Drawing the Line: The Early Work of Agnes Martin 9780520356122

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
1 “IF I COULD MAKE A LIVING PAINTING”
2 TOWARD A MATURE EXPRESSION
3 THE PROGRESSION OF A PAINTER’S WORK
4 FINDING THE GRID “The Lines Began as Points in Space”
CONCLUSION
NOTES
WORKS CITED
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX

Citation preview

the publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the art endowment fund of the university of california press foundation, which was established by a major gift from the ahmanson foundation.

DRAWING THE LINE

DRAWING THE LINE The Early Work of Agnes Martin Christina Bryan Rosenberger

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by Christina Bryan Rosenberger

MM Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rosenberger, Christina Bryan, 1980– author. Title: Drawing the line : the early work of Agnes Martin / Christina Bryan Rosenberger. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | “2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2015039773 | isbn 978-0-520-28824-9 (cloth : alk. paper)  Subjects: lcsh: Martin, Agnes, 1912–2004. | Painters—United States— 20th century—Biography. | Painting, Modern—20th century. Classification: lcc n6537.m38 r67 2016 | ddc 759.13—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039773 Printed in China 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

For my parents, Eric and Teresa Rosenberger

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1.

“If I Could Make a Living Painting”

2.

Toward a Mature Expression

3.

The Progression of a Painter’s Work

4.

Finding the Grid: “The Lines Began as Points in Space” Conclusion

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Notes 171 Works Cited 213 Illustration Credits Index 231 •

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225

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My study of Agnes Martin’s early work has been supported by the generosity of many people and institutions. I am indebted to the artists who spoke to me about their memories of Martin, including Ellsworth Kelly, Pat Steir, Richard Tuttle, and Jack Youngerman. Many of Martin’s friends in New Mexico were generous with their thoughts, including Alexandra Benjamin, Bob Ellis, Woody Gwynn, Mary Lance, Marcia Oliver, Diana Stein, Kristina Wilson, and Karen Yank. In New York, Dorothea McKenna Elkon, Barbara Haskell, Kathleen Nugent Mangan, Barbara Moore, Karen Schiff, Jack Tilton, and Werner Kramarsky gave their knowledge willingly, as did Brad Epley in Houston and Rachel Barker in London. Tiffany Bell and Nancy Princenthal remain valued colleagues with regard to Martin’s life and work. Arnold and Milly Glimcher provided access to Martin’s paintings and studio materials, and I appreciate the assistance of Jon Mason and Lindsay McGuire at Pace Gallery. The object-based nature of this study was made possible by the many collections and individuals who graciously allowed me to examine their works of art. In this regard, Lynne Cooke, formerly of the Dia Art Foundation, was especially generous. I conducted primary source research at numerous repositories where archivists, conservators, registrars, reference librarians, image specialists, and others gave their expertise. For their tremendous help—reflected in my notes and in the images reproduced here—I offer my thanks. I am especially thankful for the assistance I received from many artists’ estates. I am grateful for the fellowships and residencies that enabled me to pursue my research, including a Baird Fellowship at the Harvard Art Museums; a residency at

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the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico; a Craig Hugh Smyth Fellowship in the History of Art and a Connoisseur’s Circle Fellowship at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and a Sylvan C. Coleman and Pamela Coleman Memorial Fund Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The College Art Association’s Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award made the reproduction of the images in the book possible. Opportunities to test my ideas in public forums immeasurably improved the book; thanks are due to the engaged audiences at the College Art Association’s Annual Conference; Dia: Beacon; the Harvard-Radcliffe Club of New Mexico; the Harwood Museum of the University of New Mexico; the Graduate Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania; the Southwest Art History Conference, and the University of Southern California. Just as Martin’s early work was formative, so, too, was the creation of this book. My thanks go to Thomas Crow, my advisor at the Institute of Fine Arts, for providing the scholarly model that has guided this book. My thinking and writing have been enriched by his insights, as far-reaching as they are specific. I remain grateful for the rigor and curiosity he brought to my work. Rob Slifkin read the book with a discerning eye, providing thoughtful advice. At the Conservation Center at the Institute of Fine Arts I owe a special debt to Margaret Holben Ellis and Michele Marincola for their belief in my interest in the materials and techniques of modern art. Lauren Cannady, Rachel Federman, Titia Hulst, Brendan Sullivan, and Betsy Williams provided insight and laughter in equal measures. At the Harvard Art Museums, Tom Lentz championed my research and Kathleen Kennelly, Narayan Khandekar and Jens Stenger have been generous colleagues. Harry Cooper’s work functioned as a model, and his perceptive insights have been given with warmth and humor. I owe my gratitude most especially, however, to Carol MancusiUngaro. Her intellect, originality, and academic standards challenged me, and her belief in the power of close, informed observation has guided this project from the very beginning. Carol’s encouragement, along with that of Heather Cox, has made more of a difference than they know. Karen Levine’s enthusiasm for Martin’s work was palpable. I have appreciated her sage advice and incisive editorial guidance at the University of California Press. Jack Young’s patience and smart solutions have made this a far better book. Rachel Berchten, Aimee Goggins, and Bonnie Hurd guided the creation and publication of the book with enviable expertise. While I worked, Noemi Veieta Chavez, Dena Christensen Garcia, and Wendy Wyman cared for our children with warmth. My deepest thanks go to my family. This book would not exist but for my parents, Eric and Teresa Rosenberger. Their support, over a decade of research and writing, never faltered. Providing encouragement at every turn, the completion of this project is due to their selfless efforts to provide me with time and space to write. I owe them my lasting gratitude. My siblings, Ian and Lizzie, offered their steadfast support. Along the

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way, they made everything more fun. My sincere gratitude is due to Jorge and Serina Sanchez. With unquestioning dedication, my husband Carlos provided the moral compass that has guided my work. His kindness saw me through many late nights, his keen intellect and generosity of spirit prompted thoughtful reflection, and his humor sustained me. Agnes Martin loved babies, remarking in her 1989 lecture Beauty Is the Mystery of Life that “when we see a newborn baby, we say it is beautiful—perfect.” It is my great joy that Carlos and I celebrate the publication of this book with our young children, Isabel and Alexander, whose bright eyes and enchanting laughter have brought so much happiness to this project.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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INTRODUCTION

Agnes Martin lit a bonfire outside of her South Street studio one evening in 1967, tossing painting after painting into the flames. Over the course of the prior decade, Martin had emerged as a successful and critically respected artist in New York, receiving favorable reviews of work she exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Fig. 1.) But to the astonishment of almost everyone who knew her, Martin decided to stop painting. She asked Arnold Glimcher, a dealer, to give her art supplies to a young artist and packed a camper with her remaining belongings. With that, Martin left New York and, seemingly, her career as an artist.1 Many explanations have been offered over the last half century to account for Martin’s abrupt departure from New York at the height of her career: her loft was torn down; her friend Ad Reinhardt died; she was uncomfortable with her increasing prominence in the art world; she wasn’t up to the demands of her life in New York; she felt a sense of remorse.2 Martin, often asked by journalists about her withdrawal, was careful to equivocate, never giving a firm answer. Perhaps the answer was too painful, or perhaps Martin herself couldn’t cite a single, overarching reason. Leaving New York, Martin drove around the United States and Canada, eventually settling on a remote mesa near Cuba, New Mexico, in 1968. Martin proceeded to build two houses, a studio, a three-car garage, and a mushroom house.3 She did not have running water, electricity, or a telephone on the mesa.4 A 1973 photograph in Newsweek shows the artist wearing a cowboy hat and splitting a log wider than her body.

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Figure 1 Peter Moore, Agnes Martin, 1961, color photograph.

By the time of her first retrospective at Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1973, Martin’s reputation was thus doubly established: as an artist of some renown, and as a sage in the desert. As Douglas Davis notes in the accompanying Newsweek article, Martin’s “work is seen, collected and discussed everywhere now, and young artists—​particularly women—​flock to her door, inspired by her stubborn integrity.” 5 Davis identified the narrative potential of Martin’s story, writing that the artist, “long an under-ground heroine, is well on her way to becoming a modern myth.” Martin’s

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Figure 2 Agnes Martin and Arne Glimcher on her tractor, ca. 1974, Polaroid photograph.

myth, as Davis explains, trades on a particular romance of the American West: “She left New York in 1967, just as her spare and precise canvases were winning respect, after years of patient toil. She moved to a little town in northern New Mexico, where she meditates, makes occasional prints, and paints rarely.” 6 (Martin resumed painting in 1973.)7 (Fig. 2.) It was an irresistible paradox for journalists: an artist of demonstrated critical renown who had stopped painting. Martin’s departure from New York—​long the subject of speculation—​fueled interest in her work, rather than forestalling it. “I had 10 one-man shows and I was discovered in every one of them,” Martin told Jill Johnston, then a young art critic for ARTnews visiting her in Cuba. “Finally when I left town I was discovered again—​discovered to

Introduction

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Figure 3 Agnes Martin, the directions to Agnes’s house, ca. 1974, graphite and red ink on paper.

be missing.” 8 Martin’s witty, well-rehearsed line acknowledges her long struggle to be recognized as an artist in New York, as well as the allure of her outsider status once she relocated to Cuba.9 In fact, much of the critical literature on Martin’s art after the 1970s functions as a travelogue, with critics routinely describing their travel to see Martin in Cuba as a pilgrimage of sorts; the maps that Martin drew for friends, artists, and art students have achieved almost iconic status among Martin devotees.10 (Fig. 3.) The hardship involved in seeing Martin and her art was part of the appeal of her work: A visit to Cuba from New York City usually entailed multiple airplane flights, an hour-and-a-half drive to Cuba, and driving over arroyos, sometimes flooded out, in search of Martin’s compound. (Martin often rescued lost or stranded visitors in her pickup truck.) As Terry Castle observes, Martin’s semi-obscurity is exactly the point. True, her paintings now reside in all the fabled modern collections and sell for millions of dollars. True, like O’Keeffe she lived near Taos and Santa Fe for much of her life. But she remains a cult figure—​an artist’s artist—​legendary among the cognoscenti for her reclusive style of life and the zen-like austerity of her vision. I first read about her in the 1970s in a weird stream-of-consciousness piece in the Village Voice by the then-radical-lesbian writer Jill Johnston. Johnston—​herself once a fixture in the New York art world—​described making a kooky pilgrimage to New Mexico to find Martin: a sort of sapphic Quest for Corvo.11

There were many talented artists in New York, as Martin well understood, but Georgia O’Keeffe was the only internationally recognized female artist in New Mexico in the late 1960s.

