Agnes Martin
On a Clear Day
Agnes Martin in her studio, 1954. Photograph © Mildred Tolbert. Courtesy of The Marginalian.
Agnes Martin (1912-2004) was an influential artist best known for her spare paintings composed of delicately penciled grids and lines featuring earthy, muted tones on her signature six by six-foot canvases. Her work is associated with both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, though her innovative approach charted new territory and was influenced by the spiritual philosophies of Zen Buddhism and American Transcendentalism.
Born in rural Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin immigrated to the United States in the early 1930s. She lived in the Pacific Northwest, earned a BA and MA from the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, and studied painting in New Mexico. She eventually settled in Taos, New Mexico, where she devoted herself to painting.
After a studio visit from influential gallerist Betty Parsons, Martin moved back to New York in 1957. She found a loft in Coenties Slip, where she lived alongside artists including Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and others.
Martin’s career took off, with her inclusion in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. She was one of the few female artists to gain critical recognition in the male-dominated art world of the 1950s and 1960s.
At the height of her career, facing the loss of her home and other personal challenges, Martin abruptly stopped painting in 1967. Seeking solitude, she traveled around the United States and Canada for a year and a half, eventually settling in New Mexico where she focused intently on writing and meditation.
Martin returned to making art in the early 1970s. The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Philadelphia hosted her first solo museum exhibition in 1973. On a Clear Day, her one-artist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1973), featured thirty screenprints based on drawings made in 1972. The Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Whitney Museum of American Art hosted retrospectives of her work in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Agnes Martin, a comprehensive survey of her work, was presented at Tate Modern, London (2015), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2015-16), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2016).