most influential contacts were Kelly and Rauschenberg, from whom she borrowed some stylistic ideas. Martin created one of her most famous watercolours, entitled Summer (Fig. 3), while living at Coenties Slip. In this painting she incorporated squares containing a pale blue dot on a dynamic blue background, which from a distance may seem to be merely a blue and rather homogeneous block [Miranda, 2016; Schjeldahl, 2016].
Fig. 3. Agnes Martin: Summer, 1964. © 2018, ProLitteris, Zurich. Reprinted with permission.
Agnes Martin’s style incorporated grids as an element of the organisation of canvases, as can be seen in Figure 3, filled with colour. These techniques blended the two separate artistic styles of minimalism and colour field [The Art Story, 2018c]. Although Agnes Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist, she was seen by art critics as quieter than 10th Street abstract expressionists, and subtler than Coenties Slip minimalists [Greenberger, 2015].
When she lived at Coenties Slip, Agnes Martin started experiencing episodes of auditory hallucinations and catatonia, and she was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. In the early 1960s she required several hospitalisations at Bellevue Hospital and she was treated with electroconvulsive therapy [The Art Story, 2018c]. Martin’s psychosis was noted by her fellow artists from Coenties Slip, including Robert Indiana, who explained:
I happened to encounter Agnes on South Street and she simply walked past me and didn’t recognise me. Shortly thereafter she was committed to Bellevue. [Greenberger, 2015]
Agnes Martin had another psychotic episode triggered by listening to Handel’s Messiah in a church on 2nd Avenue [Laing, 2015]. Martin’s biographer, Nancy Princenthal, noted that she was clear about the fact that her disease with psychotic breaks and vivid auditory hallucinations had nothing to do with her work. The voices Martin heard did not direct her in what to paint and did not influence her work. On the other hand, the voices directed other aspects of Martin’s life with various punitive and protective directions [Princenthal and Martin, 2015].
There was another element to this though, as Martin’s artistic creation was eccentric and distinct. Martin apparently described her paintings as coming to her mind fully formed as the size of a postage stamp, and she was just extending them to the full six-square-foot canvas as full-blown paintings. This could be considered as a way to establish a balance between her emotions, perception and visual world [Princenthal and Martin, 2015]. Martin wanted to conceal and control her psychiatric symptoms, and as mentioned by Schjeldahl [2016], used the grid as a screen and shield, distilling the overwhelming, uncontrollable content of her states of mind into artistic output. Martin had a great insight into the drivers of her artistic production, and during a lecture she gave at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pensylvania on February 14th, 1973, she reflected on the states of mind that triggered her paintings:
The panic of complete helplessness drives us to fantastic extremes and feelings of mild helplessness drive us to ridiculousness. But helplessness when fear and dread have run their course, as all passions do, is the most rewarding state of all. [Flournoy, 2018]
In addition to this, Martin was a very private and discrete person, unlike the 10th Street abstract expressionists. She destroyed her early paintings and she discouraged anyone from sharing facts from her life and discussing her painting.
In 1966 Martin’s paintings were exhibited at Guggenheim’s “Systemic Paintings,” and later at Virginia Dwan’s gallery as part of the innovative exhibition “10,” where her works were shown together with those of other conceptual and minimalist painters [The Art Story, 2018c]. In 1967 she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts [Miranda, 2016]. Around the same time, she broke up with Chryssa, a Greek-American sculptor [Greenberger, 2015], her friend Ad Reinhardt died, she had a relapse of her psychosis, and her studio on Coenties Slip was demolished. Following these events, Martin gave away all her painting tools and canvases, and bought a truck and camper and left New York [The Art Story, 2018c]. Martin escaped from all distractions and impediments in order to clear her mind and to achieve, as Kevin Salatino said, a state of being “egoless,” which allowed her to be free and happy [Salatino, 2008]. Many years later, Martin commented on her decision to leave New York:
I could no longer stay, so I had to leave, you see… I left New York because every day I suddenly felt I wanted to die and it was connected with painting. It took me several years to find out that the cause was an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. [Laing, 2015]
She embarked on a trip to Canada and ended up in New Mexico, initially in Portales Mesa, where she lived in very basic conditions without electricity, a phone or any neighbours. She built a house with her own hands with self-made adobe bricks and wood that she cut herself with a chainsaw [Laing, 2015]. After a few years she eventually settled in Galisteo, where she built another adobe brick home with a studio [The Art Story, 2018c]. During her stay in New Mexico, Martin focused on writing poetry and contemplation. In 1971, Martin was invited to prepare a series of prints which yielded a portfolio of 30 screen-prints called On a Clear Day, which were exhibited in 1973. The prevailing motive in these screen-prints is grids [Salatino, 2008]. Martin commented on this particular pattern, highlighting the play of geometrical shapes with an abstract emotional dimension:
My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.
I was thinking about innocence, and then I saw it in my mind that grid. So I painted it, and sure enough, it was innocent. [Salatino, 2008]
According to Salatino [2008], Martin was able to condense in those 30 screen-prints the essence of happiness, beauty, freedom, and at the same time perfection. Following this Martin took up painting again, and in 1976 she made a film entitled Gabriel, which featured a little boy meditatively walking around a beach. The film itself was not widely appreciated but it was Martin’s attempt to reach for something beyond her abilities [Greenberger, 2015].
In 1992 Martin moved into a retirement residence in Taos in New Mexico. In her later paintings she returned to the theme of objects. She used more geometric shapes, such as trapezoids, squares coloured in black and put against simple sandy grey backgrounds, which Schjeldahl [2016] suggested as having a deathly appearance. Her very last work was that of a 3-inch-tall plant which was painted with a tottering ink line. As far as Martin’s medical condition was concerned at the end of her long life, she displayed features of dementia. She spent her last days in the infirmary of her retirement residence where she died in December 2004 [Laing, 2015].
Overall, Agnes Martin’s artistic creativity was undoubtedly influenced by her paranoid schizophrenia, resulting in more systematic creations rather than being content with developing postage-stamp ideas into full-blown canvases. No convincing evidence has been offered by art critics on any deterioration of her artistic style and, on the contrary, her late artistic productions are considered as purification of her style and a consequence of her maturation as an artist and her personal emotional journey. One can say that she achieved purification of minimalism and abstraction, which is similar to what we saw in the case of Willem de Kooning and James Brooks. With application of scientific observational methods or fractal density assessment to interpret artistic changes, we can come to a more numerically palpable conclusion of the shifting of artistic output in abstract expressionists toward a more simplistic style. The question remains as to whether this is a consequence of the disease process or represents the mastering of artistic skills.
References