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Although Martin’s departure from New York was seen as precipitous, and critics have routinely cited it as a major break in her career, much of what surprised Martin’s colleagues in 1967—​the bonfire and her decision to stop painting, her travel to New Mexico, and the building of her house and studio in Cuba—​had precedent in the previous two decades of Martin’s life and work. Martin’s time in New York between 1957 and 1967 suggests geographic stability, but she spent the 1940s and 1950s moving between New York, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. In addition, Martin had lived in New Mexico twice before, in Albuquerque from 1946 to 1951 and in Taos from 1952 to 1957. As a result, her travel to New Mexico was a return to familiar territory—​and not the exile that the Newsweek article implies. While in Albuquerque, Martin built an adobe house and a swimming pool, thus setting a model for the house and studio she would build in Cuba. And while much is made of Martin’s decision to stop painting, her prior patterns of production were by no means consistent. Before 1957, when Betty Parsons’s advances allowed Martin to paint full time, the artist would work for an extended period of time in order to save enough money to paint for a year—​in contrast to her decision to stop painting in 1967, by which point she had attained greater financial stability. As she said later in life, “I had established my market so I felt free to leave.” 12 In such remarks, Martin emerges as a far more astute and worldly participant in the art world—​and, to use her term, the art “market”—​t han is usually assumed. Though Martin had the reputation of a solitary, isolated artist, she gave many interviews and routinely met with young artists and scholars, such as Johnston. And if Martin was not overtly calculating in her statements to critics and journalists, she certainly did little to dispel the myths that others created. (“Just say that I am a hermit,” Martin once instructed a curator when she declined to appear at an exhibition opening.)13 In a 1993 profile in the New Yorker that relied heavily on interviews with the artist, Benita Eisler summed up Martin’s career in the following preface: “Behind the calm, pure order of Agnes Martin’s paintings lies a restless journey that drove her from the New York art world of the sixties to a solitary oasis in the New Mexico desert, where she found her artistic rebirth.” 14 The only salient difference between Eisler’s characterization of Martin and Davis’s Newsweek profile two decades earlier is Martin’s return to painting, demonstrating just how entrenched this romantic reading of Martin’s work had become. Eisler’s biographical reading of Martin’s art is characteristic of much of the literature on the artist. Martin’s work has received accolades since 1958, when the art historian Dore Ashton associated her paintings with the desert landscapes of New Mexico. Over time, interpretations of Martin’s paintings as quiet, almost spectral abstractions inflected by the linear wheat fields of Saskatchewan or the colors of New Mexico became infused with a polymorphous spirituality that reached from Calvinist predestination to Zen Buddhism, depending on the critic. Stuart Preston, writing in the New York Times in 1965, observed “purism in excelsis” in Martin’s grid paintings, “displayed . . . by an austere geometric artist who reduces the act of painting to near-invisible renderings of

Introduction

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intersecting straight lines against a neutral background.” 15 Like Preston, many critics located strains of minimalism in Martin’s work, but a romantic sensibility dominated. “The impression should be one of precision,” John Canaday wrote at the end of the decade, “but rather one feels a poetic sensibility at work here—​reserved, perhaps even a little removed, but warm. That’s how it is. It shouldn’t be, but it is.” 16 By the late 1960s, the operational logic of a Martin painting—​and, in this period, many applied the logic to all her mature works—​was clear: her grids appear as precise, rational paeans to minimalism but distinguish themselves by their “poetic sensibility,” which in turn relies upon the “handmade quality of her work.” 17 This apparent paradox had its own poetic sensibility and quickly became the standard interpretation of Martin’s work, gesturing toward an equally durable debate over Martin’s status as an abstract expressionist or a minimalist. Rather than grapple with the sources of this duality, art historians and critics have been content to acknowledge the tension inherent in Martin’s work as an end in itself—​the “miracle of how much can be communicated . . . with (seemingly) so little,” as one critic wrote.18 This strategy often functioned as a method of sidestepping larger, more fundamental issues—​the question of Martin’s undervalued place in the art historical canon, for example, or the persistent use of biographical anecdotes in lieu of trenchant criticism of Martin’s art. Criticism intended to function as a corrective to this trend, such as Rosalind Krauss’s rigorous phenomenological account of viewing a Martin painting, offered much-needed theoretical insight but often left the paintings drained of the artist’s hand.19 Twenty years after Holland Cotter confirmed Martin’s status as “a legend in American art” on the pages of the New York Times, the seamless, burnished surface of Martin’s critical regard is ripe for reexamination.20 Analyzing Martin’s early artistic production, this book argues that the rapidly evolving creative processes and pictorial solutions Martin developed between 1940 and 1967 define all of her subsequent artistic work, including the celebrated grid paintings she created from the mid-1960s until her death in 2004. The hallmarks of Martin’s grid paintings—​t heir subtly modulated color, balanced compositions, humming lines, carefully calibrated levels of reflectance, and texture—​are developed and refined in Martin’s early paintings. And while much has been written on Martin’s grid paintings and the pale, banded paintings she created after 1973, her early work has not received similar scholarly attention.21 Peter Schjeldahl, writing in the Village Voice on the occasion of Martin’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992–​1993, called this bias toward Martin’s later work the “Venusfrom-the-sea effect,” and declared it “anti-informative. . . . The effect suggests that her mature style was a breeze for Martin, when in truth, I suspect without detailed proof, it was an onerous grind.” 22 This book provides the detailed proof that Schjeldahl posits, detailing not only the “onerous grind” but also Martin’s breathtaking ambition and consummate technical skill amid the artists and dealers of Albuquerque, New York, and Taos. Further, this book seeks to correct the pervasive bias that Martin’s crucial aesthetic breakthroughs

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occurred in New York. Rather, by documenting Martin’s exchanges with artists such as Edward Corbett, Beatrice Mandelman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ad Reinhardt, Clay Spohn, and Adja Yunkers, the book demonstrates that Martin’s accomplishments in New York were based upon an aesthetic vocabulary she developed and refined in New Mexico. Using Martin’s early constructions, drawings, paintings, and prints as a guide, this book thus argues that a more nuanced understanding of Martin’s early work changes our perception of her larger oeuvre. The categorical divisions that have preoccupied art historians and critics, for example, do not account for Martin’s lived experiences, and they hinder our understanding of her nonlinear aesthetic development—​which, in turn, provides new precedents for her use of the grid. Likewise, close analysis of Martin’s early work yields a narrative at once more complex and exploratory than Martin led critics to believe. The active flow of information and ideas between New York and New Mexico provided a rich ferment for Martin’s artistic growth, in contrast to the model of rupture that has characterized many accounts of her movement between the two locations. Further, the reception of Martin’s work as either abstract expressionist or minimalist has obscured Martin’s innovation as well as her experimentation with other movements from assemblage to pop. This recalibration of Martin’s artistic development enhances our understanding of her larger oeuvre, charting Martin’s realization of the grid and, importantly, identifying the tools and strategies that made her grids—​a common enough form in the late 1950s and early 1960s in New York—​so compelling for generations of viewers. While Martin’s grid often seems, in hindsight, to be the inevitable conclusion of her early work, Martin’s artistic project during this period was more broadly defined: to create a “completely non-objective” painting.23 Martin achieved this goal with such striking success in her grids and later banded paintings that the messy, contingent circumstances of their creation have been largely forgotten. Indeed, her grids are often seen as the ultimate embodiment of modernist painting—​pure, autonomous abstract paintings. While this critical progression is tempting, and some scholars have seen Martin’s work as akin to Ad Reinhardt’s ultimate paintings, Martin’s practice proves otherwise. Careful observation of her work reveals another, less ostentatious but no less rigorous path: quiet, steady attention to form and facture paired with a purging of representational subject matter and a heightened attention to viewers’ responses. At the basic, local level of color, form, line, shape, and texture, undertaken with advanced knowledge of modern and contemporary art and with an unusual capacity for discernment, Martin thus transforms abstraction—​or, to use her words, “non-objective painting”—​from the inside out. Not surprisingly, Martin remains the most influential voice with regard to the understanding and interpretation of her art. She was remarkably prescriptive when speaking or writing about her art, telling viewers not only when to view her paintings (in the morning, at first light), at what height (a foot off the ground, for her six-foot-square paintings), and for how long (at least five minutes) but also how to understand them.

Introduction

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Publication of Martin’s writings, lectures, and stories offered viewers ample opportunity to hear Martin’s voice, further solidifying her views as the dominant interpretation of her art.24 Crucially, Martin’s attempts to shape the narrative of her work also extends to the things that she did not say. Hers is a story of gaps, pauses, deletions, and omissions, of which Martin’s sexuality and mental health are the most important.25 It is a narrative that is defined as much by what has not been said as by what is endlessly repeated. As these omissions suggest, Martin was careful to present a particular account of her work. Describing to art historian Joan Simon the vision she had when she found the grid, Martin related how she “came down from the mountain and I saw the plains. I think I was impressed with the space.” 26 She continued: Martin: I looked out over this plain and I felt I was traveling over it. I felt—​I think—​ I responded to the space. I’m not very proud of that quotation. Simon: You’re not? How so? Martin: I consider my paintings to be non-objective. Not about the world, or nature or things like that. That quotation is really before I got on the ball.27

Martin’s comments correct one interpretation of the advent of her grid paintings—​ that they are abstractions derived from nature—​by positing an alternate lineage: “nonobjective” paintings that are “not about the world, or nature or things like that.” 28 Her awareness of the need to be “on the ball” in published interviews signals her desire to shape the narrative surrounding her art, a desire that grew stronger as she aged. She told curator Barbara Haskell, for example, that she found it difficult to work in New York given all the interruptions.29 When Sally Eauclaire later asked Martin about it, she responded, “There were no interruptions. Where did you hear that?” 30 Pressed by Eauclaire, Martin redacted her earlier statement: “That’s all been made up. Not any of that is true. I don’t think I ever lay in bed until afternoon or had inspiration driven from my head by a phone call. That wouldn’t have been much of an inspiration, would it? Gosh, I hope she doesn’t quote me like that throughout the book. You’re misquoted once and soon you see it again and again, footnoted.” 31 Whether Martin remained in bed until the afternoon or had inspiration driven from her head by a phone call remains a matter of conjecture, but Martin’s observation signals her familiarity with the critical apparatus of art history. Further, Martin understood the iterative nature of scholarship and was eager to set the record straight while she had the opportunity—​even if that meant contradicting her prior statements. “Now all of these things of New York are totally, totally different from the stories that Aggie told us about her background,” Mary Fuller McChesney told Susan Landauer in 1994. “She’s re-writing the whole history. [laughs] Why not?” 32 Martin’s willingness to repudiate aspects of her biography in order to shape a particular account of her art carries over into her artistic production as well. From the beginning of her career, Martin edited and destroyed work that did not meet her standards. She reused canvases, gave them away, or burned them in bonfires, culling her

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Figure 4 Agnes Martin, Night Sea, 1963, oil on canvas with gold leaf, 72 × 72 in., private collection, San Francisco.

