” New York Times, June 3,
2014, D1 & 4-5.
98. Indeed, even in the eleventh century, a prominent monk apparently “seems to think of composing in writing as ‘dicta-
tion to himself’” And while the biblical languages, Aramaic and Hebrew, “do not differentiate between the act of reading
and the act of speaking; they name both with the same word,’ it is also the case that “The classic phrase scripta manet,
verba volat—which has come to mean, in our time, ‘what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air’—used to
express the exact opposite; it was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared
to the silent word on the page, which is motionless, dead.” Alberto Manguel, A History ofReading (New York: Viking,
1996), 43, 45.
99, Manguel, A History of Reading, 50.
100. Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 31.

Chapter 5
1. Corris wrote, “Younger artists tended to acknowledge their affinity to the reductive qualities of the ‘black’ paintings
but seemed to be able to disregard the contradictory implications that Reinhardt’s manifestos may have held for their
own work. One thinks of the delicately inflected monochromes of Agnes Martin... with their strong commitment to the
project of creating an image that maps on the artist's experience of landscape.” Ad Reinhardt, 119. Corris wasn't quite
right about her commitment to the landscape either.
. Lee Hall, Betty Parsons (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 74.
. Barron, “Giving Art History the Slip,” 82.
. Hall, Betty Parsons, 89.
. Ibid., 102.
. Youngerman, interview by phone with the author, October 2012.
ff
DMN
WN
N . Sally Eauclaire, “All My Paintings Are About Happiness and Innocence’: An Interview with Agnes Martin,’ Southwest
Profile 16, no. 2 (May/June/July 1993): 17.
. Youngerman, by phone to the author, October 3, 2012.
. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 76.
. Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,” 9.

270
 ENDNOTES

=i To Suzanne Delehanty, undated, Institute of Contemporary Art Archive, Annenberg Library, University of Penn-
sylvania.
. Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed, 9.
. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 77.
- Betty Parsons papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
. Eauclaire, “All My Paintings Are About Happiness and Innocence,” 17.
. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 77.
. In response to a question from the audience after delivering the lecture “Beauty Is the Mystery of Life” at the Museum of
Fine Arts, Santa Fe, in April 1989, transcribed in El Palacio 6 (Fall/Winter 1989); 22.
18. Campbell, “The Interview,’ 15.
19: It may have helped Martin to secure a new gallery that she was included, in early 1961, in the exhibition Six American
Abstract Painters at Arthur Tooth & Sons Gallery, in London; the other artists—Kelly, Reinhardt, Leon Polk Smith,
Sidney Wolfson, and Alexander Liberman—were all also represented by Parsons. The catalogue essay was by Lawrence
Alloway.
20. Dore Ashton, New York Times, December 6, 1958, 26.
21.pert Dore Ashton, New York Times, December 29, 1959, 23.
22. Lawrence Campbell, “Reviews and Previews: Agnes Martin,” Art News, January 1960, 16.
23. Donald Judd, “Exhibition at Robert Elkon,” Arts, February 1963, 48.
24. Judd, “Exhibition at Robert Elkon,” Arts, January 1964, 33-34.
25. Barbara Rose, “New York Letter,” Art International, January 1964, 53.
26. Jill Johnston, “Exhibition at Robert Elkon,’ Art News, April 1965, 10.
27. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 292-93.
28. Ann Wilson, “Linear Webs,” Art and Artists 1, no. 7 (October 1966): 46.
29. Ibid., 47.
30. Ibid., 47. Also, “These paintings achieve that classic beauty which requires a disciplined vision.”
a1; Ibid.
32. Ibid., 48-49.
53. William Seitz, The Responsive Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963), 5.
34. Ibid., 8.
35. Ibid., 9.
36. Ibid., 16.
37. Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era ofDissent (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1996), 114.
38. In the essay’s only reference to Martin, Alloway remarks that Kelly, Reinhardt, and Leon Polk Smith “have been ratified
by the work of younger artists.” Alloway continues, “These three artists demonstrate an unexpected reconciliation of
geometric art, as structural precision, and recent American painting, as colorist intensity. They showed at Betty Parsons
Gallery and her adjunct Section Eleven, 1958-61, along with Alexander Liberman, Agnes Martin, and Sidney Wolfson.
It is to this first phase of nonexpressionistic New York painting that the term Hard Edge applies.” Lawrence Alloway,
“Systemic Painting,” reprinted in ed. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968),
38, 39.
39. Alloway, “Systemic Painting,” 52.
40. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in ed. Battcock, Minimal Art, 135.
4 = . Annette Michelson, “Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings,” Artforum, January 1967, 47.
42. Jane Livingston, “Exhibition at Nicholas Wilder Gallery,” Artforum, December 1967, 62.
43. Lucy Lippard, “Homage to the Square,” Art in America 55, no. 4 (July-August 1967): 50.
44, Ibid., 56.
45. Ibid., 54.
46. Ibid., 57.
47. Ibid., 54.
48. Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,” 11.
49, Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, everything is about feeling,” 94.
50. To Douglas Dreishpoon June 24, 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Archive.
51. Quoted in Corris, Ad Reinhardt, 121.
52. Michelson, “Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings,’ Artforum, January 1967, 47.
53. Corris, Ad Reinhardt, 131.
54. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 298.
55. Mildred Glimcher, Coenties Slip, 15.
56. Thomas Hess, “You can hang it in the hall,” Art News, April 1965, 41.
57. Ibid., 42.
 ENDNOTES

58. Ibid., 50.

59. Ibid., 49-50.
60. Donald Woodman, by phone to the author, October 31, 2011.
61. Lee Seldes, updated version, The Legacy ofMark Rothko (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1996), 94.
62. Reinhardt, “Chronology,” reprinted in Artforum, October 1967, 47.
63. Campbell, “The Interview,” 24.
64. Kate Horsfield, “On Art and Artists: Agnes Martin,” Profile 1, no. 2 (March 1981): 6-7.
65. Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,” 9. y
66. It probably did not escape Martin's attention that Arne (then Arnold) Glimcher, president of Pace Gallery, had testified
for the prosecution; “He gave a two-day lecture on Rothko’s durability and importance. He spoke of art in terms of
investment. When an artist dies, he said, this creates a ‘finite commodity, where there once existed an open-ended one.”
Seldes, The Legacy ofMark Rothko, 216. By the time Martin read this book, Glimcher was her dealer; his testimony
could have given cause for both confidence and a certain wariness; his testimony to Rothko’s stature, cited in the legal
judgment, was of material help to the prosecution. When the case was finally settled, in 1978, Rothko’s eldest child, Kate,
chose Pace to represent her father’s estate.
67. “On August 26 [1970], with no warning, Mell died. ... Mell’s death shocked her friends; she was only forty-eight and,
except for heavy drinking, was in apparent good health. Despite her sudden and premature demise, the medical exam-
iner performed no autopsy.” Seldes, 120. On March 26, 1973, “sculptor Louise Bourgeois discovered that her husband
Robert Goldwater had died in his sleep. He was sixty-five years old and in apparent good health... With Goldwater
gone, there was no one left who would further enlighten Harrow [Assistant Attorney General for Trusts and Estates,
representing the prosecution] about the foundation or about the three-way conflicts of interests” of the trustees who,
Seldes writes, were in Marlborough’s pocket. The Legacy ofMark Rothko, 175.
68. Seldes, The Legacy ofMark Rothko, 309.
69. Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, everything is about feeling,” 93.
70. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 297.
71. Ibid., 301.
72. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 89.
73. Judith Kendall and William Davis, unpublished interview with Agnes Martin, February 2, 1999.
74. Maurice Poirier and Jane Necol, “The ’60s in Abstract: 13 Statements and an Essay,” Art in America 71, no. 9 (October
1983): 132.
75. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 9.
76. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 89.
77. Denise Spranger, “Center of Attention,” The Taos News: Tempo Magazine, March 21-27, 2002, 22.
78. Campbell, “The Interview,” 20.
79. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 80.

Chapter 6
1. Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” 6.
2. Samuel Wagstaff papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
3. Borden, “Early Work,” 43.
4. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 293.
5, Ann Wilson, “Agnes Martin and Coenties Slip,” in Harwood Museum symposium, March 24, 2012.
6. Ann Wilson, by phone to the author, January 10, 2013.
7. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 305.
8. David McIntosh, by phone to the author, January 31, 2013.
9, Kristina Wilson, interview with the author, October 20,2012.
10. Pat Steir, interview with the author, November 28, 2011.
11. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 78-79.
12. Robert Indiana, by phone to the author, August 11, 2013. He continued, “I went to visit her there and saw that a mouse
sat under her chair—I wasn’t impressed with the conditions at Bellevue so I called Arthur Carr, and he transferred her
to a private institution called Psychiatric Institute, connected with New York University. It was in Northwestern part
of Manhattan and was a more pleasant accommodation. She was at Bellevue for a very short time and got very little
treatment there. It was one of the sad parts of Coenties Slip: everyone else had achieved a measure of success and Agnes
became ill and had to leave.”
13. Ann Wilson, Harwood Museum symposium, March 24, 2012.
14. Kristina Wilson, interview with the author, October 20, 2012.
15. Woodman, by phone to the author, October 31, 2011.
16 . Quoted in Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (1972; New York: Palgrave, 2005), 73.
 ENDNOTES

. Arthur Carr, interview with the author, September 28, 2013.

. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 102.
. The Life ofSt. Teresa ofJesus, trans. Lewis, xxxvii.
. Teresa of Avila, “Prayer of Quiet,” Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Way ofPerfection, Chapter 31. Accessed online:
www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/way.ixxxvii.html.
. Ibid.
. Kristina Wilson, in Harwood Museum symposium, March 24, 2012.
. Unpublished letter, undated, from Agnes Martin to Donald Woodman
. Page 7 of untitled lecture in facsimile manuscript, insert between pages 16 and 17 of Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin:
Paintings, Writings, Remembrances.
25: Undated, in Institute of Contemporary Art Archive, Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Published versions, with variants, in Writings, 19.
26. David McIntosh, conversation with the author, January 31, 2013
27. Donald Woodman by phone to the author, October 31, 2011. Woodman says that he got a call from a state psychiatric
hospital in Pueblo, Colorado, saying she’d been arrested in Colorado Springs and committed. When she came back to
New Mexico, she entered therapy with a woman who insisted, as a condition of their work, that Martin move out of
the camper; the rammed earth house was built at this time. Also at this time she was put on fairly heavy medication.
Subsequently, she was hospitalized at St. Vincent's in Santa Fe, prior to entering treatment with Donald Fineberg.
28. Kristina Wilson, in Harwood Museum symposium, March 24, 2012.
2a. Mary Lance, conversation with the author, October 15, 2012.
30. Undated lecture notes, pp. 17-18, facsimile insert between pages 16 and 17 of Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings,
Writings, Remembrances,
31. McIntosh, conversation with the author, January 31, 2013.
Bas Ann Wilson in Agnes Martin: Works on Paper, 27.
33: Harmony Hammond in Agnes Martin: Works on Paper, 37
34. Donald Fineberg, conversation by phone with the author, November 3, 2011.
35. Fineberg, interview with the author, October 17, 2012.
36. She was not alone in this ambivalence; many people with schizophrenia have conflicted feelings about such voices. For
instance, the mathematician John Nash replied, when asked why he stopped taking anti-psychotic medication, “If I take
drugs I stop hearing the voices.” Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1998), 321.
On the other hand, Nash’s biographer reports, “while... Nash often referred to pleasant aspects of the delusional state, it
seems clear that these waking dreams were extremely unpleasant, full of anxiety and dread,” 326.
37. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 106.
38. Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,’ in Writings, 42.
39. Martin, “What We Do Not See If We Do Not See,” in Writings, 117.
40. Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life,” in Writings, 71-72.
41. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 5.
42. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 69.
43. Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life,” in Writings, 70-71.
44. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 12.
45. Eisler, “Life Lines,’ 82.
46. Bob Ellis, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
47. Similarly, “She was very close to David McIntosh. On a picnic he somehow offended her and she threw him out of her
life. They didn’t see each other for five years. He moved out of Taos, to Dixon. When they re-established contact, it was
like mother and son—he wheeled her around in a wheelbarrow.” Kristina Wilson, interview with the author, October 20,
2012.
48. Fineberg, interview with the author, October 17, 2012.
49. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 300.
50. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 79.
51. They grew from clinics and spas that catered to the anxious and sad, and offered dubious treatments whose efficacy,
such as it was, had depended on sympathetic practitioners. Consequent reliance on “the healing power of the human
voice” soon translated to wide beliefinthe talking cure, and in the first decade of the twentieth century psychother-
apy spread rapidly in the United States (as well as in Western Europe). Thus Freud’s psychoanalytic methods, and his
disciples, arrived in the United States at a propitious time. They sustained interest, among psychiatrists, in disorders of
everyday life at the expense of psychoses, and in the first half of the twentieth century psychiatric practice shifted deci-
sively from the asylum, where it had been directed, to the private office, while research into the biological underpinning
of serious mental illness—indeed, into its effective treatment—languished.
52. Shorter, A History ofPsychiatry, 190.

273
 ENDNOTES

33% Ibid., 180. Among the obstacles at mid-century to the development of alternative therapies for mental illness, according
to Shorter, was “The Nazi association of mental debility with genetic defect,” which made biological psychiatry “inad-
missible for many years after 1945.” A History ofPsychiatry, 99.
54. In state hospitals before the war, Dr. Robert Garber reported, doctors “treated all patients with the tools that were avail-
able. Colonic irrigation was still used.” So were strains of malaria and typhoid, injected to induce fever. Insulin shock
therapy was common. “We did it to take the starch out of disturbed patients.” In a typical hospital, in Trenton, New
Jersey, “There was a toilet and a sink and a drain in the middle of the floor so that if a patient, say, smeared feces around
the room, we could hose it down.” Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 294. M
553 Shorter, A History ofPsychiatry, 61-62, 108. Louis Sass writes that schizophrenia was “not conceptualized as a diagnostic
category until the 1890s,” though it “quickly became psychiatry’s central preoccupation.” Louis Sass, Madness and
Modernism, (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 13.
56. Gerald N. Grob, The Mad Among Us:AHistory ofthe Care ofAmerica’s Mentally Ill (New York: Free Press, 1994), 216.
57. Donald Goff, “A 23-Year-Old Man with Schizophrenia, Journal of the American Medical Association, June 26, 2002, 3251.
58. Mark Epstein, e-mail to the author, July 19, 2014.
59, Grob, The Mad Among Us, 276.
60. Shorter, A History ofPsychiatry, 207-8.
61.= Epstein, e-mail to the author, July 16, 2014.
62. “The broadening of the boundaries of the mental health system characteristic of he 1960s and later was thus accom-
panied by a diffusion of responsibility toward the most severely impaired persons,” writes Grob (The Mad Among Us,
268). Established in the 1970s, these centers got off to a shaky start, and were fatally undermined by the fiscal and social
priorities of the 1980s, when the homeless mentally ill became a nationwide sign of failed healthcare policy.
63. Szasz, The Myth ofMental Illness: Foundations ofa Theory ofPersonal Conduct (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 259,
267-68.
64. Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1973), 103.
65. Ibid., 95.
66. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self(Harmondsworth, U.K., and Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 24.
67. Ibid., 164.
68. Early in the next decade, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari began a series of investigations that further undermined the
tenets of psychoanalysis.
69. Szasz, Second Sin, 93.
70. Chesler, Women and Madness, 62. It is Chesler, among others, who developed the goddess myth as a positive alternative
to the mythical figures—Oedipus, most notably—that Freud offered, consistent with her belief that mental illness is a
cultural phenomenon.
wi,e Shortly after Chesler’s book appeared, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published Madwoman in the Attic (1979), an
influential work of literary criticism that explored the recurrence of “madness” as a sign, or stigma, for transgressive
female characters.
dis Chesler, Women and Madness, 110.
73. Ibid., 76, 115.
74. Ibid., 164, 155.
Th Susan Sontag, “Artaud,” in ed. Sontag, Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1976), xiv.
76. Ibid., liv-lv.
Te Shorter, A History ofPsychiatry, 277.
78. Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
79s Epstein, e-mail to the author, July 16, 2014.
80. Rachel Taylor, “Kusama’s Se/f-Obliteration and the Rise of Happenings 1967-1973,” in ed. Frances Morris, Yayoi Kusama
(London: Tate Modern and New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012), 117.
81. Frances Morris, Introduction, Yayoi Kusama, 14.
82. Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, trans. Ralph McCarthy (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2011), 20.
83. Ibid., 23.
84. Ibid., 26.
85. Ibid., 57.
86. Ibid., 47.
87. Morris, Introduction, Yayoi Kusama, 14. In this, too, there were echoes of Martin's experience. According to Fineberg,
Martin reported that “She had psychotic fantasies about sexual abuse by her mother when she was an infant... 1 say
psychotic because she was certain of abuse that happened in the first year of her life, but could not possibly be remem-
bered.” Fineberg, e-mail to the author, August 12, 2013. Others also say that Martin spoke of amore than ordinarily

274
 ENDNOTES

difficult relationship with her mother; filmmaker Mary Lance, for instance, wrote that Martin spoke of “some kind of
abuse—maybe not physical but emotional.” Lance, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
88. Morris, Introduction, Yayoi Kusuma, 15.
89. Taylor, “Early Years: 1929-57,” Yayoi Kusama, 17.
90. Mignon Nixon, “Infinity Politics,” in Yayoi Kusama, 180-81.
91. Juliet Mitchell, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Flower,” in Yayoi Kusama, 194.
92. Ibid., 197.
93. The connection has become evident; for instance, in recent years, works by the two artists have been hung next to each
other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Chapter 7
1, Jill Johnston, “Agnes Martin, 1912-2004,” Art in America 93, no. 3 (March 2005): 41.
. Samuel Wagstaff papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
. Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, everything is about feeling,” 93.
. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 5.
. Campbell, “The Interview,” 18.
fk
Du. Martin, “Untroubled Mind,” in Agnes Martin (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1973), reprinted in
wWN

Writings, 36.
. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 9.
8. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 80.
. Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, everything is about feeling,” 93.
. David Witt, interview with Agnes Martin, April 7, 1987, transcript by the author. She told the same story to Suzan Camp-
bell in 1989; see “The Interview,” 18.
11. Hammond, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 37.
12. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 81.
. “When I was in Albuquerque, see, I built a house. I was teaching in the university, so I said to my students, ‘You all need
experience laying adobe. (Laughing.) So they all came, 15 and 20 at a time, and we built this house. We built it in four
weekends. Well, Ihad poured the foundation before. But the house on the mesa I built with all native materials. And
then I built a studio out of logs. And by the time I had built the studio, four and a half years had passed.” Collins, “Agnes
Martin Reflects on Art and Life.”
. Karen Schiff, “In/Substantial Constructions in Paint and Adobe: Agnes Martin,” December 2005 (unpublished).
. Campbell, “The Interview, 19.
. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 123.
. Suzanne Delehanty, interview with the author, October 19, 2012.
. Benita Eisler, “Life Lines,’ 80. Lee Hall says this trip was in November 1969—“She and Agnes Martin visited Bennington
early in November for a party with Helen Feeley and an exhibition of Paul Feeley’s work at Bennington College,’ (Betty
Parsons, 139)—but that is not when the Feeley show took place. Both Parsons and Tawney lost touch with Martin soon
after she left New York, at least temporarily. In a June 1971 interview, Tawney said that Martin “quit painting about four
years ago and went out to New Mexico. I saw her once after that, I was with her for twelve days in her camper traveling
around but now I don’t see her, I don’t write, I don’t have any contact at all” (Paul Cummings, “Interview,” Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., p. 24). On October 21, 1975, Parsons wrote, “Dear Agnes, I hear
news about you from time to time and often wish I were somewhere near to get it directly from you. ... Let me know
if you ever come to NY. And we will have a big celebration together! Love, [this carbon of the typed original has no
signature]” Betty Parsons Papers, Archives American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.
. Institute of Contemporary Art Archive, Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
. Douglas Crimp, “Back to the Turmoil,” in Agnes Martin (Dia Art Foundation), 64.
. Crimp, “Back to the Turmoil,” 64-65.
. Ann Wilson, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 20.
. Ibid., 21.
. Ann Wilson, unpublished essay for Institute of Contemporary Art catalogue, ICA Archive, Annenberg Library, Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,’ 294-95.
. Along similar lines, Arne Glimcher records that on a 1977 trip, as they were driving from Cuba to the airport in Santa Fe,
a cow was separated from the herd and Martin stopped to talk to it, saying, “Go back with the herd now—get—you hear
me?’ We continue and she says, ‘Cows that leave the herd just sit and, finally, die. There's nothing wrong with them, but
they die. Cows have social problems.” Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 100.
27. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,’ 298-99.
28. Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, everything is about feeling,” 93.

