Agnes Martin was a Canadian-born American painter, born in Saskatchewan in 1912, who died in Taos, New Mexico, in 2004. She is known for large square canvases with faint pencil grids and pale stripes, drawn by hand to carry feeling.
In 1967, at the height of her New York reputation, she left the city and stopped painting for about seven years. She lived with schizophrenia for much of her adult life.
From across a room, an Agnes Martin looks like graph paper. Up close the lines tremble, because a hand drew every one.
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Museums hung her beside the Minimalists, and for a few years she belonged there. In 1966 her grids were in Systemic Painting at the Guggenheim, next to the work of Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman and Donald Judd. A year later she was gone.
She gave away her art supplies and left New York for good. For about eighteen months she camped her way across Canada and the western United States. Her friends pointed to the death of the painter Ad Reinhardt and to the coming demolition of her building. Asked in 2003, she gave the demolition alone as her reason.
Then she built an adobe house with her own hands on rented land in New Mexico, and for years she barely painted. Whatever happened out there, the woman who came back made paintings that were paler, quieter and stranger than the ones she had left behind.
What You'll Discover
What she painted before the grids.
What the pencil lines give away.
The friend she walked past.
Why she really left New York.
Who she refused to be.
How she left a lecture hall.