work as she made it. Later in life, Martin attempted a more wholesale revision, famously purging her early work. “I tried to destroy them all,” she said, “but I couldn’t get some of them.” 33 As a result, the corpus of early works that survives is incomplete. Any analysis of Martin’s early work, as with this book, is necessarily shaped by Martin’s omissions as well as by her role as a self-conscious editor. If we look at what Martin asked us to see, we are rewarded with paintings of striking beauty that conform to a remarkably consistent narrative. Eisler’s description of seeing a Martin painting for the first time is representative of the experiences of many critics, curators, and journalists. (Fig. 4.) “I saw my first Agnes Martin painting in the early

Introduction

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Figure 5 Agnes Martin, Homage to Greece, 1959, oil paint on pieces of canvas laid on wood panel and nails, 12 × 12 in., private collection.

nineteen-seventies, at the home of a collector of contemporary art. Called ‘Night Sea,’ it hung at the top of a staircase, invisible until you arrived on the landing. Then it hit you with the full force of revelation: a shimmering golden grid that seemed to hover above a velvety blue ground.” 34 This is exactly as Martin intended: a visceral reaction that leads to a sense of heightened emotion. Martin’s best grid paintings elicit this state, and it is this reaction that has propelled her work to such high critical regard. But if one stops there—​at the surface of a shimmering golden grid hovering above a velvety

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blue ground—​one risks an understanding of Martin’s art that, while often revelatory, remains highly circumscribed. This book is an attempt to unravel the myths that have solidified around Martin’s art and to recapture the texture and nuance of her early work. By examining Martin’s constructions, drawings, paintings, and prints from the 1940s through the 1960s within the social and historical contexts in which they were created and received, this book evokes the freshness and originality of Martin’s contributions to twentieth-century art. By virtue of Martin’s steadfast insistence on her aesthetic vision and resistance to traditional methods of periodization, the development of her early work also provides a compelling lens through which to view the dominant movements of postwar art in America. Precisely because of Martin’s inability to fit neatly into a single art historical category, her artistic development illuminates the ways in which traditional art historical distinctions often fail to account for the richness and experimentation of a particular cultural moment. Martin’s paintings do not conform to the traditional narrative of modernism as a steady march toward artistic purity, and thus they offer an instructive alternative to an entrenched account of modernism. (Fig. 5.) As we look at tantalizing early works like Homage to Greece, we realize that it’s here—​on the messy level of form and facture—​t hat we discover both the singularity of Martin’s vision and the strategies she used to negotiate age-old aesthetic tropes in a rapidly changing artistic climate.

Introduction

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1 “IF I COULD MAKE A LIVING PAINTING”

In the summer of 1947 or 1948, seventeen-year-old Stanley Landsman left Manhattan to visit his father, who was convalescing from tuberculosis of the spine in the dry climate of New Mexico. Landsman was struck with the scenery when he stepped off the plane in Albuquerque—​t he “big red sun in the sky over the purple mountains and the yellow desert. . . . I just looked at that and I said, ‘My God, those picture postcards were real!’ ” (Fig. 6.) He soon enrolled in a watercolor class at the University of New Mexico.1 As Landsman recalls, I went to the catalogue in the art department and they told me yes, they had a course in watercolor. You went out to the desert every day. So I found out who was teaching. It was a young girl by the name of Agnes Martin who was teaching this course in watercolor . . . So I meet this Agnes Martin, a big, terrific woman. And she sort of takes a liking to me. She said, “I’m going water-coloring with you every day. We go together and the rest of the class follows us.” So, Agnes and I get in the car. . . . And we get out there. And I have this little pad of watercolor paper and my brushes. And Agnes would be out there with sheets like thirty-six by fifty and she had a brush that looked like a housepainter’s brush; it was this big. And she had big buckets of water and she carried sacks full of paint. She’d spread it out on the desert. She was working in about three-quarter of a mile area. Everything was . . . blowing. It didn’t matter. And I was working on this really fine delicate little English watercolor. Like a little 17-year-old postage stamp. She’d say, “Stop with that already! Stop with that! Paint! Paint big. Get it all out.” 2

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Figure 6 “Rio Grande and Volcanoes as Seen from Air Base, Albuquerque, N.M.” 1941, 13 × 7.5 cm., Lake County (IL) Discovery Museum, Curt Teich Postcard Archives.

The image that Landsman creates of Martin painting in the desert—​working across three-quarters of a mile, wielding housepainters’ brushes on four-foot paper in the whipping wind, giving advice to younger artists—​suggests the feisty, pioneer spirit that has characterized depictions of Martin in popular magazines since the mid-1970s. Independent, self-sufficient, and dedicated to her craft—​perhaps at the expense of the rest of her watercolor seminar—​Martin fully, and dramatically, inhabited her role as an artist in the late 1940s. Martin’s exhortations to Landsman about scale and emotion—​“Paint! Paint big. Get it all out”—​read today as classic abstract expressionist dogma. Indeed, she always identified herself as an abstract expressionist, often correcting critics who labeled her a minimalist. Martin’s knowledge of abstract expressionism in 1947 was secondhand: from art magazines and discussions with her colleagues at the University of New Mexico. Although she was born in the same year as Jackson Pollock, Martin thus remained physically removed from the epicenter of the abstract expressionist movement in New York during this period.3 When asked later in life if she ever went to the Cedar Tavern, Martin curtly replied—​incorrectly, in point of fact—​t hat she did not go to bars.4 Within this context, at once male-dominated and urban, Martin’s perch on a mesa outside of Albuquerque appears eccentric at best and, at worst, entirely irrelevant to the dominant discourses of postwar American art. (Fig. 7.) But New Mexico occupies a unique position within the trajectory of postwar art, one that blurs the boundaries of center-and-periphery that have dominated most accounts of the period. This cultural transmission was aided by advancements in transportation, technology, tourism, infrastructure, and publishing, all of which allowed information to be communicated to rural locations at far greater speed than ever before. Martin thus laid the groundwork for many of her most important formal innovations, including her turn toward abstraction, in New Mexico. Analysis of her early paintings of the period, the artistic environments of Albuquerque and Taos, and her time at Teachers College reveals how

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Figure 7 Agnes Martin, ca. 1947, black-and-white photograph, no dimensions specified.

Martin moved from the windswept mesas of New Mexico to the avant-garde galleries of New York City. By all accounts, Martin’s path to New Mexico was circuitous. Born in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912, Martin spent her youth in Vancouver and moved to Bellingham, Washington, in 1931 to help her pregnant sister. Martin graduated from Whatcom High School in Bellingham and enrolled at Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (later Western Washington College of Education and now Western Washington University) in 1934 to train as a teacher. “I couldn’t come to the United States unless I had a profession,” Martin told Joan Simon, “and I thought the easiest profession I could acquire would be to be a teacher. . . . Later I did teach art in college. But I trained to be an elementary school teacher at Bellingham.” 5 Through both on-site classes and correspondence courses, Martin earned an advanced teaching certificate, properly called a Special Normal Diploma, on June 10, 1937, which was renewed on June 12, 1942.6 Martin was recognized on campus for her athletic rather than artistic abilities and was named an all-star player on the basketball and volleyball teams; she also excelled at

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baseball, tennis, recreational sports, and swimming.7 Martin held a number of leadership positions within the Women’s Athletic Association, where she was in charge of decorations for a tea. She was nominated multiple times for a position on the school’s control board, though she never won. In addition to Martin’s wide-ranging extracurricular activities and her stated desire to become a teacher, her aptitude for visual art was recognized in her coursework.8 After graduating during the Depression, Martin had difficulty finding a permanent position as a teacher.9 She moved frequently in search of work, teaching at three different schools in Washington State between 1937 and 1941.10 Often, in a pattern she would repeat well into the 1950s, she worked nonteaching jobs to support herself.11 Martin thought that earning a B.S. degree might improve her chances of acquiring a permanent teaching position. “When I found that I could work my way through college,” Martin said, “I asked everybody what was the best college; I thought I’d go for that. They said Columbia University. So I went to New York.” 12 In fact, Martin “drove a Model T (or A) Ford to New York City, taking a month to camp along the way,” in what Tiffany Bell suggests may be the first of Martin’s many cross-country road trips.13 Martin’s decision to attend Teachers College, Columbia University, was characteristically pragmatic. It was also based upon her understanding of the reputation of Teachers College as well as the academic culture of the institution.14 Specifically, Martin was drawn by the progressive ideas of John Dewey, whose teachings were still dominant in the first half of the twentieth century. Dewey taught at Columbia and at Teachers College between 1904 and 1930, though he continued to publish through 1949. He championed the idea of progressive education, which is often referred to as “learning by doing.” 15 In his early text The School and Society, Dewey outlines the crux of his idea: “Here is the organic relation of theory and practice. . . . [One learns] not simply [by] doing things, but [by] getting also the idea of what he does, getting from the start some intellectual conception that enters his practice and enriches it; while every idea finds, directly or indirectly, some application in experience and has some effect upon life.” 16 Dewey’s hands-on philosophy of teaching and learning was still in circulation at Teachers College in the early 1940s. The symbiotic relationship that Dewey describes between experience and intellect was formative for many at Teachers College, including Victor D’Amico, who would go on to found the influential Department of Education at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.17 D’Amico taught at Teachers College in 1941–​1942, the year when Martin was in residence as a student. Although there is scant evidence that Martin’s aesthetic refinement was developed during the 1940s, Dewey’s concept of learning by doing, filtered through professors such as D’Amico, framed Martin’s unexpectedly experimental methods of working in the early part of her career. During Martin’s year at Teachers College, Dewey’s academic model, however pervasive, was fundamentally disrupted by world events. The Second World War had begun in September 1939, and the United States formally entered the war in December 1941.

