Agnes Bernice Martin

Background

Agnes Bernice Martin was born on March 22, 1912 in Maklin, Kindersley Census Division, Saskatchewan, Canada to Scottish Presbyterian settlers. Her father Malcolm I. Martin was a wheat farmer, passed away when Martin was two and her mother sold real estate to support the family. Her family relocated several times, finally settling in Vancouver, where Martin swam competitively and tried out for the Olympic team.

Education

Agnes Bernice Martin immigrated to Washington in 1931, when she was nineteen, gaining United States citizenship in 1950. She pursued studies at the Western Washington State College (now Western Washington University) from 1935 to 1938. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Teachers College, Columbia University in 1942. Martin then pursued graduate studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she also taught, before returning to Columbia to earn her Master of Fine Arts in 1952.

Career

Agnes Martin lived in New Mexico from 1946 to 1951, Martin painted representational landscapes and portraits. She grew dissatisfied with this conventional style of art because the images contained little of the revelatory, transcendental expression that she sought to depict. In 1954 Martin defined her artistic goals as helping to establish a distinct and authentic national art that would represent the expression of the American people, but she had trouble finding a suitable way to illuminate these feelings.

In 1954 Martin made her first abstract painting. On viewing the piece, the gallery owner Betty Parsons persuaded Martin to return to New York City in 1957 to join the abstract expressionists Parsons represented. During the decade that she lived in Manhattan, Martin developed a fully abstract style based on tight grids and repetitive linear marks. By the end of the 1950s Martin had completely abandoned figurative imagery in favor of subjective landscape forms that gradually became geometric.

By 1967 Martin had stopped painting and given away her paints and rolls of canvas to younger artists. She abandoned her Manhattan loft to tour the western United States and Canada in a camper and pickup truck. Martin did not paint again for seven years. She picked up her brushes in 1974 after a survey of her work was presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Martin exhibited to the end of her life. In 2004 she shocked the art world by abandoning modernist grids in favor of floating, free-form rhomboids on gray backgrounds. Martin died in Taos of complications of pneumonia brought on by chronic heart disease.

Achievements

• Agnes Martin was one of the leading contemporary artists in twentieth-century America. She was known for her monochromatic, geometric grid painting that combined paint and faintly wavering pencil lines. She is considered a forerunner of Minimalist art.
  
  Martin held solo exhibitions in many countries, including England, France, and Japan. She also participated in a variety of group exhibitions. A major retrospective exhibition was held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016.
  
  Her works are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Desert Rain

    1957

  • Untitled

    1959

  • Untitled

    1959

  • Homage to Greece

    1959

  • This Rain

    1960

  • Rain (Study)

    1960

  • White Flower

    1960

  • Aspiration

    1960

  • The Islands

    1961

  • Untitled (White Flower)

    1961

  • Drops

    1961

  • Tremolo

    1962

  • Morning Star

    1962

  • Stars

    1963

  • Night Sea

    1963

  • Falling Blue

    1963

  • Untitled

    1963

  • Red Bird

    1964

  • The Tree

    1964

  • The Peach

    1964

  • Petal

    1964

  • The Harvest

    1965

  • The Desert

    1965

  • Untitled

    1965

  • Mountain I

    1966

  • Happy Valley

    1967

  • On a clear day, #2

    1973

  • On a clear day, #1

    1973

  • Untitled Number 5

    1975

  • Untitled #0

    1975

  • Untitled #13

    1975

  • Praise

    1976

  • Untitled

    1977

  • Untitled

    1977

  • Untitled

    1977

  • Untitled

    1977

  • Untitled

    1978

  • Untitled

    1978

  • The Islands

    1979

  • Untitled #6

    1980

  • Untitled

    1980

  • Untitled No. 1

    1981

  • Untitled #4

    1989

  • Untitled

    1994

  • Untitled #15 (Peace)

    1996

  • With My Back to the World

    1997

  • Untitled

    1998

  • Happy Holiday

    1999

  • Grattitude

    2001

  • Untitled

    2001

  • Untitled #11

    2002

  • The Sea

    2003

  • Starlight

  • Leaves

  • Loving Love

  • I Love Life

  • Columns

Views

Quotations: "My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind."

"The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea."

"Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings."

"You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting."

"People who look at my painting say that it makes them happy, like the feeling when you wake up in the morning. And happiness is the goal, isn't it?"

Membership

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

  1992

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  1989

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Agnes Martin had a schizophrenia.

Connections

Agnes Martin was never married and had no children.

Father:

Malcolm I. Martin

Mother:

Margaret Kinnon

Sister:

Mirabell Martin

Friend:

Arne Glimcher

References

• Agnes Martin Edited by Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, and with essays by leading scholars that give a context for Martin's work: her life, relationship with other artists, the influence of South-Asian philosophy, alongside focused shorter pieces on particular paintings, this beautifully designed volume is the definitive publication on her oeuvre.
  2015
• Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances is the first and only complete career retrospective publication of the visionary painter. This important and beautiful book brings together 130 of Martin's paintings and drawings, with her previously unpublished writings and lecture notes, which vividly illuminate her art. Letters and facsimiles are reprinted in Martin's own hand, and cut to notebook size, adding an element of intimacy for the rea
  2012
• Agnes Martin The publication brings renewed focus and energy to Agnes Martin’s career and her contributions to the art historical narrative.
  2012
• Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon This book provides a perspective of Agnes Martin that has not been seen in earlier, more academic works or fine-art monographs. Certain to be a mainstay for readers of the arts, and admirers of the creative spirit, this book also includes rare photographs from Martin’s family and friends, many of which have never appeared in a book before.
  2018
• Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art The first biography of visionary artist Agnes Martin, one of the most original and influential painters of the postwar period.
  2015