Agnes Martin, 1912-2004

Art in America, March, 2005 by Jill Johnston

In 1973 out on her New Mexican mesa, called Portales, by the way, where nature is of course spectacular, views of the Continental Divide included and people thankfully missing, Agnes addressed my future again. Asking me what I was working on just then, when I said a book about my father, she harrumphed with startling promptness: "What do you know about your father?" Agreeing instantly, I replied, "Nothing." In the presence of greatness, especially in the rough, where honor is often due the sage who stands outside the affairs of the world, every word or action can be persuasive.

Agnes had made a fine bouillabaisse dinner on her cast-iron woodburning stove (in the adobe she had built in 1968 with her own hands) and we were sitting down to eat it when a huge sonic boom rent the sky, causing me to fall back instantly onto the floor, at one with the chair or bench I was occupying. Agnes, who had been holding forth on some topic, never paused in her speech, apparently unaware of either the boom or my collapse to the floor. Something like this happened once in New York when I brought a few people over to her loft on South Street and while we were sitting around in a vague circle with Agnes putting deep sounding questions to us such as what sort of wall or body of water would we imagine crossing and how would we do it and what would we find on either side, a massive overhead crash of undetermined origin stopped us all dead except for Agnes who kept right on as if nothing had happened. Such transcendency is abnormal in our culture. We are socially trained to notice the unusual and make common cause over it. But who do you know who left a metropolis like New York to live happily alone at the edge of nowhere in the middle of a desert for 10 years? And who bequeathed to the world a body of work of undisputed beauty, and made "tons of money" that "didn't mean a thing" ("All I want is a good car") and who generously gave herself to people without burdening anyone over expectations of friendship? "I have no friends and you're one of them" she is reported to have told each of the faithful.

Her friends, she once wrote to me, were those whose work meant something to her, and those who responded to her own work. "These are all the friends I have I do not have personal friends." Agnes often took her "friends" out to dinner. Long after she packed it in on the mesa and returned to civilization in 1978, I visited her in her new home in Galisteo where I heard new unforgettable stories and was driven to a restaurant in Santa Fe for dinner. I also saw new paintings. It was only in 1974, after a lapse of seven years during which Agnes had built her studio, that she resumed painting. Her new successful life--she was then 62--was soon underway. Having completed a series of canvases, she appeared in New York at the Pace Gallery where she told Arne Glimcher she would like him to represent her. He flew to New Mexico to see the work and thereafter became her dealer for life. Her last show was at Pace in May 2004 [see article, p. 102]. In 1989 Agnes moved from Galisteo to Taos, a town she knew well from sojourns there in the 1940s, ending her years in a retirement community. She never ceased painting until her final six months when her condition, congestive heart failure, worsened. In Taos, she was known for her philanthropies, though they were given anonymously. Her gift of seven paintings to the Harwood Museum in Taos is enshrined as a permanent exhibition in a polygonal room.