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As a woman, Martin was not subject to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 and so was not conscripted to participate in the war as were many of the male artists who would come to artistic prominence in the next decade. However, the material facts of the war significantly altered Martin’s experience at Teachers College. “Suffice it to say,” Lawrence A. Cremin, David A. Shannon, and Mary Evelyn Townsend wrote in their 1954 history of Teachers College, “the faculty and administration made every conceivable effort to determine means by which the College might turn its resources to the defense of the nation and the winning of the war.” 18 Martin’s year at Teachers College was thus atypical in nearly every aspect—​w ith fewer enrolled students, a higher percentage of female students, and both a curricular and an extracurricular focus on the war effort. Cremin noted that enrollment began to drop in 1939 and hit the lowest numbers during the 1942–​1943 academic year.19 A faculty committee was created to oversee the “immediate business of civil defense and campus protection,” and members of the faculty contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways, from the creation of philosophical statements on the value of art education in a “time of total war” to direct service in Washington, D.C.20 On campus, courses were revised to reflect the changing political situation.21 New courses included Education and the Problems of War, the Present Emergency and Art Education, and Peace and Education in War and Postwar Times, as well as “over a score of relevant offerings, varying from a social studies course in The War, to a curriculum course in Precautionary Measures and First Aid for Young Children, to a fine arts course on Posters in the War Effort.” 22 The acquisition and application of practical knowledge—​a legacy of Dewey—​ was paramount. For example, “special short term courses were offered in poster and publicity work, in blueprint reading, machine drawing, sheet metal drafting, and wood pattern making.” 23 While it is difficult to reconstruct Martin’s participation in the war effort while at Teachers College given the available documentation, it remains clear that the war effort defined life at the college during that academic year, especially after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Basic training in the fine arts, as with other disciplines, continued at Teachers College throughout the war. In addition to courses in “teaching skills,” Martin took studio courses that included “Marionette Production and Stage Design, Letter and Advertising Art, as well as classes in Drawing and Painting, Figure Drawing, and Clay Modeling.” 24 The Department of Art Education placed emphasis on “self-expression” and on “exploration” in “new materials and media.” 25 Prefiguring the development of assemblage in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Elise Ruffini offered a course designed “to meet the new demand for leisure activities including crafts, modeling, metal, costume, graphic arts and manipulative activities with unusual, inexpensive and untried media, stressing inventiveness and imagination in design elements.” 26 (Martin took Ruffini’s “Color and Design” course in 1941.)27 Arthur Young taught the first studio course in printmaking in 1934, stressing a “deep personal engagement with the medium as an expression of the contemporary situation.” 28 Students worked in etching and lithography, and silk-

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screen was added to the studio curriculum in 1941–​1942.29 Only twenty-four students were enrolled in art history courses in 1942, because “most of the students were caught up in the war effort.” 30 Many courses took advantage of the cultural resources of New York City. In the Arts in Education and Life, for example, “faculty members” and “noted artists in many media . . . used demonstrations, lectures, panels and student groups to promote the integration for the arts and the social curriculum.” 31 Faculty members also urged students to take advantage of the cultural resources of the city. As early as 1926, “Teachers College students had gone out from the College, into the museums, and out to the shops in town. . . . Dean Russell noted complaints that the old-time academic tendencies were limiting instruction to badly overcrowded laboratory classes.” 32 Although many of these out-of-the-classroom opportunities dimmed during the war years, Dewey’s progressive theory of education was, in many ways, ideally suited to art students in a culturally vibrant city like New York. It proved especially valuable to Martin, who likely saw exhibitions of work by Arshile Gorky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Joan Miró.33 “I went to New York [in 1941], and I saw all the paintings in the museums. I thought if I could make a living painting, that’s what I would like to do.” 34 If Martin’s training at Teachers College was primarily practical in intention—​reflecting her desire to gain an advanced degree to secure a job—​t he lasting effect of her time in New York proved to be her identification as a painter. Martin would wait sixteen years before her debut exhibition of paintings in New York, “emerging” as a painter when she was forty-six years old. Crucially, it was Dewey’s progressive philosophies and the long-standing belief at Teachers College that students should go “out from the College, into the museums” that provided Martin with firsthand information about advanced painting that would have been impossible to acquire in a small town like Bellingham. In repeating the same foundational story to Benita Eisler, Martin added an important postscript: “That’s when I started painting.” 35 Martin’s desire to become a painter was not realized immediately, given the economic imperative to support herself. She taught in public schools after graduation “to earn enough money to come back” to Teachers College, though little documentation of this period survives.36 (“Columbia is pretty high-priced,” Martin observed.)37 Martin supplemented her income with a variety of jobs, from working as a tennis coach to washing dishes and waitressing.38 While Martin would return to Teachers College a decade later to earn her master’s degree, she spent the mid-1940s teaching in Washington, Delaware, and New Mexico. It was New Mexico that captured Martin’s attention, and she soon moved to the windswept desert outside of Albuquerque, wielding housepainters’ brushes and urging students like Stanley Landsman to “Paint! Paint big!” 39 There is no surviving record of Martin’s journey to New Mexico in 1947, nor any correspondence that details her decision to settle in Albuquerque. New Mexico’s reputation as a haven for artists or the state’s dry climate, famed light, and dramatic scenery may have played a role in Martin’s decision, as well as the relatively low cost of living.

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Taos, New Mexico, became known as an artists’ colony at the turn of the twentieth century, and Santa Fe and Albuquerque achieved prominence as artistic centers in the 1930s and 1940s. The circumstances that led to the initial development of these artistic centers, especially the growth of the railway, established precedents that would continue to draw artists to New Mexico through the middle of the twentieth century. Classically trained artists traveled to New Mexico from popular artistic centers, such as Paris, New York, and San Francisco, having first learned about New Mexico largely through word of mouth from artists who had visited the state. These artists came to New Mexico for short trips, often in the summer, during which they gathered material that would be used in larger works. The artists used New Mexico as a location to gather information (via sketches, painting, photographs, etc.) but rarely sold their work in New Mexico, preferring the more lucrative markets from which they came. They understood, as early as the 1890s, that the western subjects they depicted were part of a vanishing culture. Through their commissions from popular magazines (and later railroad companies), as well as their idealized depictions of Indian life in their own art, these artists were complicit in selling a particular image of the American West to tourists and art collectors alike. Many of the early landscapes, genre scenes, and portraits artists created in New Mexico thus traded on nostalgia and sentimentality. “Of all the painters who ‘commute’ from the Atlantic and Pacific toward the valley of the Rio Grande,” Marsden Hartley observed in 1918, “not one of them goes further than badly digested impressionism.” 4 0 Hartley’s analysis was not charitable—​especially since he was a commuter from New York—​but it was not far from the mark in many instances, as Bert Phillips’s Song of the Aspen demonstrates. (Fig. 8.) Phillips was one of the founders of the Taos art colony and described his creative process as follows: “As I visit their villages and talk with my Indian friends, I see and hear the young bucks wrapped in their white blankets standing on the bridge singing a love song in the moonlight, and I feel the romance of youth. . . . I believe it is the romance of this great pure-aired land that makes the most lasting impression on my mind and heart.” 41 Phillips’s description of his subject trades heavily on the trope of romance, and his idealization of “the young bucks” reads, to modern eyes, as a radical, if not racist, simplification of a complex culture. As Van Deren Coke wrote in 1960, this approach gave Phillips’s paintings “an aura of idealized ethnology.” 42 The economic conditions that enabled Phillips’s painting did not last forever. With the crash of the stock market in August 1929 and the advent of the Great Depression, many artists, now employed by the Works Progress Administration in New York, no longer came in great numbers to New Mexico for summer sojourns.43 The few artists who remained in Taos were devastatingly poor; as David Witt has remarked, “finding a way to make a living in Taos during the Great Depression proved exceptionally difficult.” 4 4 When artists returned to New Mexico—​fleeing persecution in Europe or, later, as veterans on the G.I. Bill—​paintings of young bucks singing love songs in the moonlight no longer appeared to be valid options, given the dramatically altered world.

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Figure 8 Bert Greer Phillips, Song of the Aspen, 1926–​ 1928, oil on canvas, 40 × 27 in., Harrison Eiteljorg Collection, Eiteljorg Museum.

The Second World War and its aftermath brought significant changes to New Mexico that were keenly felt by the artists living in the state. Taos artist Beatrice Mandelman referred to herself as “the first of the second generation of artists in Taos,” using the Second World War as the dividing line.45 New Mexico in the early 1950s, as Dore Ashton notes, “was not the desert of sagebrush and Indian arrowheads and kivas and coloured bluffs in bizarre shapes” depicted in picture postcards and Phillips’s paintings but a newly industrialized (and militarized) state.46 Despite the strong contrast that Ashton draws, New Mexico was, and remains, both things at once. Writing in the New Mexico Quarterly in 1951, Frank Waters depicted a kind of reverse romanticism: World War II abruptly ended the period. With the great influx of new residents, the beauty of the valley, the slow tempo of the Spanish-American villages, and the rhythmic appeal of Pueblo life have given way to the ruthless demands of economic development and commercial exploitation. Art is no longer paramount. The supermarket, the filling station, the travel folder and highway billboard advertise Taos as no different than any other spot in America.47

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Waters acutely describes the commercialization of New Mexico, in terms that both evoke the crucial tourist industry (the ever-present travel folder) and look toward the future of car travel in the 1950s with the ubiquitous filling stations and billboards of Route 66, a future that Ed Ruscha’s photograph of a Conoco station in Albuquerque, featured in Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), aptly demonstrates. Waters also notes that Taos is “no different than any other spot in America,” a statement that, while not entirely true, suggests that the increased accessibility of Taos led to a sense of cultural homogenization. Ashton, who arrived in Albuquerque from New York in 1950, understood this cultural shift differently, noting with delight the sophistication of the painters she met. Ashton described “young artists far from provincial; who were cognizant of the currents in the metropolis from which I hailed; and who were eager to demonstrate that sophisticated art, generated by an unusual environment, was possible.” 4 8 This heady combination—​of freedom, ambition, and knowledge, removed from the pressures of New York—​produced art serious enough for Ashton to feel it merited mention in the bimonthly publication Art Digest, which she edited. In the resulting article, Joan Evans, a literature student at the University of New Mexico, declared that Albuquerque—​“home of atom bombs, jet fighter pilots, and Fred Harvey Indians—​is the scene of an exciting spiritual renaissance in New Mexican art. A forceful group of young artists is asserting itself where once only aspen and Indian painters reigned. Not unlike their pilot-scientist neighbors, these new artists are vigorous and experimental.” 49 In 1952, when Evans’s article appeared, Albuquerque’s desert landscape had been co-opted by an unusual mix of modern technology and manufactured cultural nostalgia: the nuclear research and testing at Los Alamos National Laboratory; the fighter pilots at Kirtland Army Air Field, which opened in 1941; and the Native Americans that the Fred Harvey Company hired to lend “authenticity” to its railroad hotels, restaurants, and curio shops.50 Turning their backs on the commodification of the Native American culture that the Fred Harvey Company promoted—​and which, to a certain extent, had made the reputations of an earlier generation of Taos painters—​A lbuquerque’s young artists avidly read the latest art magazines and sought to create work that would hold its own on either coast. “The proliferation of art magazines, visiting artists and increased mobility meant that a [Willem] de Kooning or Pollock exhibition would be hotly debated,” MaLin Wilson explains.51 Elaine de Kooning, a visiting artist at the University of New Mexico, remarked that, with few exceptions, “all the serious artists of New Mexico live and work in Albuquerque.” 52 One of these artists was Agnes Martin, and her shift from creating representational landscapes and portraits to abstractions parallels this larger cultural transformation. Martin enrolled in the University of New Mexico’s master’s program in 1947 at the age of thirty-five, having completed her Bachelor of Science degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, five years earlier. As she explains, she came to the University of New Mexico “because I heard it had a good art department, and so it was in the ’40s.” 53 Martin may have heard this from students and faculty who had come to New

