.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Executed in 1965, Agnes Martin’s The Desert is an exceptional early example of the artist’s famed grid paintings from the mid-1960s, works now considered among the finest of her career. Delicate, simple, yet brimming with life, these early works would set the stage for a remarkable career. The art historian Nancy Princenthal, in her biography on the artist, enthuses “The grid-based paintings and drawings of the 1960s constitute a discrete body of work that are still bracingly radical, as gripping today as they were more than half a century ago” (Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, New York, 2015, pp. 88 and 91).
This highly-acclaimed body of work is limited in number, as Martin only painted them during a few years in the mid-1960s. In 1967, Martin ceased painting entirely and left New York, and would not resume painting again until 1974. Other examples of the penciled-grid paintings of the mid-1960s can be found in prestigious museum collections, including The Tree (1964; Museum of Modern Art, New York), Drift of Summer (1965; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and Grass (1967; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). In addition to the series' strong institutional representation, The Desert, in particular, was in several prominent private collections: Charles Cowles, renowned dealer, collector, former curator at the Seattle Art Museum, and publisher of Artforum from the mid-1960s until early 1980s; as well as Eli and Edyth Broad, lifelong philanthropists and visionary collectors that changed the fabric of the art world in Los Angeles.
Rendered in Martin’s preferred six-foot square format, The Desert at first appears to be an sparse, square-shaped canvas, but closer inspection reveals the hundreds of delicate, hand drawn graphite lines. Martin used a T-square and string to aid her in creating these lines, which come together to form a vast, delicately-rendered grid that covers nearly the entire canvas surface. The painting goes beyond the materials of its making, opening up to larger spiritual truths that Martin sought to convey throughout her work, such as innocence, purity and joy.
During much of her life, Martin was drawn to the teachings of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and through her use of the grid, she sought to achieve a pure and enlightened state of consciousness. In The Desert, she transforms the rational geometry of the grid into a portal of subjective spirituality, a strangely prescient aspect that prefigures her move to New Mexico and the significance that the high desert landscape would have upon her work, for decades yet to come.
When the present work was completed in 1965, Martin had recently switched from oil paint to acrylic, and The Desert displays the very subtle surface texture that this new medium afforded. Also typical of her work at this time, she leaves an empty perimeter around the central grid, which acts as a framing device, as well as a visual reminder of the painting’s nature, itself a stretched and painted piece of fabric. Also around this time, Martin also switched to using fine linen as her support.
When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees [laughs] and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.
Agnes Martin
In The Desert, the meticulous application of the graphite lines would have taken Martin many weeks to achieve. Its visual effect varies depending upon the viewer’s distance from the canvas. From far away, the surface appears soft and cloudlike, with certain areas reading like dark shadows. Closer inspection reveals a fascinating sensory experience, where the staggering number of perfectly proportioned rectangles comes into view. (In this case, there are exactly 57,129 of these distinct, rectangular units). Hand-drawn and applied over the creamy acrylic ground, the graphite framework transcends the materials of its making to become something greater, not unlike standing before a vast, desert landscape and considering the countless grains of sand embodied therein.
At the time she painted The Desert, Martin’s studio was located in an abandoned, run-down building in the Coenties Slip area of lower Manhattan. In the mid-1960s, most of these buildings had been condemned by the city, many of them barely inhabitable with no running water or heat. The gallerist Betty Parsons had led Martin to this area of Manhattan, and introduced her to a group of artists that would become her neighbors: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg lived nearby. It was here that the first mature example of the grid revealed itself in 1964, with The Tree (1964; Museum of Modern Art, New York). The grid emphasized the material presence of the object itself, in a way that both detracted from, and yet insisted upon, the hand of the artist.
For Agnes Martin, the grid offered up a possibility of a complete new beginning, which she associated with innocence. Martin explained this concept in a 1989 interview, saying: “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees [laughs] and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied” (quoted in T. Bell, Agnes Martin, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2015, p. 26).
This highly-acclaimed body of work is limited in number, as Martin only painted them during a few years in the mid-1960s. In 1967, Martin ceased painting entirely and left New York, and would not resume painting again until 1974. Other examples of the penciled-grid paintings of the mid-1960s can be found in prestigious museum collections, including The Tree (1964; Museum of Modern Art, New York), Drift of Summer (1965; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and Grass (1967; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam). In addition to the series' strong institutional representation, The Desert, in particular, was in several prominent private collections: Charles Cowles, renowned dealer, collector, former curator at the Seattle Art Museum, and publisher of Artforum from the mid-1960s until early 1980s; as well as Eli and Edyth Broad, lifelong philanthropists and visionary collectors that changed the fabric of the art world in Los Angeles.
Rendered in Martin’s preferred six-foot square format, The Desert at first appears to be an sparse, square-shaped canvas, but closer inspection reveals the hundreds of delicate, hand drawn graphite lines. Martin used a T-square and string to aid her in creating these lines, which come together to form a vast, delicately-rendered grid that covers nearly the entire canvas surface. The painting goes beyond the materials of its making, opening up to larger spiritual truths that Martin sought to convey throughout her work, such as innocence, purity and joy.
During much of her life, Martin was drawn to the teachings of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and through her use of the grid, she sought to achieve a pure and enlightened state of consciousness. In The Desert, she transforms the rational geometry of the grid into a portal of subjective spirituality, a strangely prescient aspect that prefigures her move to New Mexico and the significance that the high desert landscape would have upon her work, for decades yet to come.
When the present work was completed in 1965, Martin had recently switched from oil paint to acrylic, and The Desert displays the very subtle surface texture that this new medium afforded. Also typical of her work at this time, she leaves an empty perimeter around the central grid, which acts as a framing device, as well as a visual reminder of the painting’s nature, itself a stretched and painted piece of fabric. Also around this time, Martin also switched to using fine linen as her support.
When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees [laughs] and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.
Agnes Martin
In The Desert, the meticulous application of the graphite lines would have taken Martin many weeks to achieve. Its visual effect varies depending upon the viewer’s distance from the canvas. From far away, the surface appears soft and cloudlike, with certain areas reading like dark shadows. Closer inspection reveals a fascinating sensory experience, where the staggering number of perfectly proportioned rectangles comes into view. (In this case, there are exactly 57,129 of these distinct, rectangular units). Hand-drawn and applied over the creamy acrylic ground, the graphite framework transcends the materials of its making to become something greater, not unlike standing before a vast, desert landscape and considering the countless grains of sand embodied therein.
At the time she painted The Desert, Martin’s studio was located in an abandoned, run-down building in the Coenties Slip area of lower Manhattan. In the mid-1960s, most of these buildings had been condemned by the city, many of them barely inhabitable with no running water or heat. The gallerist Betty Parsons had led Martin to this area of Manhattan, and introduced her to a group of artists that would become her neighbors: Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist and Jack Youngerman. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg lived nearby. It was here that the first mature example of the grid revealed itself in 1964, with The Tree (1964; Museum of Modern Art, New York). The grid emphasized the material presence of the object itself, in a way that both detracted from, and yet insisted upon, the hand of the artist.
For Agnes Martin, the grid offered up a possibility of a complete new beginning, which she associated with innocence. Martin explained this concept in a 1989 interview, saying: “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees [laughs] and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied” (quoted in T. Bell, Agnes Martin, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2015, p. 26).