Agnes Martin, 1912-2004

Art in America, March, 2005 by Jill Johnston

We have a lot of really abstract emotions not caused by anything in this world.... You can wake up in the morning and you are happy. Extraordinarily happy with no traceable cause.--Agnes Martin

[Her] color had the unemphatic glow of a slow embrace, and the carefully calibrated horizontal bands drawn across the canvas in pencil had all the psychological assurance that measurement can bring. The work felt undemanding but right there, detached but full of feeling.--Holland Cotter

It was a pleasure finding a great woman in New York City during the terrible time of the 60s during every terrible decade it's a pleasure finding a great woman.--Jill Johnston

Anyone who knew Agnes Martin at all surely possesses her in various treasured ways. The day she died, Dec. 17, 2004, artist Ann Wilson called me from Taos, New Mexico to tell me. I knew Agnes was 93 but had thought she might go on to at least 100, so the news was something of a shock, making me burst into tears. "My Agnes" was the only great woman I ever knew personally, an otherworldly woman with a magnificent aura and a fiercely independent nature. I can't say besides that why she was great exactly, but I sensed it the moment I first saw her early in 1964. I was a reviewer for Art News at that time, working only by assignment. In November the previous year, though unassigned, I saw an exhibition of Agnes's paintings at the Robert Elkon Gallery and immediately wanted to meet her. I already felt her greatness from her paintings. She was living and working then in a loft on South Street overlooking Manhattan's East River, above the Seaman's Institute, not far from her first two lofts on Coenties Slip--that famed location of emerging artists like Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana and of course Agnes who were creating an art of a different sensibility and look from the established Abstract Expressionists. Agnes had moved into the Slip when she came to New York in 1957.

After climbing the five flights to the top of Agnes's South Street building, I was seated in a chair facing a whitewashed wall about 10 feet away. Agnes's hair was long then, and she had lots of it and when I came in it was all loose and she was busy putting it back or up and apologizing for being in some disarray. Now a kind of ritual or ceremony unfolded, with Agnes carrying her 6-by-6-foot paintings in a measured pace one by one from a nearby area, and upon reaching the wall space in front of me hiking the canvas up with her foot into position on nails that were sticking out, then sitting down next to me to contemplate the work. She might have been waiting for me to speak my thoughts, but I had none. I was just bathing in all this presence-a woman au naturel (no makeup or hairdo or any female appurtenance or for that matter mannerism) obviously indivisible from the large square canvases that she was portaging so methodically, hypnotically, onto and off the wall. I was looking at Agnes's mature work. Surfaces of muted incandescent colors crossed vertically and horizontally by a daunting armature of thin hand-drawn penciled lines, the famous grids that she had conceived in 1961 just three years earlier--a simple yet detailed and tremendously variable allover geometry that became her bellwether in a stormy world.

Agnes's own storminess may have been caused by external events, but she experienced it in very quiet states. Raised in a freedom-loving Scottish-descended maternal family (her father died when she was two) with unfearing emphasis on self-reliance in Saskatchewan, that wild Canadian part of the continent, she was not ever likely to ask for help or signal distress by any means. Her solution to extreme conflict or despair was to sit still. I had not known her long when she told me about her "trance" states, clinically called catatonia. Her stories always amazed me, but one that stood way out was a round-the-world freighter voyage she took with perhaps a dozen other passengers, all strangers. When they reached Bombay, Agnes had fallen into a trance and was taken off the boat and put in a hospital where she was kept for over a month.

No doubt Agnes's best solution to her emotional stupefactions was to leave New York. In 1967, after 10 years in the city, Agnes gave away her tools and art supplies, destroyed the paintings she had in her loft (many were elsewhere, having been sold), and left abruptly in a Dodge pick-up equipped with camper, dramatically casting off from her life as a successful artist. She had had three exhibitions with Robert Elkon, unwaveringly good reviews, appearances in a number of museum shows, an NEA grant, and as she would say much later, "I had established my market and I felt free to leave." Agnes has told interviewers that she left because her loft building on South Street was due to be torn down. She would hand out unlikely excuses to people. When I found her in 1973 living in Cuba, New Mexico, on a remote mesa--having settled there in 1968 after driving and camping for a year and a half all around parts of Canada and the American West--she entertained me with, "I had 10 one-man shows and I was discovered in every one of them. Finally when I left town I was discovered again--discovered to be missing." But she offered darker intimations as well. It was it seems her very success that derailed her. Arne Glimcher, Agnes's dealer, who knew her as well as anybody, has told me she couldn't cope with the wider recognition that was coming her way at that time. He mentioned the "sin of pride"--a familiar concept in Agnes's writings. To me in 1973 she said she left because of "remorse." Over what, I didn't dream of asking her, but remorse is a word, like pride, that appears frequently in her writings ("One thing I've got a good grip on is remorse") which she began delivering in museums and art schools as incantatory "lectures" the very year I found her on her mesa.