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York after spending time at the University of New Mexico, or she may have traveled west on the promise of hearsay recommendations. The structure of a university art department appealed to Martin, as she could begin painting almost immediately: “I went to the universities because they had the set-up, you know. There’s a studio to work in and usually the universities they let you work in the studios anytime.” 54 As Martin understood, universities offer—​for a substantial cost—​a readily available structure for painting: courses that demand a certain level of production, studios in which to paint and materials with which to do so, dedicated art history libraries, an engaged group of peers, a source of criticism through the faculty; and the opportunity to exhibit finished works of art in the department’s annual exhibitions.55 Like Rita Deanin Abbey and the other female students at the time, Martin did not receive the benefits of the G.I. Bill. In practical terms, this meant that Martin was not entitled to a tuition waiver, did not receive a monthly stipend, and was not given money for art supplies. For a single woman supporting herself in the late 1940s, without the aid of the G.I. Bill or a spouse with a supplementary income, the relatively low tuition at the University of New Mexico and the ready-made environment for painting may have been appealing. “I would work at a job and save my money and go to a university when I took a year off to paint,” Martin recalled. “It was the quickest way to get to be painting.” 56 As a result of the G.I. Bill, the overall enrollment in the art department doubled between 1940 and 1946 and the number of majors increased from 49 in 1938 to 328 in 1948.57 The summer sessions at the university, which were held in Albuquerque and Taos, saw nearly a 40 percent increase, from 1,353 students in 1946 to 1,957 in 1948.58 Along with the increase in students came a shift in the demographics of the student body, as many of the returning soldiers were older, well traveled, and had significant life experience. As Landsman remembers, The war was just over and there was a tremendous number of G.I.’s coming back[,] . . . and they had a lot of piss and vinegar to get out of their systems. And it just seemed that the school was composed of a lot of people that might not normally have ever come there. Everybody seemed to have arrived there because of some strange phenomenon. Their car broke down. They went to see their father. The G.I. Bill. Just some strange reason. . . . Adja Yunkers was there. Randall Davies was there. As I said, Agnes Martin was there. Diebenkorn was there.59

Richard Diebenkorn enrolled in the department’s master’s program in 1949 at the age of twenty-seven, after serving in the Marine Corps from 1943 to 1945. He had been a student and then a faculty member of the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and his first one-man show was held at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1948. Diebenkorn’s subsequent decision to come to Albuquerque was predicated upon a desire to take advantage of the benefits of the G.I. Bill and to experience a new environment for his painting. In his depth of experience, relatively advanced age,

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and artistic maturity, Diebenkorn represented a radical redefinition of the traditional graduate student—​but he was hardly unique. These “were all people,” Wilson writes of the students in Albuquerque in the late 1940s and early 1950s, “who arrived in New Mexico with considerable, sophisticated art training under their belts.” 60 Many soldiers had also taken advantage of their time during the war to explore art and collections that were previously unknown to them. Diebenkorn, for example, speaks of the time he spent at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., while he was stationed in Virginia. Frederick O’Hara, who taught at the University in 1949, recalled that the students of this period “generally accepted my academic offerings with respectful reservations, but they greeted enthusiastically the findings of their perhaps more gifted and astute contemporaries.” 61 One of these gifted contemporaries was Martin, who, at thirty-five, fit the mold of an older artist with significant life experience. Some scholars have suggested that Martin submitted a small, eighteen-by-fourteen-inch encaustic painting of flowers to the university as part of her application for admission, or that the work was completed during an entrance examination.62 (Fig. 9.) The vibrant colors, including the blue of the vase, the green tablecloth, and the red and purple flowers, demonstrate Martin’s early eye for color, although the awkward rendering of the table betrays her status as a student still acquiring necessary skills. At the university, Martin took Lez Haas’s materials and media course (where she may have absorbed lessons on abstraction from Haas, picked up during his time as a student of Josef Albers), and John Tatschl’s course on sculpture, the only formal training in sculpture that Martin would receive.63 Martin exhibited works from both classes in the 1947 Annual Exhibition of Student Work. It is difficult to determine with any certainty which, if any, works from this exhibition survive. Leaving the classroom behind for the high desert, Martin participated in the Taos Art School during the summer of 1947.64 Run through the university, the program offered artists the opportunity to paint out of doors and receive critiques from established artists in Taos. Martin received a scholarship to attend the university’s Summer Field School of Art and functioned as a dormitory proctor—​“I was the disciplinarian,” Martin explained—​in exchange for her tuition.65 The classes of the Taos Art School were conducted early in the morning, as Earl Stroh, a student in the 1947 Taos Art School, remembers: “Lez Haas had a class that met at five in the morning. It started with fifteen students and in no time was down to nine. Agnes was one of them. We’d go out, and paint the sunrise or whatever we were doing, come back, have breakfast at seven, then go back again.” 66 Not everyone relished such early hours, and many artists enrolled in other art schools in town. Emil Bisttram ran his own art school, and Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman, artists who arrived in Taos from New York in 1944, eschewed the competition between Bisttram and the Taos Art School by setting up their own program, running the Taos Valley Art School from 1944 to 1953.67 By any measure, three summer art schools operating simultaneously would seem to have saturated the market for artists in Taos, but the G.I. Bill provided a steady stream of new recruits and

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Figure 9 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1948, encaustic on canvas, 18 × 14 in., collection of Scott K. Stuart.

Figure 10 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1946, watercolor on paper, 14 ¾ × 20 ⅝ in., private collection, California.

fostered a small but vibrant community of artists in Taos. Martin joined a group of younger artists, such as Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak, many of whom had ties to New York and were interested in contemporary art.68 This artistic environment, which lasted longer than the resurgence of the arts at the University of New Mexico, may have prompted Martin’s desire to return to Taos in the 1950s. Two of Martin’s watercolors of Taos and one depicting the hills outside of Santa Fe remain from this period. (Figs. 10–​12.) All three works are relatively small—​10⅞ by 14 inches to 14 ¾ by 20 ⅝ inches—​and the piece depicting a landscape near Santa Fe bears four oblong holes along the proper right edge that suggest it once belonged to a sketchbook bound with four rings. (If there are other sheets from this sketchbook, they have not been located to date.) Watercolor is a difficult but portable medium, ideally suited to the type of outdoor painting that Martin enjoyed. It also dried remarkably quickly in the desert, which may have proved an added advantage. This work, which appears to have been painted wet-on-wet given the blurring of the brown and blue paint in the sky, is

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Figure 11 Agnes Martin, Untitled (Landscape South of Santa Fe, NM), 1947, watercolor and ink on paper, 10 ⅞ × 14 in., private collection.

the only one of the three in which the forms are reinforced by outlines made with pen and black ink. The use of strong outlines in watercolor landscapes was perhaps a nod to John Marin, who painted in New Mexico during the summers of 1929 and 1930 as a guest of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Marin drove across northern New Mexico painting the landscape, “laying out spots, places, points of observation, staking claims for future use,” as he wrote to the photographer Paul Strand, much as Martin would do two decades later.69 In fact, Near Taos, No. 6, New Mexico, 1930, shows that Marin and Martin laid claim to nearly the same view of the Taos Mountains. (Fig. 13.) The identifiable character of Marin’s subject matter was an asset to the painter, rather than a liability. Writing again to Strand in 1929, Marin noted that “all my pictures this year will have labels tagged to them, as, this is so and so mountain, I’d have you understand, and is, I’d have you understand, so and so feet high. Yes, all labeled with explanations like a map.” 70 While Martin may have been working from local recommendations about favored painting spots, rather than

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Figure 12 Agnes Martin, New Mexico Mountain Landscape, Taos, ca. 1947, watercolor on paper, 11 × 15 ¼ in., gift of Mercedes Gugisberg to the Raymond Jonson Collection, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, 86.208.

Marin’s watercolors, the unexpected congruence between her watercolors and Marin’s underscores just how squarely her work fit within a traditionally representational mode during the late 1940s. Martin showed two works at the culminating exhibition for the 1947 Taos Art School, displayed at the Harwood Foundation, and it is possible that two of these watercolors may have been exhibited. Ernest Blumenschein and Andrew Dasburg critiqued the watercolors, and the exhibition has often been cited as Martin’s first museum exhibition.71 It was a small but auspicious debut: the Taoseno and the Taos Review, a local newspaper, reported, “Among the more advanced students, Agnes Martin and Earl Stroh have turned out some excellent work.” 72 Martin agreed, stating later in life that she believed that she had “good results” with her art during her summer in Taos.73 Returning to Albuquerque, Martin finished her master’s degree. She took credits beyond those required for her master’s degree, and then, to her surprise, was elected to the faculty of the fine arts department at the University of New Mexico. “While I was at the University of New Mexico,” Martin recalled, “they had a faculty meeting, and

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Figure 13 John Marin, Near Taos, No. 6, New Mexico, 1930, watercolor and crayon on paper, 15 ¼ × 21 15⁄16 in., Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX.

when they came out they said, ‘Agnes, we’ve just elected you to the faculty.’ I thought I’d do it just for one year—​because the salary was so low.” 74 Martin’s unique status as an instructor at the university during the 1948 academic year and the 1948 summer session in Taos—​she was the only student who was promoted to faculty member during this period—​is related to the increase in the volume of students in the art department owing to the G.I. Bill. Martin’s relatively advanced age (she was ten years older than Diebenkorn, for example) and her significant teaching experience may have also factored into the decision. Martin taught life drawing and beginning drawing during the 1947–​1948 school year and taught design and drawing in the 1948 summer session. She showed a watercolor titled Landscape in the 1948 Seventh Annual Faculty Exhibition along with a monoprint titled Saturday Night. The exhibition checklists do not include reproductions of either the watercolor or the print. While it is possible that the watercolor is one of the pieces discussed earlier, Saturday Night marks the earliest mention of a print in Martin’s body of work. Local critics reviewed the exhibition, and Martin’s work received favorable mention in the University of New Mexico’s student newspaper, the New Mexico