275
 ENDNOTES

29. Campbell, “The Interview,’ 25.

30. In Ann Wilson, “Linear Webs”: “Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it”; “You wouldn’t think of form by the
ocean.”
31 Ann Wilson, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 21.
32. Institute of Contemporary Art Archive, Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
B3y Ibid.
34. Ibid. Z
35. Ann Wilson, unpublished essay, Institute of Contemporary Art Archive, Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia.
36. Lawrence Alloway, “Agnes Martin,” in Agnes Martin (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1976 reprint of 1973
catalogue), 12.
37, Ibid., 10.
38. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 80.
39. Delehanty, interview with the author, October 9, 2012.
40. Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life,” in Writings, 69.
41, Ibid., 70-74.
42. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 291.
43. Ed. Dieter Schwarz, Agnes Martin: Writings/Schriften (Ostfildern-Ruit: Haatje Cantz, 1992).
44. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 9.
45, Campbell, “The Interview,’ 22.
46. Ibid., 26.
47. Ann Wilson, by phone to the author, January 10, 2013.
48. They arrived at the Institute of Contemporary Art as a typed manuscript, which Martin amended, with such handwrit-
ten marginal statements as, “Annie misunderstood me here I do not even know what Romanesque means,’ in reference
to a line that was deleted: “You can’t make the effort to be Romanesque before nature.” ICA Archive, Annenberg Library,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
49. Here too Martin was amending the text as Wilson had submitted it. Beside the passage “Someone said all human
emotion is an idea / Well ideas we can handle,” Martin, having crossed out the second line, wrote “Painting is not about
ideas or personal emotion.” Institute of Contemporary Art Archive, Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia.
50. “The Untroubled Mind” is contained in the ICA catalogue, Agnes Martin (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art,
1973), 17-24. See also Flash Art 41 (June 1973): 6-8. It is reprinted in Writings, 35-44, with the final section in a separate
section as “Lecture at Cornell University,’ 61-62.
Sr Plato, The Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2004), 211.
D2. Campbell, “The Interview,” 26-27.
33. In a later, somewhat less shapely telling of Willie’s story, Martin provided the protagonist with four sisters and a mother
who “all told him what to do, And he said, believe me, when I grow up, I’m gonna do what I want to do.” Nevertheless,
“he met a fair maiden, married her and it wasn’t long before she was telling him that he had to make sacrifices for his
children. So he started complaining... from morning until night. The angels looked down and thought, what he needs
is to go to the flames.” Willie put up a fight, and he almost succeeded in drowning the devils in the river Lethe, but they
managed to drag him to a flaming mountain, where he saw the damned, blistered and sweating. As in the first version,
Willie responded by jumping “right into the flames,” and, after three days of immolation, he emerged intact and
presented himself at “the devil's office,’ seeking employment. “See you have to figure that out,” Martin concluded this
rendition, told to the filmmaker Mary Lance. When Lance turned the question ofthe tale’s meaning back to its teller,
Martin offered this explanation: “It means that if you complain, the best thing is to be exposed to the flames.” Mary
Lance, unpublished transcript of interviews for Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
54. Cather’s story appeared in an article marking the writer’s centenary in the same June 1973 issue of Vogwe that featured
a profile of Martin by Barbara Rose; both were clipped and saved by Betty Parsons. The first of Martin’s Willie stories
had appeared earlier in the year, so she would have to have seen Cather’s Winkie tale prior to this publication for the
influence to be possible. It was first published in 1896. Betty Parsons Papers, Archives of American Art.
5k Plato, The Symposium, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 24-30.
56. Hammond, interview with the author, October 19, 2012.
Sy Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 298.
58. Delehanty, interview with the author, October 9, 2012.
59. Reprinted in So] LeWitt (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 166-68.
60. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,’ in The Writings ofRobert Smithson: Essays with Illustrations, edited by Nancy Holt
(New York: New York University Press, 1979), 111-13.
61. “I bought the most expensive Aeroflex camera. I was going to take it off my taxes (laughs) so I might as well get the best.”
Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art & Life.”

276
 ENDNOTES

62. Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, everything is about feeling,” 94.

63. Campbell, “The Interview,” 30.
64. Crimp, “Back to the Turmoil,’ 70.
65. Ibid., 73-74.
66. Campbell, “The Interview,’ 29.
67. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 14.
68. Ibid., 14-15.
69. Hammond, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 36.
70. Spranger, “Center of Attention,” 22.
71. Lance, transcript of interviews for Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
72. Horsfield, “On Art and Artists,” 4.
73. Martin, “What We Do Not See If We Do Not See,” in Writings, 119.
74. Lance transcript. On another occasion, she upped the ante, estimating that “the response to music is about ten times
the response to visual arts. People make a fantastic response to music. Every note affects them.” Campbell, “The Inter-
view,” 29.
75. Ed. Nancy Tousley, Prints: Bochner, LeWitt, Mangold, Marden, Martin, Renouf, Rockburne, Ryman (Toronto: Art Gal-
lery of Ontario, 1975), 37.
76. Eauclaire, “All My Paintings Are About Happiness and Innocence,” 17.
77. Martin, “What is Real,” in Writings, 98.
78. Simon, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 124.
79. Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art and Life.”
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Donald Woodman, by phone to the author, October 31, 2011.
83. Hammond, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 36. Ann Wilson also spoke of Martin's interest in foreign films, including
Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Amarcord. Ann Wilson, by phone to the author, January 10, 2013.
84. Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art and Life.”
85. Ibid.
86. Lance, transcript, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
87. Hammond, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 36.
88. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 88-89.
89. Mark Stevens, “Thin Gray Line,” Vanity Fair, March 1989, 51.
90. Campbell, “The Interview,” 35.
91. Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” 16.
92. There is, too, the schizophrenic “stare,” described by Louis Sass as the unmistakable marker of a deeply dissociated state.
93. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 64.
94. Ibid., 68.
95. Ibid., 69.
96. Ibid., 92.
97. Ellis, interview with the author, October 15, 2012. Ellis was accompanied by Van Deren Coke, who photographed the
studio; sadly, the photographs “didn’t turn out.”
98. Martin, Skowhegan lecture, 1987, transcription by the author, On a more upbeat note, she also advised the students,
“It is better to go to the beach and think about painting than it is to be painting and thinking about going to the
beach”—advice that was met with grateful laughter, in which she happily joined.
99. Mandelman-Ribak Archive, Taos.
100. Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,” 11.

Chapter 8
1, Harmony Hammond says she spent this period in Corrales, Mary Lance says she was in Albuquerque.
2. The most recent census puts the population at around 250, of which a third is Hispanic and less than one percent Native
American. Median income is below the state’s average; real-estate values much above. Guided tours of local artists’
studios are available: its proximity to Santa Fe and association with well-known artists are raising its profile, though not
the number of residents.
3. Delehanty, interview with the author, October 9, 2012.
4. Flora Biddle, to the author, April 12, 2012.
5. Woodman, unpublished journal, 1978.
6. Hammond, interview with the author, October 19, 2012.
7. Lippard, interview with the author, October 18, 2012.
8. Woodman, by phone to the author, October 31, 2011.

