The eternal joy of an attentive mind: Agnes Martin continued to work until several months before her death in December. The author considers the painter's attitudes toward life and art as reflected in two recent exhibitions—one of early work, currently on view at Dia:Beacon, and the other of canvases from 2003

Art in America, March, 2005 by Lilly Wei

Born in 1912 in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Agnes Martin died in December at the age of 92. The celebrated but reclusive abstract artist--who belongs in the luminous circle reserved for the best modernist painters--had long lived in New Mexico, settling during the '90s in Taos, where she and Georgia O'Keeffe are local legends. Until shortly before her death, age had not much hampered the steadiness of Martin's practice nor altered her routines. In 2004, she had two critically acclaimed shows, one of new work at PaceWildenstein's midtown Manhattan gallery in late spring and another upstate, the first temporary exhibition (through Apr. 25, 2005) at Dia:Beacon.

The 21 canvases that make up "'... going forward into unknown territory ...' Agnes Martin's Early Paintings 1957-67" have been beautifully installed in three serene, well-proportioned rooms by Dia curator Lynne Cooke. Her sensitively selected, utterly gratifying survey focuses on the decade Martin spent in New York at Coenties Slip with, among others, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, Lenore Tawney and Robert Indiana as friends and neighbors. In 1957, the influential dealer Betty Parsons promised to show the then-unknown artist's paintings if she would move to New York. Martin did, and stayed for 10 years.

Abandoning her biomorphic abstractions on arrival, Martin began drawing simple geometric shapes over thin washes of paint. Some works, such as Window, an approximately 3-foot-square oil painting from 1957, depict delicately, decorously brushed rectangles in pairs or doubled pairs. The shapes are painted in pale tones--olives, grays, taupes, off-whites both warm and cool--that retain vestiges of landscape color. Two untitled narrow white vertical compositions from around 1959 at Dia have even less representational reference. One of these has little open triangles arranged in six successive ranks in a 4-5-6-6-5-4 configuration, resembling cuneiform markings or archaic systems of counting. Earth and Reflection (both 1959) consist of dark brown grounds patterned by regularly positioned rows of large dots; in the latter, each white dot is ringed by a finely incised white line. The two works are less familiar formulations of what would become Martin's signature compositional strategy.

Martin's format soon became standardized: 12-inch-square drawings and watercolors, and 6-foot-square paintings (she downsized them to 5-foot squares only in her mid-80s when the larger canvases proved too cumbersome). By 1960, Martin had made her breakthrough and discovered the grid, that emblematic image of modernism. She famously said: "When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision." (1) She had also begun using other devices--symmetry; fugitive, indeterminate colors; parallel lines, dots, dashes; borders; and the repetition of small units--as syntactical means toward the creation of that calm vision of innocence and perfection. Martin's esthetic repertory was strictly limited, but her simplification, ruthless rectitude and methodical application--stroke by stroke, line by line--achieved a miraculous range of effects. "My interest," she stated in 1972, "is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in artwork which is also wordless and silent." (2)

The paintings of the 1960s are remarkable, made mostly in oil and graphite, based on the dialectic between grid and color, form and formlessness, change and the changeless. The Dia show included The Islands (ca. 1961), featuring meticulously stacked white dashes enclosed in the most delicate of grids; Grey Stone H (1961) and Night Sea (1963), with their facades of blue bars and glints of gold leaf; and the tremulous Flower in the Wind (1963), which radiates a rosy light, each thin horizontal band striped by a tight sequence of short, penciled, slightly misaligned vertical lines. Resembling threads in woven fabric, the marks merge at a certain distance to form a haze over the surface of the canvas. The Peach (1964), The Beach (1964) and The Harvest (1965)--the latest works in the Dia exhibition--are even more reticent, the graphite lines at times nearly invisible, snagged here and there on tiny irregularities in the canvas's weave, like an insubstantial mesh suspended over an exhalation of colored air, an unstable color that may or may not be there. The latter two canvases are painted in acrylic; by 1966 Martin had completed her transition to that more tractable--and faster drying--medium.

A year later, in the spring of 1967, soon after the loss of her loft and the untimely death of her friend Ad Reinhardt (in many ways her exact opposite--the Black Prince of "last paintings" who challenged her more ethereal idealism), she gave away her paints and brushes and abruptly left New York to wander through Canada, the western United States and finally New Mexico, not to paint again until 1974. These were also the years when she began to write down her reflections on art and life; on beauty, joy and innocence; on truth, solitude and the inward eye--her enduring themes. (Martin's writings have since been collected and published, to mixed reviews.)