Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal

Nancy Princenthal’s biography of Agnes Martin opens with a section on abstraction. The introduction does not, as one might expect, position the artist firmly within an art historical frame. Instead, it offers “distance from the material world” as a key to the koan of Martin and her art, to the amalgam that might be described as part disappearing act, part vibrational surface.

With her sphinx-like canvases, legendary discipline and reticence, her spiritual interests, lyrical proclivities and periods of withdrawal due to mental illness, the woman behind the work isn’t readily legible. Yet Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art conjures both by leveraging a subtle reconsideration of abstraction.

Princenthal interprets Martin’s life (1912–2004) as insightfully and intuitively as if it were one of Martin’s artworks. In fact, she reads the artist’s life through her paintings, as “the most reliable sources of information” about her. With her depth of knowledge and astute sensitivity as an art critic—along with respect for and obvious pleasure in visual art—no other biographer could have invented this tactic or achieved quite this result.

Writing about the 1964 works The Beach and White Stone, produced after the mid-career artist finally struck upon the linear grid for which she became renowned, Princenthal notes, “Its fine network of lines goes wonky if viewed too closely; at this range, the graphite wavers; as one steps back, it disappears too quickly into a glary haze, like the white sky of a summer day near the ocean….As with The Beach, this grid dissolves quickly, as one steps back, to a grey veil shadowing—or as in stone, veining—a slightly uneven, milky surface.” On the other hand, she writes, “Like [Ad] Reinhardt’s black squares, the lineaments of Martin’s grids are only visible at close range and can disappear entirely when photographed.”

This surface-continuum, between the visible and comprehensible and the irresoluble, hidden or mysterious, is integral to Martin’s life and art. Maintaining these paradoxes and tensions, the art critic-as-biographer tracks Martin’s “lines of thought,” as she names them, the circumstances, progressions, diversions and details that advance and finally resolve into the lexicon of Martin’s art, the paintings Princenthal calls “the extension of a hand, an opening to an understanding.”

The chapter “Reaching Harbor” revisits the decade starting in the summer of 1957 in Lower Manhattan, where Martin resided with other artists in a still undeveloped, rough waterfront area called Coenties Slip. In 1958 Martin, then in her 40s, had her first New York exhibition; she was closing in on her signature style. Everything led her to this work. Better put, Martin pulled everything towards the ends of her art; starting with an isolated pioneer Protestant childhood on the vast Canadian Prairies and hardscrabble young adulthood in the shadow of the Great Depression, she eventually moved west to Vancouver with her family, then left at the age of 19 for the US to pursue studies in Washington state. The early death of her father and a fierce, emotionally distant mother who nonetheless bequeathed prodigious tenacity and self-reliance contributed to shaping her character and the artist she became. An education in art instruction at Columbia University’s Teachers College resulted in a BA in 1942, and she resumed her art education at Columbia with graduate studies in 1952. Martin lived between New York and an insular artist community in Taos, New Mexico, where she spent much of her 30s (and to which she returned in her later years after abruptly leaving New York in 1967, when she gave up painting until 1974), then studying at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The solitude she cultivated and craved and which was sometimes imposed by psychological turmoil, including bouts of psychosis and institutionalization, first occurred in the mid-’60s.

Ordering with steady elegance, judiciously weighing evidence, Princenthal’s study of Martin’s life captures the artist’s work towards “composure” and concentration of her “quiet, luminous force.” This convergence is one of the most fascinating aspects of her career and of this biography. Martin thought in terms of artistic kinship and connections, often spiritual or abstract, rather than direct influence, manifestoes or programmatic approaches. She identified with Abstract Expressionism (though her work is often categorized as minimalism) including the art of Jackson Pollack, writes Princenthal, for its “passionate commitment to achieving transcendent expression.” She felt affinity with John Dewey’s principles of aesthetic pragmatism and with the internal-focused discipline of Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly, who were also friends. Deeply drawn to nature and eventually the American landscape of the Southwest, she was never seduced by it, steadfastly devoting herself to a non-representational art. She avoided contemporaneous artistic and philosophical approaches developed from Freudian or existential thought. She read Gertrude Stein and scripture. Enticed by Christian mysticism and the teachings of Saint Teresa of Avila, she was also intrigued by John Cage’s ideas about silence and art making through structured systems of chance. Likewise, Zen Buddhism and Eastern thought held great appeal, though Martin rejected (and was even angered by) the notion that her work somehow expressed an ideological fealty. Her loyalty was to “universal” and “absolute” emotions rather than personal ones, calling them “anti-art.”

“Of the many paradoxes to [Martin’s] work, this one is central,” asserts Princenthal. “She was unyieldingly committed to her vision and, with equal fervor, to refusing the claims of personal experience.” There was dedication to modesty and the “defeat of ego” in pursuit of perfection on the one hand, and the “celebration of a state of rapture” and of the “experience of happiness and innocence” on the other, guarding against the dangers of “intellectual interference.” The artist commented, “When you look in your mind you find it covered with a lot of rubbishy thoughts. You have to penetrate these and hear what your mind is telling you to do.” Inspiration was everything to Martin, “the beginning the middle and the end,” as she put it. And when it came inspiration arrived whole, in visions she transcribed to the canvas.

Her self-assured art functioned as screen and lens, as defence and ordering device. For Martin, Princenthal writes, “art is not born on gusts of irrepressible feeling. On the contrary, it is an expression of control, which is a source of calm and happiness….Martin’s work can be seen as a screen, shielding her from…scrutiny—baffling the curious—while also protecting her, as she made them, from unwanted and excessive stimulation….it also functions as a lens through which she saw the world…making it both orderly and luminous; it surely does that for viewers.”

It does, as does Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, that rare biography that is also a thing of beauty. Like Martin with her work and her life, it maximizes the ratio of depth to surface: no mean feat. ❚

Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal, Thames & Hudson, New York, 2015, 320 pages.

Mariianne Mays Wiebe is a poet and writer with an interest in creative processes across the disciplines.