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Lobo, as well as in the Albuquerque Tribune.75 Despite these positive notices, Raymond Jonson—​t he chairman of the department, who made it department policy to keep one work of every graduate student for the university collection, at his discretion—​did not ask for any of Martin’s work.76 Earl Stroh remembers that Martin was “then working in a figurative style variously influenced by German expressionism, very much by Rouault, and perhaps a touch by the other French post-impressionists.” 7 7 To date, three additional figurative works that likely date to this period are extant, although none of them conform exactly to Stroh’s description of Martin’s works at the time. Martin recalled that she taught “portrait painting at the University” in an interview later in life, but noted that she destroyed many of these figurative canvases: Simon: Were you painting portraits during the time of that first visit to Taos? Martin: No, I was teaching portrait painting at the university. Simon: But you weren’t really a portrait painter. Martin: No. Well, I did paint portraits and landscapes. But I didn’t, like, paint commissions. Simon: Whose portraits did you paint? Martin: We’d paint the Indians. And I painted flowers and landscapes. Simon: Are these the works that you later destroyed? Martin: Yeah, they’re destroyed.78

University records do not list any records of Martin teaching such a class, though it remains possible that portrait painting was a component of a more general course. Two of Martin’s extant figurative works come from Daphne Sheridan Vaughn, whom Martin met when they were both at the University of New Mexico. (Figs. 14, 15.) Leslie Hall, a friend of Vaughn’s, recounts that the two women lived together in a small adobe house in southwest Albuquerque, and that Martin gave Vaughn a cache of work in 1949, including a signed watercolor landscape and a signed nude, as well as three unsigned pieces: an encaustic portrait of Vaughn and two small abstract paintings.79 (Fig. 16.) The nude has recently been characterized as a self-portrait, though a more convincing argument suggests that Barbara Pullens, who, Hall notes, was “part Scottish and part Blackfoot,” sat for the portrait in her capacity as a professional model.80 Additionally, Martin noted that she “did a pretty good painting of an Indian girl,” which likely refers to this painting.81 The portrait does not display any noteworthy formal or stylistic elements. Like the portrait of Daphne Vaughn (twenty inches high and sixteen inches wide) and Martin’s self-portrait (twenty-six by nineteen inches), Martin’s nude (twenty by sixteen inches) is a fairly typical example of student work. In fact, Martin’s choice of media tells more about her future as a painter than does her choice of subject matter or her application of paint. The portraits are executed on

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Figure 14 Agnes Martin, Portrait of Daphne Vaughn, ca. 1947, encaustic on canvas, 20 × 16 in., Peters Family Art Foundation, Santa Fe, NM.

canvas in encaustic, a medium composed of dry pigment or tube oil paint mixed into hot wax, which is then applied to a canvas support. Encaustic acts as a marker of artistic process, since the wax dries so quickly that the path of individual brush hairs remains visible on the canvas. Martin’s use of encaustic—​which prefigures Jasper Johns’s muchheralded use of the medium—​suggests that she was comfortable working quickly and decisively, since encaustic cannot be scraped off or worked over as easily as oil paint. Although the thinned acrylic paint Martin used from the 1960s through her death in 2004 has none of the body or stiffness of encaustic, both media share an almost immediate drying time. “You can see that I’m a pretty speedy painter,” Martin told an interviewer in her Taos studio in 2003. “You have to be in this climate; it’s a very dry climate.” 82 The dry climate of New Mexico would have affected Martin’s manipulation of watercolor as well, especially during her time in Taos. Martin, as she recalled, thought that she would teach at the University of New Mexico “just for one year—​because the salary was so low. I built a house and went into debt.” 83 Despite her low salary—​or perhaps because of it—​Martin found a ready source of labor at the university. “She was a terrific teacher,” Stanley Landsman recalled. “I helped her build a house and a swimming pool out in the desert. She lived alone . . . about fourteen

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Figure 15 Agnes Martin, Self-Portrait, n.d., encaustic on canvas, 26 × 19 in., collection of Christa Martin. Figure 16 Agnes Martin, Nude, 1947, encaustic on canvas, 20 × 16 in., Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

miles from anything right out in the middle of the desert. She liked that kind of isolation and quiet.”  8 4 This is the house that Martin likely shared with Daphne Vaughn, and Martin later remembered the project with evident satisfaction. “Believe it or not,” she recalled, I built a house. I know nothing about building houses, and I didn’t even think I wanted to build one very much. But it just kept on going through my mind, about you know, I wanted a house, you know, and where it would be, and what it would be like, and it kept on until I found out that I was building the foundation. I finally built this house. I even built the windows and doors, and I know nothing, you know, you don’t have to. . . . I was teaching at the University in Albuquerque. [Laughs] And I have to admit that I said to the students, my students, I said every one of you needs experience laying adobe. And so they came up, fifteen and twenty and a time, and boy, we really made that house, in four weekends we put up a shell.85

The building of Martin’s first house in Albuquerque is not as well known in the popular press or the critical literature as her building projects in Cuba, New Mexico, in the early 1970s or in Galisteo, New Mexico, in the 1980s.86 Landsman’s memories suggest that Martin’s independence, self-sufficiency, and desire for uninterrupted isolation were established by the late 1940s, as was her pattern of building spaces in which to live and paint. While Martin was struggling with questions of form and composition in her studio at the university, she was also creating the mental and physical conditions that would characterize the remainder of her career. Martin left the University of New Mexico in August of 1948 and began teaching at the John Marshall School in Albuquerque, noting that the Albuquerque school district paid better than the university.87 Martin taught for three years, saving money to attend a graduate program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Unlike Diebenkorn’s, Martin’s time in New Mexico did not yield a solid corpus of work, nor did she achieve any formal or stylistic breakthroughs. Rather, her time in Albuquerque and Taos functioned as a period of apprenticeship in which conditions that would define her creative process were established. To achieve her formal breakthrough, however, Martin needed to leave the Southwest for the classrooms, galleries, and museums of Manhattan. When Martin returned to Teachers College to earn her master’s degree in modern art in 1951–​1952, she spent little time wiping the sand off her shoes. Friends remember Martin as “a well-versed New Yorker” who knew Manhattan’s galleries and museums well, and she relished the opportunity to return to the familiar studios.88 And indeed, Martin’s year at Columbia’s Teachers College was a generative period that marked her first explorations into abstraction. While the Second World War overshadowed Martin’s first period of study at Teachers College, she returned to a very different cultural moment in New York in the fall of 1952. On campus, the postwar boom in student enrollment due to the G.I. Bill had ended, and the material consequences of this decline

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were significant—​classes were less crowded, professors became more accessible, lines for registration no longer snaked around the block, and student housing was less difficult to come by.89 (A negative development was the rise in tuition; while Martin had paid less than fifteen dollars per point in 1941–​1942, tuition was raised to twenty dollars in September 1948.)90 More broadly, abstract expressionism was in full swing and the focus of the international art world was on New York rather than Paris. Jackson Pollock developed his revolutionary drip paintings in 1947; Mark Rothko was painting his famously saturated compositions of floating rectangles by 1950; and Barnett Newman held his first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in the same year. While much of the ethos of abstract expressionism—​the male-dominated culture; the alcohol-fueled nights at the Cedar Tavern; and the emphasis on macho posturing—​was not accessible to an unknown female artist in 1951 in any sort of a professional capacity, the formal and material developments of these artists were on display throughout New York.91 In the studios at Teachers College, the influence of abstract expressionism was paramount. By the early 1950s, an emphasis on exploratory uses of media and individual expression was a part of studio practice at Teachers College.92 Foster Wygant, who wrote a dissertation on the history of Teachers College in 1954, cited Pollock and recorded that no longer are there specialized approaches to traditional subjects treated in painting. Where students once grappled with the establishment of the middle distance or the achievement of skin tone, they are now encouraged to explore the possibilities of the media. New and revived media are investigated; no single technique is imposed. No special nobility attaches to tool, medium, or treatment; the watercolor class may scrape, soak, rub, spray or bleach. But exploration is not for the enlargement of skill alone. More properly, through freedom from material restrictions, one explores art, and one’s self. . . . Nor does any master procedure guide the group along a single path toward a common aesthetic goal. Since the war, the student has more and more been urged to expand his visual concepts in order to seek his own expression and image.93

The influence of Pollock’s technique of dripping enamel house paint on a canvas placed directly on the floor is apparent in Wygant’s discussion of “freedom from material restrictions,” as is the focus on individual expression that is characteristic of abstract expressionism. (Wygant succinctly summarizes this tendency, writing that the meaning of works of art comes “from the direct impact of feeling more than intellect.”)94 Martin’s paintings from this period do not survive, and her works on paper demonstrate her interest in the thin washes of Rothko’s multiforms and the legacy of surrealism as it filtered through abstract expressionism—​particularly in Miró, and in the work of William Baziotes, Louise Bourgeois, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso—​rather than in Pollock’s controlled drips. This was not atypical, as Wygant observed: “Because so

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much of what is new in art may be seen in New York City, the production of the students throughout the Department appears to be more truly contemporaneous than has usually been the case. The result is a great variety of styles in painting, an increased interest in experimental graphics, and an expanded program in crafts.” 95 Martin’s shift toward a more abstract idiom was fostered in the classroom, but the specific strategies that she took from other artists came, in large part, from the time she spent looking at art in the galleries and museums of New York—​much as she had in 1941–​1942. Influenced by the rich offerings of historical, modern, and contemporary art available in New York galleries and museums, Martin experimented with abstract form, color, and composition during the 1951–​1952 academic year. (Her facility with line began, as well, but did not assume prominence until 1954.) Martin’s desire to experience original works of art developed during her first year at Teachers College, but it also echoes the thoughts of Barnett Newman, who would later become a friend and mentor. It was not through photographs, reproductions or from slides [that I knew or studied about “art history”]. . . . I have always had a distaste—​even a disdain—​for reproductions and photographs of art works, even those of my own works. I can only feel fortunate, that my art education came not from the scrutiny of photographs and the spectaculars of slides or even from teachers but from myself in front of the real thing.96

Martin did not record her experiences “in front of the real thing” in any systematic way that has survived, unlike, for example, Andy Warhol, who recorded his path through Manhattan in detailed daily diaries. Martin’s works on paper from the period, however, show the artist’s wide-ranging experimentation and provide a guidebook, of sorts, for the artists and exhibitions that she may have seen while in New York. The thin blocks of watercolor Martin used on the verso of the Museum of Modern Art’s Untitled, 1952, drawing, for example, recall the multiform paintings that Mark Rothko painted between 1946 and 1949, such as Untitled, 1948, and No. 9, 1948.97 (Fig. 17.) Rothko moved from thick, heavy applications of paint to thin, dilute layers in his 1949 paintings, which provide the most direct parallel to the applications of paint and defined geometric shapes that can be seen in Martin’s drawing. Rothko first placed his multiform paintings at Betty Parsons’s gallery in 1948, when he exhibited the paintings of colored bands that would herald his classic paintings of the 1950s. The application of what Allison Langley describes as Rothko’s “modern tempera paint” on canvas is markedly different from Martin’s use of watercolor on paper, but the ideas of pastel hues, thinned washes of paint, and geometric areas of color can be seen both in the Museum of Modern Art’s drawing and in Martin’s acrylic paintings after 1973, suggesting that the model had a sustained impact on Martin’s practice.98 While Martin likely saw Rothko’s multiforms or the 1951 paintings in New York, the advent of the multiform paintings was also bound up in Rothko’s trips to California. Rothko taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1947 and