277
 ENDNOTES

. Built without footings, the studio was converted into a guesthouse by subsequent owners. Woodman had purchased the
land for $22,500; in 2011 it was on the market for $1.2 million.
. Klaus Kertess, “A Sense of Wonder,” Elle Décor, December 1992-January 1993, 24.
. Undated lecture notes, pp. 33-34, facsimile insert between pages 16 and 17 of Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings,
Writings, Remembrances.
. Hammond, interview with the author, October 19, 2012.
. Ann Wilson, “Meetings with Agnes Martin,” 27.
~“
. Extracts from Woodman’s unpublished journal, 1978:
a man marries a beautiful wife he has always been bossed by his brothers and sisters. They have children so his wife tells
him to go out and work to support her & the kids he refuses—after a time of this god sends down the angels to take him
to Hell for not being responsible. They drag him off fighting he almost drowns them in the river styx. They get him to
the first level of fire he jumps in an does not come out even though they beg and plead he stays 3 days and then comes
out and asks to see satan goes to see satan & asks for a job taking people to hell he gets it and stays on forever.
“Two Hearts that are the same.”
Two people who love each other -first one person the other then vice versa. The angels see this and say that it can’t go
on. The 2 realize their mutual love and embrace each other so strongly that their 2 hearts become one and they jump
over a lovers leap when they go off into the spirit world the one heart which is two goes also—but it beats in slight dis-
harmony the only place where it can live is by the sea where they is only sea and sky—disharmony still exist so the heart
breaks in two and one % goes to the sky the other to the sea—they are both still and God sees this and tells the angels
take both hearts and form them into water. So now they are very happy for they bring joy each time it rains.
. McIntosh, by phone to the author, January 31, 2013.
. Interview with Pat Steir, November 28, 2011.
. Marja Bloem, “An Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin: Paintings and Drawings 1974-1990 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk
Museum, 1991), 32.
. Martin, “Reflections,” Artforum, April 1973, 38.
. Borden’s article “Agnes Martin: Early Work” is cited in chapter 2.
. Alloway, “Agnes Martin,” Artforum, April 1973. He took pains to distance Martin from her peers on Coenties Slip
(including Reinhardt) as well as from the painters producing the “opticality” promoted by Clement Greenberg (whose
ideas had until recently been favored in Artforum). Alloway found connections instead to Mondrian’s “Plus and Minus”
paintings, which “combine a comparable degree of formalization in the signifier without losing contact with a signified .
scene”—for Mondrian, piers and ocean; for Martin, the New Mexican desert. And once more, Alloway detected echoes in
Martin’s paintings of craft and textiles.
21. Alloway, “Formlessness breaking down form: the paintings of Agnes Martin,” Studio International, February 1973, 61-63.
He again spoke of the work as creating “a veil, a shadow, a bloom,” and quoted the artist (and Ann Wilson) in a confirma-
tion of Martin’s classicism.
22. Carter Ratcliff, “Agnes Martin and the ‘artificial infinite,” Art News, May 1973, 26-27.
23. “One is struck, in Martin’s statements no less than in her paintings, by the modesty and transparency of tone, the
absence of rhetoric.” Peter Schjeldahl, “Agnes Martin at the Institute of Contemporary Art,” Art in America 61, no. 3
(May-June 1973): 110.
24. Barbara Rose, “Pioneer Spirit,” Vogue, June 1973, 157.
25. Hilton Kramer, “An Intimist of the Grid,” New York Times, Match 18, 1973, 23.
26. Hilton Kramer, “An Art That’s Almost Prayer,” New York Times, May 16, 1976, 31. Similarly, David Bourdon, in writing
about the two shows for the Village Voice (May 17, 1976), 111, observed that “the recent canvases,” composed of bands
that are sometimes irregularly spaced, “are, by her standards at least, unusually coloristic and painterly,” and “shot
through with a milky white light that gives them an almost mystical radiance.”
27; Thomas Hess, “Fresh-Air Fiends.” New York, May 31, 1976, p. 65
28. John Ashbery, “Art,” New York, April 17, 1978, 88. For a show at the Arts Council of Great Britain, in London in 1977,
Dore Ashton wrote a catalogue essay in which a similar metaphor is applied: “Martin frequently laid down a delicate
tone... that served much as the continuo serves in music. Above this continuo lifts the rhythmic melody, in which the
very close harmonies are sometimes as indistinguishable to the eye.” Dore Ashton, Agnes Martin: Paintings and Draw-
ings 1957-1975 (London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1977), 11.
29. Kuspit, who also wrote of Martin's new work that it used color as if “excavated . .. achieving its first visibility in con-
sciousness.” Donald B. Kuspit, “Agnes Martin at Pace,’ Art in America 70, no. 1 (January 1982): 139.
30. Thomas McEvilley, “Grey Geese Descending,” Artforum, Summer 1987, 94.
31. Holland Cotter, “Agnes Martin at Pace,” Art in America 77, no. 4 (April 1989): 257.
32. Facsimile letter, insert between pages 136 and 137 of Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances.
33. Lucy Lippard, “Top to Bottom, Left to Right,” Grids (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1972), unpaginated.
34. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge,
Mass, and London: MIT Press, 1986), 8-22.

278
 ENDNOTES

35. Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,’ reprinted in the Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Mod-
ernist Myths.
36. Rosalind Krauss, “The /Cloud/,” in ed. Barbara Haskell, Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
1992), 155-65.
a7: For example, Thomas McEvilley wrote, “When Martin’s grids disappear as one backs away from the painting, they disap-
pear, as it were, into the otherwise formless ground, where they reside always in a kind of latency, giving the ground an
appearance of floating vibrancy, of light-filled potentiality, of invisible but active force. Thus the grids are intensifica-
tions of the meaning that the ground itself has in art.” “Grey Geese Descending,” 96.
38. For instance, Klaus Kertess, like McEvilley, attended to the mathematics that govern Martin’s stripes, not-
ing that the 72-inch-square canvases, which she'd been using since the 1960s, were divisible “by almost every
digit—2,3,4,6,8,9—[which] permits Martin to set an endless variety of regular rhythms resonating across her planes.”
Kertess, “A Sense of Wonder,’ 24. Peter Schjeldahl compared her late work unfavorably to the early paintings: “Beauty
emerges slowly in a viewer's experience of Martin’s best paintings and drawings, those from the 1960s... and the later
70s,” finding that “Since 1980 or so Martin has been profligate with effects of beauty,” but allowed, “The meaning of her
best art... may be termed ‘spiritual,” not because it blurs the mind to “dreamy sublimity,” but because “When perusing
a good Martin, your eyes are sharpened.” Peter Schjeldahl, “Martin Eyes,” Village Voice, November 24, 1992, 100.
. Deborah Solomon, “The Pleasure of Self-Denial,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1992, A9.
. Kay Larson, “Solitary Refinement,’ New York, November 23, 1992, 74.
. John Perreault, “Martin-ized, Or the Zen of Drawing Blanks,’ Soho Weekly News, October 11, 1979, 42.
. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender & Solitude,” 300.
. Lance, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 119
. Anna Chave, “Agnes Martin: ‘Humility, The Beautiful Daughter. ... All of Her Ways Are Empty,” in ed. Haskell, Agnes
Martin, 131-53.
. Eisler, “Life Lines,” 82. Of course, she had long since expressed her irritation at criticism which, in linking her paintings
to weaving, also implicitly connected it to women’s work, as in Alloway’s repeated references to textiles.
. Ibid.
. Lance, unpublished transcript of interviews for Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
. “Interview with Michael Auping,’ Agnes Martin, Richard Tuttle, n.p.
50. Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art and Life.”
51. In this respect, comments Martin made in an unpublished, late interview may be relevant: “I think that human beings’
idea of love is just terrible... Idon’t see how they can be so wrong. That they think that the genital reaction of making
love is love, I just think that’s fantastic! It’s 15 minutes of physical abrasion. ... Love is really when you are no longer
responding genitally, then you are able to be aware of love... 1 don’t think that the sexual response is normal. I think
that procreation is normal.... Making love is a destructive attack. ... After you make love, you're just so dumb.” Jenny
Attiyeh, unpublished interview, undated, Dia archive. Similarly, to Douglas Dreishpoon in an interview conducted
in 2000; “I paint innocent love like the babies. I think a baby is pure love.., You notice how happy the baby is? Just
gurgling and spitting. Well I don’t think that making love is that enjoyable. [laughs] So the [recent] paintings are about
love and innocence and happiness.” Mandelman-Ribak Archive.
52. Martin, “The Current of Life Moves Us,” in Writings, 137-38.

Chapter 9
1. Bernier, “Drawing the Line,” 306.
2. Eauclaire, “All My Paintings Are About Happiness and Innocence,” 16-17.
3. Tony Huston, by phone to author, July 17, 2014.
4. Suzanne Delehanty, interview with the author, October 9, 2012.
5. Holland Cotter, “Like Her Paintings, Quiet, Unchanging and Revered,” New York Times, January 19, 1997, 45.
6. Goff, “Agnes Martin: In Taos, New Mexico,” 82.
7. John Bentley Mays, “Martin Demystified,’ Canadian Art, Fall 1992, 46.
8. David McIntosh to the author. Arthur Carr similarly referred to her daily reading of the New York Times in the 1960s.
9. Harmony Hammond, interview with the author, October 19, 2012.
10. Bob Ellis, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
11. Eauclaire, “All My Paintings Are About Happiness and Innocence,” 16.
12. Ellis, interview with the author, October 15, 2012.
13. Collins, “Agnes Martin Reflects on Art and Life.”
14. Lillian Ross, “Taos Postcard: Lunch with Agnes,” The New Yorker, July 14 & 21, 2003, 34.
15. Lance, unpublished transcript of interview for Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
16. Interview with Douglas Dreishpoon, June 24, 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Archive.
17. “On the Perfection Underlying Life,’ in Writings, 71.

279
 ENDNOTES

18. Kristina Wilson, interview with the author, October 20, 2012.
19. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 6-7.
20. Anna Chave, “Revaluing Minimalism: Patronage, Aura, and Place,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 3 (September 2008): 472.
21. Ibid., 470.
22. Ibid., 479-80.
23. Ibid., 479.
24. Similarly tied to renewed interest in spiritualism, the first exhibition of Emma Kunz’s drawings took place in 1973, ten
years after her death, at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, Switzerland. .
25. Catherine de Zegher, “Abstract,” in ed. de Zegher and Hendel Teicher, 3X Abstraction: New Methods ofDrawing, Hilma
afKlint, Emma Kunz, Agnes Martin (New York: Drawing Center / New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 26.
26. Ibid, 29.
27. More dedicated than af Klint to providing care, Kunz also offered herbs to her patients along with her other healing arts.
28. De Zegher, “Abstract,” 24.
29. Richard Tuttle, “Agnes Martin and Abstractionism by Women,’ in 3X Abstraction, 155.
30. De Zegher, “Abstract,” 36.
31. Pollock, “Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes,” 180.
32. Ibid., 164.
33, Crimp, “Back to the Turmoil,” 68.
34. Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, 9.
35. Johnston, “Agnes Martin: 1912-2004,” 42.
36. Kristina Wilson, “A Contribution to a Further Understanding of Agnes Martin,” symposium accompanying Agnes Mar-
tin: Before the Grid, Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, March 24, 2012.
37. Kristina Wilson, interview with the author, October 20, 2012.
38. Kristina Wilson, “A Contribution to a Further Understanding of Agnes Martin.”
39. Anna Chave, Agnes Martin: On and Off the Grid (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2004) accompany-
ing Agnes Martin: The Islands (November 20, 2004-February 15, 2005), n.p.
40. Jonathan Katz, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” in Katz and David Ward, Hide/Seek: Differ-
ence and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Books, 2010), 45.
41. Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,’ 176.
42. Ibid., 192-93.
43. Barry Schwabsky, “Dan Walsh,” Artforum, January 2014, 208. At the same time, many prominent artists still misidentify
Martin. Writing in 2012, the painter and writer Peter Halley argued that “the ruling ethos of contemporary art” until
1980 valued truth to materials and process, and that it “reached its apogee with artists like Agnes Martin and Donald
Judd, with Minimalism,” this despite her adamant demurrals. “100 Years: Sensibility of the Times, Revisited,” Art in
America 100, no. 11 (December 2012), 164.
44, It was one ina series ofartists’ talks on artists represented in the Dia Art Foundation’s collection.

