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Lot Essay
Agnes Martin’s The Peach is an early example of the profound and sublime canvases with which the artist made her name. Painted in 1964, her simple grid of graphite lines was in stark contrast to the prevailing artistic landscape of the time, including the expressive gestures of Abstract Expressionism and the playful bravado of Pop Art. In part a response to memories of her native Canada, and in part a response to her own emotions living in New York, Martin developed this unique grid visual aesthetic which, as the critic Dore Ashton noted, “eliminated all but essentials for her poetic expression” (quoted by P. Peiffer, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever, New York, 2023, p. 135). This would form the basis for a singular practice that would last over forty years and was unlike anything else at the time, breathing new life into the painted surface and paving the way for subsequent generations of artists.
The Peach is an early example of this distinctive format, using her favored support of a large 6 x 6 foot square canvas. Of this configuration Martin stated, “My formats are square, but the grids are never absolutely square, they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power” (quoted in D. Schwartz, Agnes Martin: Writings, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1992, p. 29).
The present work was painted in 1964, a key year for the artist. It was during this period that the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased her canvas Milk River, painted the previous year. This canvas has strong parallels to the present work, in that its unified field and seamless appearance makes any one piece of it equal to anything else. The critic Barbara Rose wrote that year that, alongside artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Martin was producing “some of the most advanced painting being done today,” with her work celebrated not only for its purity, but also for the extreme discipline in its approach to composition (quoted in “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience” in F. Morris and T. Bell, Agnes Martin, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2015, p. 57).
For over four decades, Martin explored her perceptions of truth and beauty by using a simple grid that annulled the complications of conventional space. Her early upbringing in the vast open plains of Canada and her formal training at university in New Mexico gave her—in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich—an almost mystical understanding of tranquility, space and a deep appreciation of the spiritual forces of nature. Her grids are far removed from the work of earlier painters such as Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian. Deeply personal, her compositions of simple, almost invisible colors, combine with gossamer horizontal or vertical lines that actually grew from the traditions of the Abstract Expressionists. Although minimal in effect, her art was not an intellectual exercise, but an emotional one. Martin might seem to have broached the reductive nature of Minimalism, yet her visual poetry is light years removed from that movement’s brute materialism. Instead, her aim was to induce a state of rapt contemplation in the beholder, comparable to the experience we might feel when sitting alone amid a tranquil landscape.
An interest in the sublime led Martin to the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, both of whom used art as a way of expressing certain concrete but ineffable feelings. But rather than concentrating on the expressionistic free-flowing movements of the brush to convey her ideas, Martin chose a poetic geometric style to express her metaphysical ambitions. With its warm pale ground on top of which Martin has executed her delicate series of blocks, it is as if we are looking through a diaphanous veil into a secretive world within. The Peach’s warm tones evoke its given title but Martin was at pains to point out that her works were not meant to be descriptive, “My paintings have neither objects, nor space, nor time, not anything—no forms…They [are] not really about nature,” she insisted, because they depict “not what is seen,” but “what is known forever in the mind” (quoted in ibid.). Part of a generation of North Americans who were inspired by the teachings of Zen Master D.T. Suzuki, Martin adopted and adapted Zen’s calm contemplative vision of nature and the world as illusion and combined it in her art with the vast space of the American landscape to create sublime but simple works of surprising depth and transcendental beauty.
The Peach is an early example of this distinctive format, using her favored support of a large 6 x 6 foot square canvas. Of this configuration Martin stated, “My formats are square, but the grids are never absolutely square, they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power” (quoted in D. Schwartz, Agnes Martin: Writings, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1992, p. 29).
The present work was painted in 1964, a key year for the artist. It was during this period that the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased her canvas Milk River, painted the previous year. This canvas has strong parallels to the present work, in that its unified field and seamless appearance makes any one piece of it equal to anything else. The critic Barbara Rose wrote that year that, alongside artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Martin was producing “some of the most advanced painting being done today,” with her work celebrated not only for its purity, but also for the extreme discipline in its approach to composition (quoted in “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience” in F. Morris and T. Bell, Agnes Martin, exh. cat., Tate, London, 2015, p. 57).
For over four decades, Martin explored her perceptions of truth and beauty by using a simple grid that annulled the complications of conventional space. Her early upbringing in the vast open plains of Canada and her formal training at university in New Mexico gave her—in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich—an almost mystical understanding of tranquility, space and a deep appreciation of the spiritual forces of nature. Her grids are far removed from the work of earlier painters such as Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian. Deeply personal, her compositions of simple, almost invisible colors, combine with gossamer horizontal or vertical lines that actually grew from the traditions of the Abstract Expressionists. Although minimal in effect, her art was not an intellectual exercise, but an emotional one. Martin might seem to have broached the reductive nature of Minimalism, yet her visual poetry is light years removed from that movement’s brute materialism. Instead, her aim was to induce a state of rapt contemplation in the beholder, comparable to the experience we might feel when sitting alone amid a tranquil landscape.
An interest in the sublime led Martin to the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, both of whom used art as a way of expressing certain concrete but ineffable feelings. But rather than concentrating on the expressionistic free-flowing movements of the brush to convey her ideas, Martin chose a poetic geometric style to express her metaphysical ambitions. With its warm pale ground on top of which Martin has executed her delicate series of blocks, it is as if we are looking through a diaphanous veil into a secretive world within. The Peach’s warm tones evoke its given title but Martin was at pains to point out that her works were not meant to be descriptive, “My paintings have neither objects, nor space, nor time, not anything—no forms…They [are] not really about nature,” she insisted, because they depict “not what is seen,” but “what is known forever in the mind” (quoted in ibid.). Part of a generation of North Americans who were inspired by the teachings of Zen Master D.T. Suzuki, Martin adopted and adapted Zen’s calm contemplative vision of nature and the world as illusion and combined it in her art with the vast space of the American landscape to create sublime but simple works of surprising depth and transcendental beauty.