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Figure 17 Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1952, watercolor and ink on paper, 11 ¾ in × 17 ¾ in., gift of Paul F. Walter, Museum of Modern Art, 549.1990.

again in 1949. In California, Rothko found a “thriving, experimental environment” where Elmer Bischoff; Edward Corbett; Richard Diebenkorn, who was a graduate student at the time; David Park; Clyfford Still; and Minor White supported his interest in abstraction.99 It was here, many art historians claim, that Rothko lost the last vestiges of surrealism and moved toward abstraction.100 “Rothko came to San Francisco a surrealist,” student Claire Falkenstein recalled, “and left an abstractionist. I remember that quite clearly.” 101 Many of the artists Rothko met in California—​among them Bischoff, Corbett, and Diebenkorn—​found their way to New Mexico in the late 1940s, further establishing links between Taos and the East and West Coast art scenes. This would have enabled Martin to discuss Rothko’s paintings with informed artists in Taos, as well as with those she met in New York. While Martin’s interest in Rothko would continue through the end of the 1950s, many of the other artists she looked to in 1951–​1952 provided Martin with information that she would test against her developing personal vision and, often, subsequently discard. Martin’s debt to Picasso, for example, can be seen in the abstracted form of a howling animal in a small, untitled black-and-white print, circa 1952. (Fig. 18.) Martin’s academic year at Columbia’s Teachers College coincided with the exhibition Picasso:

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Figure 18 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1952, lithograph, 19 × 12 ½ in., private collection, Brooklyn, NY.

Figure 19 Mildred Tolbert, photographic negative of a work by Agnes Martin, now lost; date, size, and media are unknown; Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

His Graphic Work at the Museum of Modern Art. The strong black-and-white lines of Picasso’s prints may have influenced Martin’s use of line in her figural works, such as in this lost work (fig. 19), visible in a negative. The Picasso exhibition may have also prompted Martin to look further into Picasso’s surrealist period from the 1920s. However, Martin’s use of line appears to have a greater affinity with that of Alberto Giacometti, whose work was known in the United States by the early 1950s. (In 1952 and 1953, Giacometti’s work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago—​an apt index of the popularity of his work at the time.)102 Martin’s tall, spindly forms in paintings of the period suggest that she knew Giacometti’s work. Additionally, Martin’s black-and-white lithograph Personages recalls Giacometti’s work, though the remarkably smooth surfaces of the forms also suggest a younger artist influenced by Giacometti: Louise Bourgeois.103 (Figs. 20–​22.) Bourgeois first showed her totems at the Peridot Gallery in 1949, followed by another exhibition in 1950. One of her totems was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1951 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and

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Figure 20 Agnes Martin, Personages, 1952, lithograph, 10 × 14 in., collection of Louise Sause.

Figure 21 Herbert Matter, installation photograph of Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings from 1956 to 1958, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, May 6–​31, 1958, black-and-white photograph. Figure 22 Aaron Siskind, installation photograph of Louise Bourgeois: Sculptures at the Peridot Gallery, New York, October 2–​28, 1950, black-and-white photograph.

Drawings, providing a rare example of a critically noted (if not yet commercially successful) female artist working primarily in abstract forms in New York.104 The 1951 Whitney Annual provides a useful index of the state of abstraction in New York, since Bourgeois’s surrealist-inspired work was placed alongside that of abstract expressionists like Newman, Pollock, and Rothko as well as the work of Stuart Davis. Martin, as mentioned previously, was friendly with Newman and greatly admired the work of both Pollock and Rothko. Davis’s bright, hard-edged, graphic painting Owh! Sao Pao, shown at the 1951 annual, would seem to have very little in common with any of Martin’s work, but a curious black-and-white print attributed to Martin and dated circa 1952, depicting an upright stand mixer, an electrical outlet, and numerous electric lightbulbs and extension cords—​a still life composed of disparate household objects—​ raises the possibility that Martin may have seen Stuart Davis’s famous Egg Beater series at either the Whitney or the Museum of Modern Art.105 (Figs. 23, 24.) Davis’s later paintings, which utilized simple forms and planes in bright, opaque colors, were widely shown in New York and nationally during the early 1950s and may have suggested the color blocking seen in Martin’s orange-and-pink silkscreen, also from 1952.106 This curious silkscreen, signed and dated “’52” in Martin’s hand and suffering from irregular discoloration to the paper support, makes great use of the large, flat, even fields

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Figure 23 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1952, lithograph, 12 ¼ × 18 ½ in., private collection, Brooklyn, NY.

Figure 24 Stuart Davis, Egg Beater, V, 1930, oil on canvas, 50 ⅛ × 32 ¼ in., Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund, Museum of Modern Art, 122.1945.

of opaque color that screen printing can produce. (Fig. 25.) The layering of forms is also characteristic of the medium, and Martin’s ability to lay opaque white forms over darker black fields demonstrates her ability to understand the relative values and opacities of each hue. The birdlike, curvilinear white form at the top center of the work suggests familiarity with the work of William Baziotes, whose work garnered much attention in the New York press during 1951–​1952.107 A series of prints that Martin completed in 1952 (Figs. 26a–​c) bears a striking resemblance to Baziotes’s 1952 painting The Flesh Eaters. Baziotes had begun experimenting with biomorphic forms a decade earlier and, as Lawrence Alloway notes, used the forms as a way “to invent freely while avoiding nonobjectivity. [Biomorphs’] allusive though non-descriptive forms have a strong potential

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Figure 25 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1952, silkscreen, 13 × 20 in., private collection, Brooklyn, NY.

for erotic, pathetic, or aggressive meanings. Miró is central to all this, for he combined, more than any other artist connected with the Surrealists, a sense of clear, flat, coloristic painting as well as life-generating line.” 108 Miró’s “central” influence can be seen not only in Baziotes’s work, as Alloway demonstrates, but also in Martin’s “clear, flat, coloristic” approach and in the motif of the star, seen at the left of her orange-and-pink silkscreen. Martin may well have seen the Miró exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art during her first period of study at Teachers College in 1941–​1942; a decade later, in 1951–​1952, that firsthand knowledge would have been strengthened by her viewing of Miró works in New York City public collections and refracted through the filters of various artists working and exhibiting in New York.109 Miró was central to Rothko’s early development, and Alloway, among many other art historians, has noted Miró’s importance to Gorky, Motherwell, and Pollock.110 Miró’s influence was not limited to abstract expressionists, however—​Davis’s Still Life with Saw, 1930, now at the Phillips Collection, also demonstrates a thorough knowledge of Miró’s formal vocabulary. As a result, the disparate array of abstract works shown at the 1951 Whitney Annual—​from Bourgeois’s totem to Davis’s Owh! Sao Pao to Pollock’s watercolor Number 1, 1951—​provides an indication of the diversity of models available

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to a young, ambitious artist in New York City. Simultaneously, the exhibition maps a shared heritage of surrealist influence, regardless of how differently each artist chose to come to terms with that legacy.111 Martin’s graphic output while at Teachers College demonstrates, as this brief survey shows, the remarkable breadth of her creative experimentation during the 1951–​1952 academic year.112 She utilized the aesthetic strategies of a wide variety of historical and contemporary artists to test the validity of these approaches within the context of refining her evolving personal vision. Martin’s voracious approach to her art education—​ what Newman called “myself in front of the real thing”—​is reflected in the stylistic breadth of her images, though there remains a distinct lack of any characteristics that would identify these works on paper as being Martin’s work, rather than that of any other young, visually literate artist in Manhattan. The rigorous, unforgiving exactitude and repetition of Martin’s later work, so readily identifiable as her own, is nowhere in evidence. In these student works, Martin’s relentless search for the truth is the opposite of the strict systems often ascribed to her grids and banded paintings from the 1960s to her death: it is open, experimental, playful, and full of appropriation. (However strongly Martin denied the effects of the influence of other painters on her work later in life—​preferring to characterize her inspirations as coming directly into her head, fully executed—​her corpus of early work demonstrates her keen attention to the work of others.) This model, set early in Martin’s career and repeated at various intervals in her aesthetic development, suggests that as we move through her oeuvre, we should remember Martin’s early expansiveness and look for her continued experimentation, both formal and material, however subtle it may become. Martin’s education at Teachers College during the 1951–​1952 year was not confined to art alone, and one of the most important developments at Columbia was the appointment of the scholar D. T. Suzuki as a visiting lecturer in January 1952. Considered by the Los Angeles Times as “the greatest living authority on Zen Buddhism, and one of Japan’s most eminent scholars and philosophers,” Suzuki came to the United Sates at the invitation of the University of Hawaii in 1950.113 Funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Suzuki spent the fall of 1950 lecturing at elite universities on the East Coast.114 Trained as a Buddhist scholar but not as a priest, Suzuki is often credited with introducing Buddhism to the United States. “He is,” Christmas Humphries, then president of the Buddhist Society in London, wrote in 1948, “the pioneer teacher on the subject outside Japan, for except for Kaiten Nukariya’s Religion of the Samurai (Luzac and Co., 1913) nothing was known of Zen as a living experience, save to the leaders of The Eastern Buddhist (1921–​1939), until the publication of Essays in Buddhism (Volume I) in 1927.” 115 Suzuki followed Essays in Buddhism with the second and third volumes of the same title, published in the United States in 1933 and 1934, respectively. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism was published in English in London in 1948, with an introduction by C. G. Jung, and Suzuki’s Manual of Zen Buddhism was published in London in 1950. The publication of these volumes in English was of enormous importance to those interested

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Figures 26A–B Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1952, monoprint, 20 × 13 in., private collection, Brooklyn, NY.

in Eastern religions. Holland Cotter records that Martin became “interested in Asian thought” in the late 1940s and early 1950s and “read the Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki and heard lectures by Jiddu Krishnamurti,” and Nancy Princenthal writes that Martin’s exposure to Buddhism “in Taos in the 1940s and again in the 1950s” was “almost certain.” 116 Jacquelynn Baas, however, posits that Martin’s interest in Japanese Zen may have developed even earlier, in “Vancouver, with its vibrant Asian culture.” 117 Suzuki gave a famous series of three lectures at Columbia in March 1951, in the spring semester before Martin enrolled at Teachers College. Suzuki’s lectures were titled, respectively, “The Development of Buddhist Philosophy in China,” “Kegon (Huayen) Philosophy,” and “Kegon Philosophy and Zen Mysticism.” 118 John Cage and Alan Watts attended Suzuki’s lectures, as did Sari Deines, Yoko Ono, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a Japanese composer and Ono’s first husband. Morton Feldman and Philip Guston, who had attended conferences with Suzuki in 1950, also heard the lectures, as did Ad Reinhardt.119 Feldman explained that Zen provided “hope” in the aftermath of the Second World War, when books like Sartre’s Being and Nothingness proved insufficient. “Sartre left us with literally nothing,” Feldman said; “Zen gave us a little more hope. . . . What is eliminated makes room for something else. It’s hard to describe what that something else