Epilogue
1. Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life,” in Writings, 68.
2. Ibid. 71.
3. Sandler, “Agnes Martin Interviewed,” 9.
4. Alloway, “Systemic Painting,” in ed. Battcock, Minimal Art, 51.
5. Seitz, The Responsive Eye, 43.
6. Undated lecture notes, pp. 13-14, facsimile insert between pages 16 and 17 of Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings,
Writings, Remembrances.
7. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

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Vortex ofSilence: Proposition for an Art Criticism beyond Livingston, Jane. “Los Angeles: Agnes Martin.” Artforum 6, no.
Aesthetic Categories. Milan: Charta, 2004, pp. 209-218. 4 (December 1967), p. 62.
Eisler, Benita. “Profiles: Life Lines.” New Yorker, January 25, Martin, Agnes. Agnes Martin: Writings. Schwarz, Dieter, ed.
1993, pp. 70-83. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1992.
Fer, Briony. “Drawing Drawing: Agnes Martin’s Infinity.” In ———. “Beauty Is the Mystery of Life.” In Uncontrollable
Women Artists at the Millennium. Carol Armstrong and Beauty; Toward a New Aesthetics. Bill Beckley and David
Catherine de Zegher, eds. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, Shapiro, eds. New York: Allworth Press; School of Visual
2006, pp. 169-187. Arts, 1998, pp. 399-402.
Glimcher, Arne. Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remem- ——. Lenore Tawney. Additional text by James Coggin. New
brances. London and New York: Phaidon, 2012. York: Staten Island Museum, 1961.
Glimcher, Mildred. Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Rosenquist, Mays, John Bentley. “Martin Demystified.” Canadian Art 92
Youngerman at Coenties Slip (exh. cat.). New York: The Pace (Fall 1992), pp. 44-49.
Gallery, 1993. McEvilley, Thomas. “(Grey Geese Descending’: The Art of
Goff, Robert. “Agnes Martin: In Taos, New Mexico.” Western Agnes Martin.” Artforum 25, no. 10 (Summer 1987), pp.
Interiors and Design Magazine, July/August 2003, pp. 82-87. 94-99.

Grids grids grids grids grids grids grids grids (exh. cat.). Text Michelson, Annette. “Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings.” Artfo-
by Lucy Lippard. Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary rum 5, no. 5 (January 1967), pp. 46-47.
Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1972. Perreault, John. “Martin-ized, or the Zen of Drawing Blanks.”
Gruen, John. “Anges Martin: Everything, everything is about Soho Weekly News, October 11, 1979, p. 42.
feeling... feeling and recognition.” Art News 75, no. 7 (Sept. Princenthal, Nancy. “Agnes Martin: l’Oeil Intérieur.” Art Press,
1976), pp. 91-94. October 1992, pp. 28-33.
Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture Ratcliff, Carter. “Agnes Martin and the ‘Artificial Infinite.” Art
(exh. cat.). Texts by Jonathan Katz and David Ward. Wash- News 72 (May 1973), pp. 26-27.
ington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2010. The Responsive Eye (exh. cat.). Text by William Seitz. New
Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965: pl. 74.
Agnes Martin, and Florence Pierce (exh. cat.). Texts by Rose, Barbara. “New York Letter.” Art International 7, no. 10
Karen Moss et al. Newport Beach, Calif: Orange County (January 1964), p. 66.
Museum of Art, 2009. Rose, Barbara. “Pioneer Spirit.” Vogue, June 1973, pp. 114-15,
Johnston, Jill. “Reviews and Previews: Agnes Martin.” Art News 157.
64, no. 4. (April 1965), p. 10. Sandler, Irving. “Agnes Martin Interview.” Art Monthly no. 169
——-. “Surrender & Solitude.” Village Voice, September 13, (September 1993), pp. 3-11.
1973, pp. 30, 32-33. Schiff, Karen. “Agnes Martin, Under New Auspices.” Art Jour-
——. “Agnes Martin: 1912-2004.” Art in America 93, no. 3 nal 71, no. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 121-25.
(March 2005), pp. 41, 43. Schjeldahl, Peter. “Philadelphia: Agnes Martin at the Institute
Judd, Donald. “Exhibition at Robert Elkon.” Arts Magazine 37, of Contemporary Art.” Artin America 61, no. 3 (May/June
no. 5 (Feburary 1963), p. 48. 1973), p. 244.
——. “In the Galleries: Agnes Martin.” Arts Magazine 38, no. 4 Shiff, Richard. “Reviews: ‘Agnes Martin: The Nineties and
(January 1964), pp. 33-34. Beyond.” Artforum 40, no. 8 (April 2002), p. 131.
Kertess, Klaus. “A Sense of Wonder.” Elle Décor, December Simon, Joan. “Perfection is in the Mind: An Interview with
1992/January 1993, pp. 20-24. Agnes Martin.” Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996), pp-
Kozloff, Max. “Art.” Nation, November 14, 1966, pp. 524-26. 82-89, 124.
Kramer, Hilton. “An Intimist of the Grid.” New York Times, Systemic Painting (exhibition catalogue). Text by Lawrence
March 18, 1973, p. 23 Alloway. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
——-. “An Art That’s Almost Prayer.” New York Times, May 16, 1966.
1976, p. 31 Wilson, Ann. “Linear Webs.” Art and Artists 1, no. 7 (October
Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids” and “The Originality of the Avant- 1966), pp. 46-49.
Garde,’ in The Originaltiy of the Avant-Garde and Other Witt, David. Modernists in Taos: From Dasburg to Martin.
Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Santa Fe: Red Crane Books, 2002.

282
“ABC Art” (Rose), 114 Basho, 106-7 burial, 247-48
Abstract Expressionism, 11-12, 17, 42, Bataille, Georges, 230 Burke, Edmund, 223
43, 64, 91, 257; Freud’s influence Baziotes, William, 57, 59 Butler, Alban, 74, 102
on, 109; influence of, 210; lifespan The Beach, 1964, 89, 90 By Nightfall (Cunningham, Michael),
of artists, 140; Eighth Street “Club,” Beethoven, Ludwig van, 203, 236-37, 13
66, 67, 105 242 Bynner, Witter, 50, 106
“The Aesthetics of Silence” (Sontag), Bell, Larry, 241
149 Bellevue, 152-53, 154, 168, 175 Cage, John, 16, 34, 43, 73, 113, 151; on
af Klint, Hilma, 173, 250-52 Bellingham, 28-29, 30, 31, 165 Buddhism, 56; humor of, 109; image
The Ages, 1960, 126 The Bell Jar (Plath), 153 and text in, 111; Kelly and, 105
Albers, Josef, 64, 81, 137, 229 Benevolence, 2001, 245 Calgary, 24
Albuquerque, 46-47, 50, 52, 54, 155, Benton, Thomas Hart, 43 calligraphy, 33, 97, 111; Reinhardt
179 Bernier, Rosamund, 12, 236 using, 112
Alexej von Jawlensky Prize, 218 Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei, 14, 212 Campbell, Lawrence, 128
Alice, Mary, 144-45 Betty Parsons Gallery, 56-57, 65, 78, Canaday, John, 139
Alloway, Lawrence, 86, 223; essays by, 143, 186; Pollock, J., at, 124-25; Cantz, Hatje, 236
134-36, 187-88, 259 relationship with, 123-24; sales capitalism, 140
American Luminist painters, 224-25 at, 126; shows at, 68, 113. See also Captivity, 204, 205
amnesia, 152, 154, 156 Parsons, Betty Carr, Arthur, 153
Andre, Carl, 138, 227, 233 Bible, 75, 101 Carr, Emily, 32
The Angelus (Millet), 26 Biddle, Flora, 212, 213 Castelli, Leo, 127
Archer, John, 20 Biddle, Sidney, 212 Castleman, Riva, 180
Archipenko, Alexander, 73 biography, 261 catatonia, 9, 156, 166, 253
Arp, Jean, 83, 96 bipolar disorder, 168 Cather, Willa, 48, 195
Art as Experience (Dewey), 42 birth, 13, 16-17 Catholicism, 74-75
Artaud, Antonin, 171 Bisttram, Emil, 49 chance, 44, 96, 105, 109
Artforum, 135, 150, 223 Blavatsky, Helena, 49 Chave, Anna, 229-30, 233, 249, 254
Artin America, 136, 224 Bleuler, Eugen, 166 Chesler, Phyllis, 170
Art News, 69, 128-29, 145, 223 Blind Swimmer, 28 childhood, 16; art in, 26; drawing
Art Students League, 37 Bloem, Marja, 218 during, 26; in Macklin, 20-21;
asceticism, 136, 149, 178 The Blue Bird, 1954, 61 maternal authority in, 24-25; tonsil
Ashbery, John, 73, 114, 225 Blumenschein, Ernest, 48 removal, 24
Ashton, Dore, 50, 99, 174 Boer War, 18, 22 children, 32, 103, 201
reviews by, 127-28 Bois, Yve-Alain, 96 Christianity, 11, 26, 92-93, 160, 191;
auditory hallucinations, 9, 156-57, 167 Borden, Lizzie, 55, 150, 223 mysticism in, 101-2
Auping, Michael, 234 Boris, Peter, 239, 241 Christie, Agatha, 14, 236, 238
automatism, 92, 94, 174; fate and, Bourgeois, Louise, 60, 233 Chryssa, 73, 75-78, 116, 120, 121, 146;
108-9; Kelly and, 95-96; Reinhardt Brainard, Joe, 114 bond with, 164; Bronze Tablets, 118;
on, 98-99 Breton, André, 43, 50, 76, 95 text and image used by, 118, 119
Autumn Watch, 1954, 61-62 Brett, Dorothy, 63 The City, 1966, 85
Avery, Milton, 61 Breuer, Marcel, 137 Clark County, 32
Brown, Norman O., 225 classicism, 138-39, 192, 223, 230, 243

Baas, Jacquelynn, 108, 110 Buddhism, 11, 17, 70, 101; Cage on, Clinton, Bill, 239
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 200, 203, 237 56; influence of, 104; in New York Clinton, Hillary, 239
Baer, Jo, 138, 232 culture of 1950s and 1960s, 104-5; Close, Chuck, 231
Barthes, Roland, 252 schools of, 105-6. See also Zen Coburn, Ralph, 96

