| Facts/Data
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Birth
1912 (Maklin, Saskatchewan Canada)
Death
2004 (Taos, New Mexico)
Lived/Active
New York/New Mexico
Photo submitted by Larry W Greenly
Often Known For
biomorph to minimal-grid images
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Categories of Interest
Modernism
Women Artists
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  One of the leading contemporary artists in 20th-century America,
Agnes Martin was known for her monochromatic, geometric grid painting
that combined paint and faintly wavering pencil lines. She is
considered a forerunner of Minimalist art. She began her career
in New York, and spent her later years in New Mexico from where
she managed to maintain a
national reputation.
She lived most of her life "fundamentally as a loner" (Cotter). In
1967 when her career was ascending in New York, she left the city,
traveled the country in a pick-up camper and quit painting for seven
years. Likely her desire to be alone was related to her innate way of
dealing with turmoil, which was to withdraw unto herself and go into a
trance-like state, clinically defined as catatonia. She later told stories of
these reactions that began in her childhood and included an experience in
Bombay, India where she fell into such a deep trance that she was hospitalized for a month.
Agnes Martin was born in Maklin, Saskatchewan in 1912 to a
wheat-farming family. Her father died when she was
two-years
old, and for the next two years the family lived on a farm with her
mother's
father, and then moved to Calgary Alberta. Arriving in the
United States in 1932, she became a United States citizen in
1940. She moved to Bellingham, Washington, where she earned her
elementary school teaching
credentials from the Western Washington College of Education and taught
in a local school. She
then moved to New York City to study art at Columbia University and
earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941 and a Master of Fine Arts
degree in 1954. She taught art intermittently during the 1940s
and 50s to children in Harlem and at the University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque. She also pursued her own painting, which in those
days included
surrealist figural work and landscape in watercolor.
In New York, where she settled for ten years beginning in 1957, she was introduced to
a circle of avant-garde artists by art dealer Betty Parsons, and she shared
a cheap studio warehouse building with modernists Ellsworth Kelly, Jack
Youngerman, Robert Indiana, Ann Wilson, Ad Reinhardt, and Lenore Tawney. The group
became very tight knit, and broke away from what they regarded as the
excesses of Abstract Expressionism.
Influenced by Kelly who was painting in large geometric bands, Indiana
who did hard-edge geometrical paintings and sculpture, and Youngerman
who did clean-cut minimalism, Martin began to find the style that would
become her signature work. She began with monochromatic
rectangular painting that resembled the expression of Mark Rothco,
although she sometimes added grid-like borders or collage elements such
as small pieces of canvas and nails. After the mid 1960s, most of
her paintings were grid designs, with some color and references to
nature with titles such as Blue Flower (1962) and Orange Grove
(1965). But in future years, her work became totally
monochromatic and non-objective with no references to identifiable
subjects.
Martin regarded the Abstract Expressionists as very egocentric and
romantic because of their heavy use of paint and spontaneous designs. She
strove to be more classical and de-personalized from her painting and
went to great lengths to plan her work with careful horizontal and
vertical lines and to establish a tone of serenity and control---a
distain of chaos.
These years in New York brought her much public attention and
acclaim. From 1968 to 1967, she had one-woman shows each year
beginning with Betty Parsons at the Parsons Gallery. And later in
her career, she had over fifty exhibitions in Europe and across America.
In 1967, Martin left New York City, and, deciding to stay away from
painting in order to clear her head, travelled through Canada and
the
western United States. She then settled permanently in New Mexico,
living first in Cuba where she built an adobe studio and home by
hand on a remote mesa. In 1977, she moved to Galisteo, and
in the early 1990s to Taos. She led a simple life of
painting, reading,
and being with friends, and in 1999, was named Distinguished Artist
by the Santa Fe Rotary Foundation.
Agnes Martin died at age 92 in a retirement home in Taos on December 16, 2004.
Sources:
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists, pp. 331-333
Holland Cotter, "Obituaries", The New York Times, December 18, 2004
Jill Johnston, "Agnes Martin, 1912-2004", Art in America, March 2005
Sally Eauclaire, Art and Antiques, November 1992
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art, pp. 224-225
Joan Simon, "Perfection Is In The Mind", Art in America, May 1996
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  The
following, submitted August 2003, is courtesy of Larry Greenly,
Albuquerque, New Mexico. He describes a painting by Martin, which is
"perhaps the only surviving nude by Martin. The painting was completed
in 1947 during her tenure as a teacher at the University of New Mexico
(Albuquerque, NM). The owner, Daphne Vaughn (still living), was
attending UNM when she met Martin. They became close friends and lived
together in southwest Albuquerque in a small, adobe house, which was
still standing as of a few years ago.
Martin gave the nude and
several other paintings to Vaughn in 1949, including a watercolor
landscape, an encaustic on canvas portrait of Vaughn (not signed), and
two small abstract paintings (not signed).
The nude model for
the 1947 painting was Barbara Pullens, a professional model and friend
of both Martin and Vaughn. According to Vaughn, Pullens was "part
Scottish and part Blackfoot."
Vaughn recollects many
interesting anecdotes, has a collection of photographs from this era,
and continues to correspond with Martin. She has no recollection of
Martin painting any other nudes during 1947-49.
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