Perfection is in the mind: an interview with Agnes Martin - painter and filmmaker - Cover Story - Interview

Art in America, May, 1996 by Joan Simon

Agnes Martin, age 83 when this interview was conducted, is neither retired nor retiring, as evidenced by a bold new body of work and by the conversation which follows. When Martin moved from Galisteo, New Mexico, to Taos several years ago and exchanged her rural house and studio for an apartment in town, she had already purchased for herself a new studio that would be but a short distance from her new home.

In this studio, in the summer of 1995, Martin completed a series of 17 paintings. Shown in January at PaceWildenstein, Los Angeles, they reveal surprising changes in her paint handling--"wild brush-stroking," as Martin puts it--even as they methodically continue to explore the joyous, measured simplicities of the rigorously abstract yet expression-imbued work she has made for more than three decades [see A.i.A., Apr. '93].

Also recently on view, in the Carnegie International [Nov. 5, 1995-Feb. 18, '96], was a suite of seven paintings that Martin has given to the Harwood Museum in Taos. These paintings, originally shown at the Harwood in March 1994 in a specially constructed octagonal room with seating in the center, will be reinstalled permanently there when the foundation's renovation is complete. A condition of Martin's gift is that once reinstalled, the paintings will never again travel.

Agnes Martin was born on Mar. 22, 1912, in Maklin, Saskatchewan, the second youngest of four children. Her father was a wheat farmer who died when Martin was two years old. For the next two years the family lived with her mother's father on his farm. They then moved to Calgary, Alberta, though they would continue to spend summers with Martin's grandfather. The family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1919. In 1931 Martin moved to Bellingham, Washington, where she studied to become an elementary school teacher. She began teaching in 1937, after receiving her credentials from the Western Washington College of Education, and taught until she moved to New York to study at Columbia University in 1941. She would study there two more times, interspersed with years of teaching. Martin became an American citizen in 1950.

Martin initially visited New Mexico in the fall of 1946, and first came to Taos during a 1947 summer program with students from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She lived in Albuquerque, then returned to Taos to live from 1952 to 1957. These years were punctuated by sojourns to New York to study at Columbia during the academic years 1951-52 and 1954-55. From 1957 to 1967 Martin lived in the Coenties Slip area of downtown Manhattan, near what is now known as the South Street Seaport. She had her first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in December 1958. In 1967 Martin abandoned painting and traveled for a year and a half through the U.S. and Canada before finally resettling in Cuba, New Mexico. Having built a studio herself by hand (as well as four other buildings on the property), she began once more to paint. In 1977 Martin moved to Galisteo, New Mexico, and in the early '90s she moved to Taos.

When Martin moved from Galisteo to Taos, she simplified her household demands, if not the rigors of her work routine, and recomplicated the social structure of her day. She rises early, paints mornings in her studio, often lunches with friends or other visitors in favorite Taos restaurants, reads at home in the afternoon, favoring mysteries, especially recommending Agatha Christie. Martin skips dinner entirely and retires early. Her book Schriften/Writings (Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1992) gathers her lectures, parables and many of her best-known characterizations of her own work. She returns to ideas of truth, beauty, innocence and happiness time and again, often using the same words in different contexts, or variants on the same examples--as she has also done in the many interviews she has given over the years. This interview took place in Taos, at lunch, Aug. 21, 1995, after a visit with Martin in her Taos studio and home. Follow-up conversations were conducted by phone on Dec. 4, 1995, and Mar. 15, 1996.

Wild Brushstroking

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Joan Simon: How do you begin to work?

Agnes Martin: When I set out to do a painting, I ask for an inspiration. And I follow it.

JS: Whom or what are you asking for inspiration?

AM: My mind.

JS: Does it sometimes not answer?

AM: Sometimes it dries up. I've had it dry up for as much as four months.

JS: And then what do you do?

AM: You have to wait it out.

JS: What do you do while you're waiting?

AM: Try for inspiration. Isn't that right?

JS: Do you think you could have kept finding the inspiration if you had, say, continued to live in New Mexico since the 1940s, and not periodically lived in New York?

AM: I don't think it matters where you live. I painted the same when I was in New York as I do here.

JS: Today, in your studio, we saw the 17 new paintings you said you're planning to show in California. They seem very different from your other work.

AM: I don't know that they're so very different. Are they?