283
 LN DIE XS

Coenties Slip, 65, 66-74, 79, 98, 150; 29-31; at University of New Mexico, geometry, 97-98
Wilson, A., at, 67, 69-70 46-47 German expressionism, 47
color, 40, 244-45 Egan, Charles, 57 Giacometti, Alberto, 60, 83
Columbia University, 36, 56, 98 ego, 8-9, 104, 240-41 Gilded Age, 17
commercialization, 141-42 Egri, Kit, 57 Giverny, 97
compartmentalization, 163-64 Egri, Ted, 57 Glimcher, Arne, 25, 45, 75, 189, 202,
Conly, Susan, 19 Eisler, Benita, 22, 72, 152, 164 239, 255-56; on burial, 248; repre-
Constantine, Mildred, 116-17 electroconvulsive therapy, 152, 165 sentation by, 148, 163, 189, 207-8,
Cornish, Nellie, 33 Elkon, Robert, 127 226, 231-33; on schizophrenia, 78,
Cornish School of Music, 33-34 Elkon Gallery, 89, 127, 129, 224 153, 154, 159, 161, 163, 253
Corris, Michael, 100, 123, 139 Ellis, Bob, 163, 208, 239-41, 248 Glimcher, Mildred, 71, 140
Cotter, Holland, 106, 225-26, 237-38 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 106 God, 103, 154-55, 160, 194, 216
Cow, 1960, 81, 110 Epstein, Mark, 167-68, 173 Goff, Donald, 167, 168
Cowart, Jack, 96 Erikson, Erik, 59 gold, 87-88
Crimp, Douglas, 181, 253; on Gabriel, Erikson, Joan, 59 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achieve-
200-201 Ernst, Max, 28, 43, 76 ment, 239
Crow, Thomas, 134 European art, 99 The Goldfinch (Tartt), 13
Cuba, NM, 179, 182, 187, 208-9, 211, Everyday Happiness, 2000, 245 Goldwater, Robert, 144
247 Existentialism, 109, 132-33 Goossen, E. C., 96
The Culture ofComplaint (Hughes), 169 Expulsion ofAdam and Eve from the Gore, Rhea, 29
The Culture ofNarcissism (Lasch), 169 Garden of Eden, 1953, 60 Gorky, Arshile, 58, 59
Cunningham, Merce, 34 Gottlieb, Adolph, 37, 43, 59
Cunningham, Michael, 13 failure, 89, 91,258 Graham, Martha, 34
Curtis, Natalie, 50 fame, 63 Gratitude, 2001, 245
fate, 108-9 Graves, Morris, 33-34, 131, 173
Dali, Salvador, 43 Federal Arts Program, 38 Gray Alphabets, 1956, 115
Damisch, Hubert, 230 Feeley, Paul, 180 gray paintings, 221
Darboven, Hanne, 255 feelings, 75, 99, 161, 180, 210 Great Depression, 35
Dasburg, Andrew, 47 Feldman, Morton, 73; scores of, 111 Greece, 241, 243
Davis, Stuart, 58 Feldman, Robert, 180 Greenberg, Clement, 66, 124
death, 247-48 feminism, 11, 170-71, 232; identifica- Greenberg, Joanne, 172
Death Comes to the Archbishop tion with, 234 grid, 9, 84-91, 100, 223, 227; develop-
(Cather), 48 Fer, Briony, 120 ment of, 92; method for executing,
De Kooning, Willem, 58, 77, 95, 125, Fifty Days at Iliam (Twombly), 221 85-86; psychoanalytic view of, 228
134 film, 199, 204-5 “Grids” (Krauss), 227-28
Delehanty, Suzanne, 11, 185-89, Fineberg, Donald, 158-59, 163 Guggenheim, Peggy, 124
197, 237 First Surrealist Manifesto, 95 Guggenheim Museum, 40, 44
Delmare School, 46 The Five, 250
democracy, 41 Flavin, Dan, 137, 138 Haas, Lez, 63
Derain, André, 40 flowers, 106-7, 200 Hall, Lee, 124
Desert Rain, 1957, 81 Flusser, Vilém, 121 Hals, Franz, 141
Dewey, John, 41-43, 249; Suzuki Food (restaurant), 112 Hamilton, Alexander, 78
and, 108 Forman, Milos, 171-72 Hammel, Faye, 68
Dia Art Foundation, 238, 249, 253 formlessness, 132, 230 Hammond, Harmony, 27, 158, 197, 201,
Dia:Beacon, 238, 248 Foucault, Michel, 170 205, 212-13, 234, 239
The Dial, 106 “Freshness” (Martin, A.), 156 happiness, 8, 93, 95, 99, 199-200, 206
Diebenkorn, Richard, 57 Freud, Sigmund, 95, 165, 252; Abstract Happy Holiday, 2000, 245
Dillard, Annie, 30 Expressionists influenced by, 109; on Harbor I, 1959, 81
discipline, 25, 45-46 homosexuality, 109-10 Harris, Lawren, 33, 49
The Divided Self (Laing), 169 Fried, Michael, 135; on Minimalism, Hartley, Marsden, 49, 51
Documenta 12,255 206-7 Harwood, Burt, 47
Documenta 5,185 Friedrich, Fariha, 249 Harwood, Lucy, 47
Dodge, Mabel, 49, 50-51 Friedrich, Heiner, 249 The Harwood Museum of Art of the
Domberger, Luitpold, 180 friendship, 10, 14, 162-63, 235 University of New Mexico, Taos, 47,
Dragon, 161, 190 Friendship, 1994, 243 51, 57, 221, 239, 241-43, 248, 253;
Dream ofNight Sailing, 1954, 61-62 Friendship,1963, 87-88 paintings in, 242-44
Duchamp, Marcel, 17, 43 Futurists, 111 Haskell, Barbara, 229, 231
Dwan, Virginia, 139 Haviland, Olivia de, 165
Dwan Gallery, 139 Gabriel, 1976, 32, 230; Crimp on, Heilmann, Mary, 227, 232, 255
200-201; making of, 199-200; Heizer, Michael, 183
Earth, 1959, 84 themes of, 201-2 Henri, Robert, 48
Eastern spirituality, 104-5. See also Galisteo, 212-14, 218, 238 Heptagon, 59
Buddhism; Zen Gallagher, Ellen, 255 Heschel, Abraham, 103-4
education: academic record, 31; high Garden, 1964, 90 Hess, Thomas B., 37, 100, 124, 141, 224
school, 28-29; in New York City, Gate (Kelly), 71 Hesse, Eva, 227, 255
36-37; at Teachers College, 38-42, Gates of New York (Chryssa), 119 Hinman, Charles, 67, 69
55-57; in United States and Canada, gender, 45, 203-4, 231-32, 233-34 Hockney, David, 242

284
 INDEX

Hofmann, Hans, 37 146; automatism and, 95-96; Cage Macklin, E. M., 18

Homage to Life, 2003, 246 and, 105; fame of, 232; in France, 96; Madness and Civilization (Foucault),
Homer, 115 influence of, 97-98; on Martin, A., 170
homosexuality, 52, 164; in 1950s and 71-72; shows of, 227 Madness and Modernism (Sass), 172
1960s, 113; Freud on, 109-10; Zen Kepes, Gyorgy, 34 Magritte, René, 127
and, 109-10 Kertess, Klaus, 214 Maharishi University, 190
Horsfield, Kate, 161 Kesey, Ken, 171-72 Malevich, Kazimir, 17, 134, 228
hospitalizations, 151-52, 218 King George High School, 28 Mandelman, Beatrice, 57-58, 208-9
Hughes, Robert, 169 Kinnon, Robert, 23, 24 Manguel, Alberto, 121
humility, 11, 104, 108, 256 Klee, Paul, 34, 59 Manhattan, 12
Hunter, Sam, 76, 77, 120 Kline, Franz, 141 Marden, Brice, 232
Huston, John, 29 Knapp, Harriet, 40 Marin, John, 49
Huston, Tony, 29, 237 Koether, Jutta, 255-56 Marlborough Gallery, 144
Kolbert, Frank, 186 Martin, Agnes. See specific topics
I Ching, 105, 109, 116 Kootz, Sam, 44, 57 Martin, Derek, 248
identity politics, 231-32 Kramer, Hilton, 224 Martin, Malcolm, 18, 19, 22
T love the Whole World, 2001, 245 Krasner, Lee, 232 Martin, Malcolm (the younger), 20, 45
Impressionism, 97, 259 Krauss, Rosalind, 227-30 Martin, Margaret, 22-23, 26; death of,
Indiana, Robert, 12, 69-70, 79, 146, Krishnamurti, 106 25; relationship with, 20, 24-25
216; friendship with, 72; on schizo- Kristeva, Julia, 252 Martin, Maribel, 20, 29
phrenia, 152-53; sign paintings, 115; Kunz, Emma, 173, 250-52 Martin, Ronald, 20
text and image used by, 112, 114-16 Kurosawa, Akira, 14 Masson, André, 43, 95
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden Kusama, Yayoi, 173-76 math, 31
(Greenberg), 172 Kuspit, Donald, 225 Matta, Roberto, 43, 95
Infant Response to Love, 2000, 245 McEvilley, Thomas, 225
Infinity Net (Kusuma), 173-74 Lacan, Jacques, 252, 256 McIntosh, David, 32, 45, 106, 217, 239,
innocence, 8, 89, 93, 104, 199, 202-3, Laing, R. D., 169-171 248; on illness, 157-58
254 Lamp, 1959, 84 meditation, 104, 106, 240-41
Innocence, 1994, 244 Lance, Mary, 13, 25, 157, 232, 234, 243, Mekas, Jonas, 200
Innocence, 2000, 244-45 246-47, 254 Melville, Herman, 65
Innocent Love, 1999, 244 Landry, Richard, 111-12 mental illness. See specific conditions
inspiration, 7-8, 93-94, 103, 157, 159, landscapes, 53, 96-97 Merton, Thomas, 100
237, 257 language: influence of, 110-11; spoken, Michaux, Henri, 95
Institute of Contemporary Art in 121; written, 121. See also text and Michelson, Annette, 139-40; reviews
Philadelphia, 11 image by, 135-36
insulin shock therapy, 165 Larry Aldrich Foundation, 89 Mid-Winter, 1954, 61
intimacy, 120 Larsen, Jack Lenor, 116-17 Milk River, 1963, 87
Isaiah, 104 Larson, Kay, 231 Miller, Dorothy, 57, 78
Islamic art, 249 Lasch, Christopher, 169 Millet, Jean-Francois, 26
The Islands, 1961, 86 Lawrence, D. H., 48 Minimalism, 64-65, 114, 123, 135,
The Islands, 1979, 221 The Laws, 1958, 82 138-39, 151; connections to, 224,
Leaves, 1966, 138 233; Fried on, 206-7; spirituality
James, Rebecca, 51 “Lecture on Nothing” (Cage), 107, and, 249-50; written works, 197-98
James, William, 42, 95, 114 109, 111 Miro, Joan, 44, 59
Janis, Sidney, 57, 124, 143 The Legacy ofMark Rothko (Seldes), mistakes, 93
Jawlensky, Alexei, 34 142, 144-45 Mitchell, Fred, 69
Jensen, Alfred, 116, 227 lesbianism, 11, 51, 232, 254-55 Mitchell, Joan, 232
John Marshall School, 47 LeWitt, Sol, 137, 138, 227, 232, 254-55; Mitchell, Joseph, 66
John of the Cross, St., 74 written works, 198 Mitchell, Juliet, 175-76
Johns, Jasper, 12, 67, 69, 115-116, 227 The Lily White, 1950, 116 modernism, 12, 17, 34, 49, 228; Eastern
Johnson, Cora, 31 Linville, Kasha, 230 influences in, 255; influence of,
Johnston, Jill, 25, 140, 150, 177, 231, Lippard, Lucy, 43, 100, 146-47, 212-13, 39-40, 43-44, 59, 62
232, 253; friendship with, 105, 227 Mohamedi, Nasreen, 255
129-30, 145-46, 197; reviews by, Lippold, Richard, 58 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 34
129-30 Little Sister, 1962, 82 MoMA. See Museum of Modern Art
Jonson, Raymond, 49 The Lives of the Saints (Butler), 74, 102 Mondrian, Piet, 17, 43, 89, 133, 134-35,
Joyce, James, 95 Livingston, Jane, reviews by, 136 229

