Untitled #11

Agnes Martin’s Untitled #11 evokes “something of sand and sky and old stone,” as the New York Times critic John Russell suggested in 1975, the year it was painted (“Where to Go From Art of the 1950s,” The New York Times, 8 March, 1975, p. 16). Here, delicate washes of diluted acrylic, carefully pared down to Martin’s signature subtle, hazy blue hue, are applied onto the gessoed canvas in broad vertical columns and bordered by simple graphite lines. This important painting, created at a seminal moment in Martin’s career when she had just settled into her adobe home on a remote, New Mexico mesa, marks Martin’s triumphant return to painting after taking an eight year hiatus. Untitled #11 epitomizes Martin’s renewed interest in the possibilities of perception and experience, as she moved to purify and renew her work, seeking to divorce her output from all external associations in pursuit of perfection witnessed through illustrating beauty and happiness. This method would sustain her for the remainder of her years and resulted in her most profound works, which call on us to “go and sit and look,” in the artist’s own words (quoted in H. Cotter, “The Joy of Reading Between Agnes Martin’s Lines,” The New York Times, 6 October, 2016, p. C21).

Between each of Untitled #11’s blue columns (numbers were important to Martin; the painting contains eleven blue columns), Martin has left a thin strip of blank, gessoed canvas. Radically different from her earlier works, her series from 1975 employ an asymmetrical composition—the first time Martin deviates from the perfect symmetry she previously favored. Both shocked and overawed by the newness of the works when first viewing them, Martin’s close friend and dealer Arne Glimcher exclaimed: “my surprise was obvious, but so was my positive response to their extravagant beauty… Filled with light, the flatness of her previous work is replaced by infinite space. All of her early work seemed chaste by comparison” (A. Glimcher, “Studio visit. Apil 30, 1976. Cuba, New Mexico,” in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, Phaidon 2012, pg. 76). When asked about her newfound asymmetry, Martin responded: “My mind said that they should be asymmetrical… and when I did, it was right. Only after I worked it out on paper did I make the first painting on canvas and you know somehow they came together—I was surprised too” (quoted in op. cit., p. 77). Beyond the structural changes, Martin now emphasizes color and area over line, with her broad bands of lightly tinted translucent washes of color giving an impression of heavenly effulgence. The importance of this series is further attested to by several other examples’ representation in prestigious institutional collections; Untitled #12 is in Dia:Beacon while Untitled #5 is at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Martin espoused a powerful aesthetic philosophy wherein perfection, beauty, and happiness are ontologically interdependent and epistemologically interchangeable, best articulated by the artist at a 1989 lecture she have at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where she said: “when I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is an awareness of perfection” (quoted in “Beauty is the Mystery of Life,” in Agnes Martin, Whitney Museum of American Art, exh. cat., 1992, p. 10). Untitled #11 represents a powerful, mature articulation of this theory, which Martin would continue to develop through the remainder of her career.

In 1967, just as Martin began to receive critical acclaim for her work, she suddenly left New York and stopped making art altogether, embarking upon an eighteen-month journey across the United States and Canada. It would be another four years, at least, before she returned to her work and settled into an extremely remote area of New Mexico. She returned to painting again around 1974, surprising her viewers with an array of beautiful colors that included, at first, pink, yellow and blue, and then much later, gray and white. The present work was first exhibited along with Untitled #2 at Martin's Recent Paintings exhibition at Pace Gallery in 1974. Anne H. and Sid R. Bass acquired Untitled #2 directly from the exhibition, then obtained the present work soon after to recreate the powerful synergies the two works establish when installed together.

Around this time, Martin also changed her approach to her titles. Instead of using titles to describe things in the natural world or to name her experiences, such as The Desert (1965), Orange Grove (1965), or Happy Valley (1967), she called them simply Untitled, and numbers them according to the series that she was working on. As the curator of Martin’s 2016 retrospective at the Guggenheim, Tracey Bashkoff, has explained: “There’s a shift into how one canvas follows another canvas—and is connected to the canvas before it and the canvas after it. And that numbering system brings out the connection between the elements in a body of work” (“Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1975,” online; accessed March 12, 2025 via: https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/agnes-martin-untitled-12-1975).

Untitled #11 demonstrates Agnes Martin’s engagement in a lifelong quest to express the particularities of her own unique vision. This only truly blossomed once she arrived in the isolation of the New Mexican desert. Remarkably, it would continue to consume her entire life. “There is no halfway with art,” Martin proclaimed, “we wake up thinking about it and we go to sleep thinking about it” (quoted in N. Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, London, 2015, p. 162).