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Lot Essay
The pristine paintings that Agnes Martin created over the course of her career offer up a unique phenomenological experience. Seen from afar, they appear to be subtly glowing fields of light. Moving closer, one discovers a profusion of simple graphite lines, executed by the artist over countless days, weeks and months. The skips and jumps of the pencil, as it was dragged across the slightly textured canvas, lends warmth to her otherwise sparse creations. Martin chose a life of quiet solitude in the high New Mexican desert, famously rebuffing the New York art world. The crisp, clear mountain air and the mutability of its weather suited her perfectly. It was there that she would paint Untitled #12, a luminous canvas comprised of alternating bands of gray and white paint. Painted when she was in her late seventies, the present work demonstrates the subtle changes that the 1980s brought about in her paintings. Evoking heavy snow clouds that blanket the sky in the area around Taos, New Mexico, Untitled #12 is a beautiful painting, possessed with a subtle, incandescent light.
Throughout her career, Martin limited her work to a prescribed set of parameters. She eschewed all recognizable imagery and any narrative content. For many years, she even refrained from using color. Her preferred format was a six-by-six foot square, which fit her arm span if she stretched them wide. She was obsessive about whether the painting “worked” and would absolutely, and without mercy, destroy those that didn’t meet her exacting standards.
From her first paintings in the early 1960s, Martin selected the grid as her primary modus operandi. This she rendered using simple graphite pencils upon a plain white gessoed surface, a narrow set of parameters that served her well. Within this reduced set of means, she embarked upon an extraordinary exploration that ultimately proved the resiliency of her medium, demonstrating painting’s endless capacity for both renewal and growth. The simple, hermetic life she chose for herself meant that she could spend days in quiet contemplation, either watching cloud formations as they moved across the sky, or studying Buddhist literature. She developed a perspicacity for color and light. Counterintuitively, her paintings were not informed by landscape, even though their square format and horizontal lines evoked it in a formal sense. Instead, she described her paintings as “meditations on innocence, beauty, happiness and love.”
In the 1980s, Martin had finally achieved the degree of commercial and critical success that had eluded her during the lean years of the 1960s and early ‘70s. She built a home and studio in Gallup, New Mexico, a quiet town about thirty minutes outside Santa Fe. She began to experiment with alternating bands of gray and white paint. Although her palette was limited in this way, she nevertheless teased out a wide variety of hues from this combination, including lustrous colors like pewter, pale gray, chalky white, warm taupe, and a lovely blue-gray the color of rain-sodden clouds. At times she used diluted india ink and even sand to create a “gravelly” texture. As in the present work, Martin preferred that the white bands be wider, and in this case created a three-to-one ratio against the gray, which she delineated with thin graphite lines—almost like a sheet of notebook paper. Interestingly, the lines do not extend all the way to the edge of the canvas. Instead, they stop just short of the perimeter. In this way, the lines do not border or delineate anything per se; instead they are lingering ephemeral elements that seem to dematerialize before our very eyes.
Martin was an attentive and devoted student: of the natural world, of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, of the mechanics of art-making, of the plenitude and fullness that exists in a single moment. Throughout her life, she pursued her own unique vision of beauty and she continually probed deeper to discover painting’s underlying essence. Although the parameters of her painting align her with the Minimalists, Martin came of age in the late 1950s in the Coenties Slip section of lower Manhattan, where her friends included Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Robert Indiana. Thus her interests dovetailed with the last vestiges of Abstract Expressionism but also the newness of Pop and the beginnings of Color Field painting and Minimalism. Above all, Martin considered her paintings to be the abstract expression of her own inner state of existence.
In 1992, the present work was exhibited in the first retrospective of Martin’s work in Switzerland, when it debuted at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in January of 1992. This major exhibit was organized by the director Dieter Schwartz, who also published a book of Martin's writings in a German translation. As part of this exhibit, the museum acquired a work of their own, Untitled #8 (1988), a remarkably similar painting when compared to the present work. After the present painting came off exhibit, it has remained in a private collection for over thirty years.
Throughout her career, Martin limited her work to a prescribed set of parameters. She eschewed all recognizable imagery and any narrative content. For many years, she even refrained from using color. Her preferred format was a six-by-six foot square, which fit her arm span if she stretched them wide. She was obsessive about whether the painting “worked” and would absolutely, and without mercy, destroy those that didn’t meet her exacting standards.
From her first paintings in the early 1960s, Martin selected the grid as her primary modus operandi. This she rendered using simple graphite pencils upon a plain white gessoed surface, a narrow set of parameters that served her well. Within this reduced set of means, she embarked upon an extraordinary exploration that ultimately proved the resiliency of her medium, demonstrating painting’s endless capacity for both renewal and growth. The simple, hermetic life she chose for herself meant that she could spend days in quiet contemplation, either watching cloud formations as they moved across the sky, or studying Buddhist literature. She developed a perspicacity for color and light. Counterintuitively, her paintings were not informed by landscape, even though their square format and horizontal lines evoked it in a formal sense. Instead, she described her paintings as “meditations on innocence, beauty, happiness and love.”
In the 1980s, Martin had finally achieved the degree of commercial and critical success that had eluded her during the lean years of the 1960s and early ‘70s. She built a home and studio in Gallup, New Mexico, a quiet town about thirty minutes outside Santa Fe. She began to experiment with alternating bands of gray and white paint. Although her palette was limited in this way, she nevertheless teased out a wide variety of hues from this combination, including lustrous colors like pewter, pale gray, chalky white, warm taupe, and a lovely blue-gray the color of rain-sodden clouds. At times she used diluted india ink and even sand to create a “gravelly” texture. As in the present work, Martin preferred that the white bands be wider, and in this case created a three-to-one ratio against the gray, which she delineated with thin graphite lines—almost like a sheet of notebook paper. Interestingly, the lines do not extend all the way to the edge of the canvas. Instead, they stop just short of the perimeter. In this way, the lines do not border or delineate anything per se; instead they are lingering ephemeral elements that seem to dematerialize before our very eyes.
Martin was an attentive and devoted student: of the natural world, of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy, of the mechanics of art-making, of the plenitude and fullness that exists in a single moment. Throughout her life, she pursued her own unique vision of beauty and she continually probed deeper to discover painting’s underlying essence. Although the parameters of her painting align her with the Minimalists, Martin came of age in the late 1950s in the Coenties Slip section of lower Manhattan, where her friends included Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Robert Indiana. Thus her interests dovetailed with the last vestiges of Abstract Expressionism but also the newness of Pop and the beginnings of Color Field painting and Minimalism. Above all, Martin considered her paintings to be the abstract expression of her own inner state of existence.
In 1992, the present work was exhibited in the first retrospective of Martin’s work in Switzerland, when it debuted at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in January of 1992. This major exhibit was organized by the director Dieter Schwartz, who also published a book of Martin's writings in a German translation. As part of this exhibit, the museum acquired a work of their own, Untitled #8 (1988), a remarkably similar painting when compared to the present work. After the present painting came off exhibit, it has remained in a private collection for over thirty years.