Judd, Donald, 7, 138, 174, 233, 241-42; Love, 1994, 243-44 Moose Jaw, 18
reviews by, 128-29; written works, Love, 2000, 245 Morris, Frances, 174, 175

197 Lovely Life, 1994, 243-44 Morris, Robert, 135, 138, 197, 249
Jung, Carl, 106 Lozowick, Louis, 58 motherhood, 103
Luhan, Tony, 51 Mountain, 1960, 84-85
Kali, 1958, 82 Lumsden, 23 Mumford, Lewis, 41-42
Kandinsky, Vassily, 34, 49, 127, 134 Le mur rose (Derain), 40
Katz, Bill, 180 Mackenzie River trip, 215-17 Museum ofArt and Design, 116-17
Katz, Jonathan, 109-10, 254 Macklin, 17-19, 23; childhood in, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 44,
Kelly, Ellsworth, 12, 64, 67, 69-70, 79, 20-21 89, 132, 180, 259-60
 INDEX

music, 43, 111, 210, 201-3 Phillips, Bert Geer, 48 Riegl, Alois, 230
mysticism, 8, 94, 104, 150; Christian, Picasso, Pablo, 17,71, 127 Riley, Bridget, 134
101-2; resistance to, 249, 257 Plath, Sylvia, 153, 171 The Rise of the Sixties (Crow), 134
The Myth of Mental Illness (Szasz), 169 Plato, 14, 115, 136, 191-93, 195-96 road trip, 158, 177-78, 216-17
Play, 1966, 90 Rose, Barbara, 76, 114, 129, 224
Namuth, Hans, 79 Playing, 1994, 243 The Rose, 1966, 137
narrative, 10, 42 Poe, Edgar Allan, 65 Rosenberg, Harold, 124, 141
National Endowment for the Arts, 147 Pollock, Griselda, 252 Rosenquist, James, 69
National Medal of Arts, 239 Pollock, Jackson, 16-17, 43, 56-58, 77, roses, 107
Native American art, 49, 50-51 79, 127; at Betty Parsons Gallery, Ross, Lillian, 242
Nauman, Bruce, 212, 237 124-25; death of, 64; influence of, Rothenberg, Susan, 212, 237
Neel, Alice, 233 95, 134-35 Rothko, Mark, 43, 57, 72, 80, 124,
Nelson, Dona, 227 Pony (Kelly), 71 127; childhood of, 143-44; death
Neng, Hui, 105 Pop Art, 12, 64, 127, 137, 140, 151 of, 144-45
Nevelson, Louise, 189 Portales, 179, 207, 209, 212, 215 Rothko Chapel, 221
New Art Education, 40 Porter, Aline, 63 Ruffini, Elise, 40, 98
Newman, Barnett, 43, 56, 64, 72, 207; Porter, Eliot, 63 Ruins Gallery, 58, 63
friendship with, 37, 69, 124-25; Portrait ofDaphne Vaughan, 1947- Russell, Bertrand, 41
teaching jobs of, 37-38 1949, 54 Ryman, Robert, 227, 232
New Mexico, 17, 22, 46, 48 portraits, 53-54
New Mexico Mountain Landscape, “Portraits and Repetition” (Stein), 114 Sandler, Irving, 69, 94, 125, 209
Taos, 1947, 53 Pragmatism, 42, 108, 114, 249 Santa Fe, 48-49, 179, 212
New York City, 39, 174; Buddhism in, Prayer of Quiet, 154, 155 Saskatchewan, 17-19, 21, 22, 48
104-5; education in, 36-37; in late Prendeville, Brendan, 113 Sass, Louis, 172
1960s, 140; leaving, 146-47, 150-51; Price, Kenny, 241 Schiff, Karen, 180
Martin, A., in, 44-45, 55-58; in Pro Musica society, 34 schizophrenia, 9-10, 34-35, 151,
1940s, 43 Protestantism, 72, 101-2 156-57, 165, 228-29; definition of,
New York School painting, 40, 43, 99 Prozac, 165 165-67; diagnosis of, 168; Glimcher,
Nicholas Wilder, 136 psychoanalysis, 165, 252; grid viewed A,, on, 78, 154, 159, 161-62, 163,
Night and Day, 1958, 82 through, 228 253; Indiana on, 152-53; public
Night Sea, 1963, 87 psychosis, 9-10; episodes, 147-48, understanding of, 167-68
Nixon, Mignon, 175 151-53, 165-66. See also schizo- Schjeldahl, Peter, 224
Nude Descending a Staircase, 17 phrenia Schuyler, James, 114
public persona, 11, 190 sculpture, 183
ocean, 27 public speaking, 8, 121-22, 177-78, Seattle, 33-34
O'Hara, Frank, 73, 114 196, 197, 206, 234 Seine (Kelly), 97
Okada, Kenzo, 63 Pueblo Indians, 50 Seitz, William, 33, 123, 132-33, 136,
O'Keeffe, Georgia, 48, 49, 51, 173, 189, 259
233; Martin, A., on, 52 Quad Suite (Six Vibrations for Agnes Seldes, Lee, 142, 144-45
Oldenburg, Claes, 137 Martin) (Landry), 111-12 self-portraits, 53-54
On a Clear Day, 1973, 180, 209, 210 quietism, 101-2, 109 Serpentine Gallery, 236
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest sexism, 170
(Kesey), 171-72 Ramirez, Martin, 173 sexuality, 27, 73, 232-33, 254; in Taos,
Ong, Walter, 120-21 Ratcliff, Carter, 223 51-52. See also homosexuality;
Op Art, 123, 133-34, 141 Rauschenberg, Robert, 67, 69, 77; white lesbianism
Orality and Literacy (Ong), 121 paintings of, 101, 116 Seyrig, Delphine, 79
Ordinary Happiness, 1994, 243-44 Rebay, Hilla, 40 Shahn, Ben, 43
outsider art, 253 Red Bird, 1964, 85 Shapton, Leanne, 28
Ovitz, Michael, 218 Reed, John, 49 ship voyages, 218
Regina, 18 Shorter, Edward, 165, 166, 168
Pace Gallery, 25, 78, 119, 148, 199, Reinhardt, Ad, 42-43, 50, 64, 69, 104, silent reading, 120-21
239; representation by, 207-8; Soho 123, 227; on art, 99; artworks of, Sinclair, Upton, 49
branch, 226 vandalized, 143; on automatism, Sires, Glen, 29
panic, 161, 178, 189 98-99; black paintings, 99, 100-101, Sketchbook 11 (Kelly), 96
paranoia, 162-63 198; calligraphic work of, 112; death Sketchbook 14 (Kelly), 96
Parsons, Betty, 51, 56-57; background of, 146; gallery shows of, 140; influ- The Slips (Indiana), 115
of, 78; Guggenheim, P., and, 124; ence of, 56, 57, 98; Parsons and, 124; Sloan, John, 48
Martin, A., and, 63, 65, 78-79, 125, on Surrealism, 98-99; at Teachers Smith, David, 66, 142
126-27; Reinhardt and, 124; Young- College, 40; writings of, 112; Zen Smith, Tony, 137
erman on, 124-25. See also Betty influence on, 105 Smithson, Robert, 138, 183; written
Parsons Gallery repetition, 120 works, 198
Pasadena Art Museum, 177, 190 reproducibility, 139-40 Snake Pit, 165
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 42 The Responsive Eye (exhibition), 123, Snyder, Joan, 227
Perfect Day, 1994, 243-44 132, 141-43 social justice, 234-35
Perreault, John, 231, 232, 233 Restany, Pierre, 76 solitude, 160
Personnages, 59-60 Ribak, Louis, 58, 209 Solomon, Deborah, 231
Philadelphia ICA, 223, 227 Riefenstahl, Leni, 27 Sontag, Susan, 14, 149, 150, 171, 207
 INDEX

