Agnes Martin Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Agnes Bernice Martin was born on March 22, 1912, in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada. She grew up in western Canada before moving to the Pacific Northwest, eventually settling in the United States as a young adult. She studied to become a teacher and pursued art education with determination, earning degrees at Teachers College, Columbia University (B.S. in 1942 and M.A. in 1952). Those years brought her into contact with ideas about perception, pedagogy, and psychology that would later inform her disciplined approach to painting. She also spent formative periods in New Mexico, taking courses at the University of New Mexico and developing an early attachment to the southwestern landscape whose clarity and quiet would become central to her sensibility. She became a U.S. citizen in 1950.

Finding an Artistic Community
By the mid-1950s Martin was showing work in New Mexico and teaching, but her trajectory changed when the New York dealer Betty Parsons saw her art and encouraged her to move east. In 1957 she relocated to lower Manhattan and joined a circle of artists living and working in the old lofts around Coenties Slip. There she formed bonds with Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, and the fiber artist Lenore Tawney, who, like Martin, pursued a rigorous, pared-down language. The painter Ad Reinhardt became an important friend; his severe black paintings and uncompromising views echoed Martin's insistence on purity and order. Parsons, a steadfast advocate, exhibited Martin's work and provided both visibility and practical support during crucial early years.

The Grid and an Aesthetic of Restraint
In New York Martin arrived at the format that would define her achievement: hand-drawn pencil grids on gessoed canvas, often six-foot squares, built from delicate lines and an almost weightless palette. Though associated with Minimalism, she consistently described herself as an abstract expressionist of a different sort, seeking not gesture but states of mind. The grid, for Martin, was a vessel for feeling, happiness, innocence, and tranquility, carried by barely perceptible modulation, repetition, and space. Critics and fellow artists, among them Donald Judd and Lucy Lippard, recognized the strangeness and originality of these paintings: they looked impersonal from a distance but revealed human touch at every line. Her first grids appeared around 1961, and through the mid-1960s she produced a concentrated body of work that secured her reputation.

Withdrawal and Search
In 1967, following the death of Ad Reinhardt and amid the demolition of her studio building, Martin abruptly left New York, put her materials in storage, and stopped painting. She traveled across the United States and Canada in a period of intense solitude, eventually settling again in New Mexico. The hiatus lasted several years, during which she wrote notes and delivered occasional talks articulating her philosophy of art: the artist, she said, must quiet the mind to receive inspiration. She lived simply, building and maintaining small studios and homes in the desert. Martin later acknowledged that she wrestled with mental illness; solitude and strict routine were ways to maintain equilibrium and protect the concentration her work required.

Return to Painting
Martin resumed painting in 1974. The first works after her return replaced the pencil grid with horizontal bands of pale color set against luminous grounds, a shift that kept her commitment to restraint while opening the paintings to rhythm and breath. The portfolio On a Clear Day (1973), a series of screenprinted grids, marked the bridge between the New York years and the new phase in the Southwest. Her longtime supporter Arne Glimcher of Pace Gallery helped introduce this late work to a broad audience, and he remained a close interlocutor. In 1973 a traveling retrospective organized by Suzanne Delehanty at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia affirmed her status, and in 1992 the Whitney Museum of American Art, in an exhibition organized by Barbara Haskell, surveyed the full arc of her career to wide acclaim.

Late Career and Recognition
From studios near Galisteo and later in Taos, Martin refined a remarkably consistent vocabulary: bands and, at times, returned grids rendered in watercolor-thin acrylic, with hand-drawn graphite lines calibrating measure and interval. Paintings from these decades, quiet, nearly monochrome, yet never cold, show her command of proportion and tone. Honors followed. Museums collected her work in depth, and she was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1998. In Taos she collaborated with the Harwood Museum of Art on a permanent gallery designed to present a suite of her paintings in natural light, an installation that reveals how carefully she considered architecture, viewing distance, and duration. Writers and curators continued to engage closely with her thought; Glimcher gathered her statements and recollections, while critics across generations returned to her insistence that beauty and happiness were proper goals for art.

Influence and Legacy
Martin influenced artists far beyond the Minimalist and post-Minimalist circles with which she is often grouped. Her example resonates with painters attentive to touch and atmosphere, with sculptors and installation artists exploring seriality and light, and with those seeking a contemplative relation between art and the viewer. She rejected anecdote in favor of an art that might calm and steady perception. Friends and colleagues from the Coenties Slip years, Kelly, Tawney, Indiana, and advocates such as Betty Parsons and Arne Glimcher formed a network that sustained her, while critics like Donald Judd and Lucy Lippard offered early, lucid accounts of her achievement. Museums worldwide, including the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, and Dia, have made her work central to the story of postwar art.

Final Years
In 1992 Martin moved permanently to Taos, where she painted daily into her nineties. She kept her life sparse, her studio ordered, and her ambitions focused on what she called the ideal in art. Agnes Martin died in Taos on December 16, 2004, aged ninety-two. Her paintings continue to serve as instruments of attention: austere yet tender, exacting yet humane. They ask for quiet and time, and they give back a rare steadiness, the sense that measure and feeling can be one and the same.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Agnes, under the main topics: Art - Happiness - Self-Improvement.

Other people realated to Agnes: Donald Judd (Artist)

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