![]() victory after victory,” she declares, laughing. I thought I would cut my way through life. She had entered the world, she tells Lance, as a small figure with a little sword. ![]() In a documentary made in 2002, Mary Lance’s With My Back to the World, Martin claimed she could remember the exact moment of her birth. She was born to Scottish Presbyterian pioneers on 22 March 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock, another child of wide-open prairies and enormous skies. Her story begins on an isolated farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. This month also sees the publication of a biography, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art by Nancy Princenthal (Thames & Hudson), a painstaking attempt to disentangle the many contradictions of a long and singular life. All the same, she hasn’t achieved quite the renown of her mostly male contemporaries in abstraction, partly because the subtleties of her paintings are almost impossible to reproduce in print, though a substantial retrospective opening at Tate Modern in June makes a powerful case for her position in the first rank. Martin’s work is in museums and collections across the world, and changes hands for millions of dollars at a time. ![]() Though inspired, they represent an act of dogged will and extreme effort, and their perfection is hard-won. And yet these images of absolute calm did not arise from a life replete with love or ease, but rather out of turbulence, solitude and hardship. Little Children Loving Love, I Love the Whole World, Lovely Life, even Infant Response to Love. “Sippy cup colours”, the critic Terry Castle once called them, and their titles likewise address states of pre-verbal, infantile bliss. When she returned to painting in 1971, the grids had gone, replaced by horizontal or vertical lines, the old palette of grey and white and brown giving way to glowing stripes and bands of very pale pink and blue and yellow. ![]() But she was also so deeply ambivalent about pride and success and the ego-driven business of making a name for yourself that in the 1960s she abandoned the art world altogether, packing up her New York studio, giving away her materials and disappearing in a pickup truck, surfacing 18 months later on a remote mesa in New Mexico. She produced the last of her masterpieces a few months before her death in 2004, at the grand old age of 92. “I paint with my back to the world,” she declared, and what she wanted to catch in her rigorous nets was not material existence, the Earth and its myriad forms, but rather the abstract glories of being: joy, beauty, innocence happiness itself.Ī late starter, Martin kept on going, working at the height of her powers right through her 80s a stocky figure with apple cheeks and cropped silver hair, dressed in overalls and Indian shirts. They came, these restrained, reserved, exquisite paintings, as visions, for which she would wait sometimes for weeks on end, rocking in her chair, steadying herself for a glimpse of the minute image that she would paint next. A grid: a set of horizontal and vertical lines drawn meticulously with a ruler and pencil on canvases six feet high and six feet wide. A rt must derive from inspiration, Agnes Martin said, and yet for decades she painted what seems at first glance to be the same thing over and over again, the same core structure subject to infinitely subtle variations.
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