Agnes Martin at the Tate Modern

Agnes Martin at the Tate Modern 

 This is a major retrospective of the work of American artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004), a name unknown beyond the circles of the avant-garde. Unusually Martin evaded an early realist period or perhaps the Tate has somehow tastefully avoided presenting it. Instead Martin began her art career as an Abstract Expressionist in the period summed up by the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956). After Martin had negotiated her influences, which included Mark Rothko (1903 – 1970) and Barnett Newman (1905 – 1970), she gradually began to find her own voice as an abstract and then a minimalist artist. 

Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterians and lived on a farm before her family moved to Vancouver. Martin then moved to Washington, USA, to help her pregnant sister and finished her education and then art education there. Apparently she had a brief career as a naturalist painter in the 1950s before turning to abstract forms such as the typical abstract movements of the time, surrealism, cubism, abstract expressionism and biomorphic forms. She decided to become an artist at the age of 30, later than some, although Vincent Van Gogh, for instance, also began his career late and flowered briefly and decisively. Like Van Gogh, Martin also had a history of mental illness and suffered a series of schizophrenic episodes and traumas throughout her life. She studied art at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque and then in New York at the Teachers College, Columbia University. Martin began working on geometric forms such as squares, rectangles and circles and her work began to flourish within the New York art scene. She also experimented with different materials: “I made a construction with the heads of three thousand nails that I fixed onto boards. When they took down the steel houses that used to be on the docks, there were some steel bolts with rotted heads, these are what I used, the first one I called Garden.” Martin’s abstract, geometric patterns are simple, understated, lines are drawn by hand rather than with a geometry set. 

By the 1960s her geometric compositions had evolved into her signature style, the square grid, which is presented here in three forms, in The Islands (1961), Friendship (1963) and A Grey Stone (1963). The grids are made from lines intersecting at right angles, creating rectangular divisions within the square format. In the 1960s Martin sold her possessions, leaving New York, and after a period of wandering through the United States and Canada, resettled in Taos, New Mexico. There had been an art colony in Taos since 1899. Artists had been attracted to the town by the presence of native Indians and the old Taos pueblo which is possibly the oldest continuously occupied site in the United States having existed for more than 1000 years. There was originally much interest in depictions of the pre-Columbian era but also in depictions of the Wild West. Eventually the avante garde also came to be attracted to living in Taos. 

Martin gave up painting for five years, a visible hiatus in her painting career, representing perhaps a necessary period of recuperation after much mental struggle and dislocation. Her painting evolved through several periods, in the 1970s and 1980s, when she worked in paints mixed with acrylic gesso in order to highlight the subtle, disparate quality of her painting. She eventually worked in grey in order to create dark opaque compositions with a restricted palette and restricted materials. All along she favoured paper as part of her ‘journey to the grid’ and luminous bands of pastel colours that are transparent, translucent, diaphanous yet also opaque. She cheerfully destroyed work that did not amount to her highest expectations and was still doing so when she died at the age of 92 on 16 December 2004 in Taos. 

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, July 2015