Soupault, Philippe, 95 Teachers College, 36, 44, 98; education Untitled #17, 2002, 246
South Africa, 18 at, 37, 38-42, 55-57, 98; Reinhardt Untitled #21, 2001, 246
Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance at, 40 Untitled #22, 2002, 245
I (Kelly), 97 teaching, 31-32, 37; at Delmare School, Untitled Drawing, 1977, 220
Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 183, 198 46; at John Marshall School, 47-48; Untitled Nude, 1947, 54
The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting in Tacoma, 46
1890-1985 (exhibition), 249-50 telepathy, 157 Vancouver, 24, 26-28, 30, 32-33
spirituality, 211; Minimalism and, 10 (exhibition), 138, 183 vandalism, 143
249-50 Tender Buttons, 117 Vasarely, Victor, 134
Spohn, Clay, 57, 63 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 106-7 Venice Biennale, 239
The Spring, 1957, 80 Teresa of Avila, St., 14, 74, 103; trances visions, 93, 102, 157
The Spring, 1958, 80 of, 154; visions of, 102 Vogue, 224, 236
squares, 136-38 text and image: in Asian art, 111; voices, 156-59, 166, 179, 215
Stables Gallery, 58 in Cage, 111; Chryssa using, 118; von Rydingsvard, Ursula, 77
Stable Gallery, 140-41 Indiana using, 112, 114-16. See also
Stamos, Theodoros, 56-57 language Wagner, Merrill, 227
Stations of the Cross (Newman), 221 Theosophy, 49 Wagstaff, Sam, 149-50, 177-78
Stedelijk Museum, 218, 236 Thorazine, 154, 165 The Wall #2, 1962, 82
Stegner, Wallace, 21 Thoreau, Henry David, 106 Wall Street, 66, 69
Stein, Gertrude, 14, 49, 75, 95; influ- Tilton, Jack, 79 Walsh, Dan, 255
ence of, 112-14 Tobey, Mark, 33, 34, 116, 130-31, Ward, David, 254
Stein, Leo, 49 135, 173 Ward, Eleanor, 57
Steiner, Michael, 138 To Do: ABook ofAlphabets and Birth- Warhol, Andy, 77, 227
Steir, Pat, 76, 152, 212-13 days (Stein), 112-13 Washington State Normal School, 31
Stella, Frank, 133, 142 Toklas, Alice B., 113 The Wave, 1963, 83
Sterne, Maurice, 49 Tolbert, Mildred, 59, 209 Wheat, 1957, 81
Stevens, Wallace, 114 Tomkins, Calvin, 142 White Flower, 1960, 86, 126
Stieglitz, Alfred, 49, 189 trance, 145-46; of St. Teresa, 154-55 White Numbers, 1958, 115
Still, Clyfford, 43, 57, 124 transcendence, 104 White Stone, 1964, 90
Still Life with Chair Caning (Picasso), Transcendentalists, 106 Whitman, Walt, 65, 210
17 Transcendental Painting Group, Whitney Museum of American Art, 12,
Still Life with Mandolin and Vegetables 49-50, 250 221, 229
(Dasburg), 47 travels, 149, 151, 178, 180, 215-18 Williams, William Carlos, 114
stream of consciousness, 92, 95, 114 Treaty 6,17 Wilson, Ann, 7, 79, 102, 109, 153, 190;
Stroh, Earl, 47 The Tree, 1964, 88-89, 141, 259-60 at Coenties Slip, 67, 69-70; essays by,
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Truitt, Anne, 232 186-87; friendship with, 27, 130, 158,
Committee, 101 Tuchman, Maurice, 49 182, 184-87, 213, 215; reviews by,
success, 162 Tuttle, Richard, 14, 162-63, 188, 239, 130-32; textile-based work of, 118
Sufism, 249 251-52; friendship with, 72, 120, Wilson, Kristina, 32, 74, 152, 155, 163,
Surrealism, 43, 92, 95; Reinhardt on, 212, 237 202, 247; relationship with, 253
98-99 Twombly, Cy, 73, 115,240 Window, 1957, 80
Suzuki, Daisetz, 14, 56, 105, 106, 113; Tzu, Chuang, 245 Witt, David, 51, 63, 72-73
Dewey and, 108; Introduction to Tzu, Lao, 14, 50; influence of, 105-6 walfli, Adolf, 173
Zen Buddhism, 106; Manual of Zen Wollheim, Richard, 135
Buddhism, 106 Udall, Sharyn, 51 Women and Madness (Chesler), 170-71
swimming, 27, 214 United States: education in, 29-31; Wood, Grant, 43
symbolism, 228, 246 naturalization in, 31, 39 Woodman, Donald, 142, 153, 155, 163,
Symposium (Plato), 195-96 University of New Mexico, 46, 241, 248 204, 213, 216-17
Systemic Painting, 135,259 Untitled, 1949, 55 Woolf, Virginia, 95, 171
Szasz, Thomas, 169-70 Untitled, 1952, 59 World War Il, 37-38, 39, 45
Untitled, 1953, 60 writing, 190-91, 196-98

Tacoma, 46 Untitled, 1954, 61 Wurlitzer, Helene, 59, 62

tact, 14 Untitled, 1955, 62 Wurlitzer Foundation, 99
talk therapy, 9, 158-59 Untitled, 1959, 83-84
Tanguy, Yves, 43 Untitled, 1974, 219 Young, Arthur, 41
Tao, 106 Untitled, 1975, 219-20 Youngerman, Jack, 66-67, 68, 70, 72,
Taoism, 105-6, 110 Untitled, 2004, 246 79, 146; on Parsons, 124-25
Taos, 12, 33, 49, 57, 62, 63, 125; art com- Untitled (Landscape South of Santa Fe,
munity in, 48-51, 58; art produced NM), 1947, 53 Zegher, Catherine de, 251
by Martin, A., in, 52-53; sexuality Untitled #1, 2003, 246 Zen, 11, 17, 33-34, 56, 75.; fate in,
in, 51-52 Untitled #3, 2003, 245 108-9; homosexuality and, 109-10;
Taos Society of Artists, 48 Untitled #4, 2002, 245 influence of, 106; intellect, teachings
Tao te Ching, 106 Untitled #5, 1977, 220 on, 107; Oxherding Pictures, 110;
Tartt, Donna, 13 Untitled #9, 1984, 221 parables, 104; Reinhardt and, 105.
Tawney, Lenore, 69, 73-76, 78, 102, Untitled #11, 1977, 220 See also Buddhism
151, 178, 254; collages of, 117-18; Untitled no. 11, 1984, 221 Zurich, 44
textile-based work of, 116-17 Untitled #14, 1977, 220

287
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Iam enormously grateful for the information and insights so generously provided to me, in
interviews and phone conversations, by artists who knew Martin including, at Coenties Slip,
Jack Youngerman, Ann Wilson, Robert Indiana, Charles Hinman and Chryssa (assisted by
Annelliesse Popescu); among Martin’s fellow artists and other friends in New Mexico, I spoke
with Harmony Hammond, Donald Woodman, David McIntosh, Mary Lance, Tony Huston
and Kristina Wilson. The curators, art historians and writers Suzanne Delehanty, Bob Ellis,
David Witt, Barbara Haskell and Lucy Lippard all offered their memories. Additional friends
who contributed recollections include Pat Steir and Flora Biddle. Much gratitude is also due
Drs. Donald Fineberg, Arthur Carr and Donald Goff.
Mark Epstein and Anna Chave each read portions of the manuscript, and I am indebted
to them for their valuable advice. Others who kindly offered information and help of various
kinds include Karen Schiff, Jack Tilton, Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Tiffany Bell, Rita Rein-
hardt, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Sandra Green and Sandra Ammann. I would like to acknowl-
edge the assistance, at the Pace Gallery, of Arne Glimcher, Mildred Glimcher and Jon Mason.
Jessica Holmes contributed research at a crucial moment, as did my son, Milo LeDoux. I thank
the School of Visual Arts, in New York, for a travel grant. And I am very fortunate that Anthony
Kiendl, director of the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Saskatchewan, offered me the opportunity to
visit Regina, where I had the benefit of talking with scholar Bruce Russell, and Macklin, where
we spoke with local historians Darlene Kidd and Susan Conly. The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Harwood Museum of Art
provided welcome access to their collections and records. So did the Archive of the Institute
of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, held at the Annenberg Library of the University of
Pennsylvania; the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and
the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation archive, in Taos. I greatly appreciate all the help provided
by my wonderful editor Christopher Lyon, of Lyon Artbooks, and, at Thames & Hudson,
Christopher Sweet and the indefatigable Elizabeth Keene. Most of all, I thank my husband
Joseph LeDoux, without whose unstinting support I would not have made it to the finish line.

288
 SCHEELE MEMORIAL LIBRARY

3 6655 00136995 7

N 6537 .M38 P75 2015

Princenthal, Nancy,
Agnes Martin

DATE DUE

Concordia College Library

Bronxville, NY 10708
NANCY PRINCENTHAL
is a New York-based critic and former Senior Editor of
Art in America, for which she continues to write regu-
larly; other publications to which she has contributed
include Artforum, Parkett, The Village Voice, and The
New York Times. Her monograph on Hannah Wilke
was published in 2010; her essays have also appeared
in monographs on Shirin Neshat, Doris Salcedo, Robert
Mangold and Alfredo Jaar, among many others. She is
a co-author of two recent books on leading women art-
ists, including The Reckoning: Women Artists ofthe New
Millennium. Having taught at the Center for Curatorial
Studies, Bard College; Princeton University;
Yale Univer-
sity; RISD; Montclair State University and elsewhere, she
is currently on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts.

Jacket photographs: (front) Mildred Tolbert. Agnes Martin in Taos,

ca. 1953. Courtesy Mildred Tolbert Archives, The Harwood Museum

of Art of the University of New Mexico, Taos. © Mildred Tolbert Family;
(spine) Donald Woodman. Agnes Martin in Galisteo, New Mexico, 1988.
Courtesy the photographer. © Donald Woodman / ARS New York

Thames & Hisdson

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 When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence
of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it rep-
resented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and shen I was"
satisfied. I thought, this is my vision. -Agnes Martin
\

Martin believed that all living things share the capacity for such
harmony; the lines she drew mapped a cosmic transit of power that
fuels happiness, beauty and innocence—and danger as well. In seek-
ing to express the vibrancy and joy inherent to animate beings, she
also strove to regulate an energy that was not always easy to tame.
—From Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art

ee
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