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Figure 26C Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1952, monoprint, 20 × 13 in., private collection, Brooklyn, NY.

is—​maybe just the mystery that exists between the beginning and the end—​between something and nothing.” 120 Zen thus proved a potent form of religion for many artists in New York City during the 1950s. While today Suzuki’s Columbia lectures are perhaps the most well known from this period, he also spoke about Zen at the Asia Institute, the Cedanta Society, and the Ramakrishna / Vivekananda Society between 1950 and 1952.121 Suzuki’s subsequent appointment as a lecturer at Columbia in March 1952 was financed by Cornelius Crane, a businessman who had been transformed by a trip to one of Kyoto’s major temples. Crane declared that Suzuki’s courses should be open to all auditors.122 This contributed to the rise of interest in Zen in New York City, for it allowed students from other schools to attend. (Baas speculates that Martin “sat in on one or more of Suzuki’s lectures,” either during the spring of 1952 or when she returned to Teachers College to participate in a “Seminar in Social Living” at a Harlem elementary school in 1954.)123 Four students took the course for credit, but the “auditors fill[ed] the remaining chairs. . . . The overflow spill[ed] out the door and into the hall.” 124 Although there is not a complete list of auditors on record, Kay Larson writes that the group included philosophers, psychoanalysts, business people, and artists. Cage describes the experience of attending Suzuki’s lectures as follows: It was very surprising that one would look forward to each one of those lectures. Because very frequently you would leave the lecture without any consciousness of having learned

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anything. So that nothing would have been pounded into your head. . . . What he would do is, he would come into the room and he would look, I think he looked at each person. And he would smile, and there would be some kind of individual greeting to each person, and if, after he sat down, he didn’t feel that he accomplished everyone, he would look to see again, and take notice of that. And then having done that he would unwrap his books, which were wrapped in silk, in a kind of loose bag. He would untie the knot and then he’d lay the books out and around, and it was as though he were looking for something to say, no one was asking him questions. So he would look in his books and he’d either look and find something and say something—​and it would make no sense, at least I wouldn’t know how to respond to it—​or he would put it aside without saying anything and take up another book. He might go through all his books and not find anything. And then he’d sit as though he was looking somewhere else for an idea of what to say, and finally he would speak, and for the most part he’d say something that you couldn’t remember. Now and then there would be an idea, and then in that setting this idea would be very striking.125

While students like Cage often admitted to being confused by Suzuki’s lectures, they had a profound impact on many artists in the city. “What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen,” Cage wrote in the early 1960s, “though without my engagement with Zen (attendance at lectures by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, reading of the literature), I doubt whether I would have done what I have done.” 126 Martin’s artistic practice at the time was still fundamentally exploratory and lacked the radical nature of Cage’s compositions, but her exposure to Suzuki fostered a lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism.127 Martin’s later writings reveal a debt to Suzuki’s thought, though her interest in Zen Buddhism was by no means exclusive.128 The diverse, multigenerational group of artists who attended Suzuki’s lectures at Columbia is striking, and it provides an alternate context in which to view the formation of Martin’s art—​not only in dialogue with abstract expressionism but also as part of an emerging movement of contemporary art. Martin took very different things from Suzuki than did, say, Cage or Watts—​or, for that matter, Guston.129 But their shared interest in Suzuki’s interpretation of Zen at this particular moment reminds us of the often surprising juxtapositions of lived experience, and it further underscores the limitations of rigid art historical categorizations. Although Martin tested the work of many artists during this period, her experimental work from the 1950s was not a simple function of aesthetic cause and effect. Rather, Martin continually refined the knowledge that she gathered from artists as diverse as Davis and Rothko to suit her personal vision in a rapidly shifting artistic climate—​sitting, as it were, between Cage and Guston. Despite Martin’s status as a “well-versed New Yorker” and the aesthetic cultivation of her time in New York in 1951–​1952, the sands of the desert never left criticism of Martin’s art. Reviewing Martin’s first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons’s Section Eleven in New York in December 1958, the critic Dore Ashton suggested that Martin’s “talent was seasoned in the New Mexican desert. . . . The warm glow and the carefully controlled optical illusions in these delicate paintings seem to be the observed and deeply

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felt benign essences of the mesa country, so long Miss Martin’s home.” 130 While other critics were noting the dry intellectuality of the “esoteric symbols” in Martin’s “delicate and refined oils,” Ashton’s criticism focuses instead upon the influence of the desert, in terms that approach the romantic.131 Martin’s paintings, hanging against the white walls of Betty Parsons’s Section Eleven on Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, would hardly have evoked the desert for an urban population hemmed in by skyscrapers and conditioned to expect Phillips’s young bucks or Marin’s mountain watercolors. But Ashton had spent a significant amount of time in New Mexico, and as her commissioning of Joan Evans’s article about the resurgence of the visual arts in Albuquerque makes clear, she had a critical stake in demonstrating that “sophisticated art, generated by an unusual environment, was possible.” 132 Half a century later, Ashton’s characterization of Martin’s paintings as sophisticated abstractions predicated upon the vastness of the western landscape remains the predominant interpretation of Martin’s art.

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2 TOWARD A MATURE EXPRESSION

When Agnes Martin returned to New Mexico in the summer of 1952, just after graduating from Teachers College with a master’s degree in modern art, she was hardly a stranger in Taos. Martin had attended the Summer Field School at the University of New Mexico in the late 1940s and knew Taos’s artists, galleries, and landscapes well. Martin’s peripatetic patterns—​this was her second move to New Mexico and would prove not to be her last—​were well established by this point, though she never articulated the reasons behind her continual movement or her return to the desert. An editorial in El Crepusculo, Taos’s weekly newspaper, provides one possible answer in the form of a prominent headline: “Ninety-Five Artists Can’t Be Wrong.” The editorial argues that Taos is a vital “art center”: Some people judge such a center by the number of galleries. If that is the case, we come out well. We have nine galleries. Another yardstick is the number of artists living in the community. Here again we do well, for there are over ninety artists living in Taos. An art center is often judged by the variety of paintings that can be bought in the town; here again we are outstanding. We have everything from the ultra-modern school to the realism of Western cowboy illustrators.1

As if to prove the author’s point, the editorial is adjacent to a notice of three works by Taos artists returning from an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the early 1950s, Taos was a town with an active population of artists who were supported by

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their community. Art mattered in Taos—​and Taos’s reputation as an enclave of “aspen painters” was being modified to also reflect younger artists interested in modern art. For Martin, an ambitious painter who enjoyed Taos’s natural beauty, the idea that one could live in Taos and exhibit at the Metropolitan may have proved a compelling argument. In the summer of 1952, El Crepusculo featured an article titled “Taos Art Colony Vigorous at Fifty,” providing another sign of the vitality of the established art scene.2 At the same time, a group of Taos artists acknowledged the “East and West coasts” as centers of influence in their published reply to Joan Evans’s 1952 article in Art Digest, but noted that “there are many [painters] who gave up for the time being promising careers in New York because they found the quiet and the stimulus to work here in this small but very beautiful mountain community.” 3 Martin, having just arrived in Taos from New York, was not mentioned by name, but she was likely aware of the precedent these artists set. And as the letter addressing the Art Digest article demonstrates, artists working in Taos were engaged in debates about the arts far beyond the confines of the “beautiful mountain community.” Martin would also have been cognizant of the opening of the Ruins Gallery in Ranchos de Taos, just outside of Taos, in June 1952.4 The Ruins was experimental in nature: “There is no director. The shows will be arranged by the entire group and will represent the artist’s own choice. . . . ‘This is,’ said Mr. Rogoway, ‘a kind of test gallery for the artists themselves; a place where any one of the participating painters may hang new pictures as they are completed in order to view his work objectively. However, the dominating spirit rests in the enthusiasm of the painters for each other’s work and their mutual desire to further its exhibition.’ “ 5 Martin’s work was not ready for the Metropolitan, but the Ruins provided the gallery structure she needed. Roughly two years later, Bill Howard of the Museum of Modern Art in Albuquerque selected Martin’s work from the Ruins to exhibit—​marking one of the first public exhibitions of Martin’s work in New Mexico after 1952.6 In moving to Taos, Martin thus identified a community of artists who participated in national debates about contemporary art; who were eager to share and promote their work; and who created a collective, artist-centered environment in which aesthetic risk and works in progress were encouraged. Martin also recognized a community that was, in certain respects, welcoming to gays and lesbians. By the mid-1920s, as Calvin Trillin observes, Santa Fe was already established as a romantic destination for wellborn Easterners. I once heard a man in Taos explain the origins of the Santa Fe Anglo community by what he called the Theory of the Dumbest Sons. According to this theory, there was a time when wealthy Eastern families assigned their dumbest sons—​t he son who was of no use in the bank or the factory—​to a life of coupon clipping in Santa Fe. . . . Although the Theory of the Dumbest Sons has a simplicity that has always appealed to me, I suspect that a theory closer to the truth would be the Theory of the Sons or Daughters Who Didn’t Fit

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In—​didn’t fit in because of being uninterested in business or being artistic or sickly or eccentric or dumb or not dumb enough to devote their lives to a family bank.7

Although Trillin’s tone is tongue in cheek, there is truth to his story. Cady Wells, for example, was a homosexual painter from a wealthy Massachusetts family who settled outside of Santa Fe in 1935. Writing about Wells, Lois Rudnick modifies Trillin’s comments: “Both Santa Fe and Taos were places populated by many people who ‘did not fit in,’ and among them were gay, lesbian and bisexual men and women.” 8 (Indeed, the painter Ford Ruthling recalled that the phrase “going to Santa Fe” functioned as a code to identify lesbians.)9 While Martin did not have Trillin’s pedigree—​he boasted of being kicked out of five boarding schools and left Harvard—​or his money, she may have similarly sought a perceived safe haven during a period of increasing homophobia. “During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as homophobia became more public and freighted with political and social consequences,” Rudnick notes, “Cady [Wells] could not have found a safer place to live for a genteel gay artist.” 10 While Rudnick records that gay and lesbian artists were in roles of “civic, social and cultural” importance in Santa Fe, this environment existed within a particular intellectual and bohemian set.11 The Spanish-American, Native American, and Mexican populations were less tolerant. Further, Rudnick explains that for most gay and lesbian artists in Santa Fe, living a double life was still the norm. Writer Witter “Bynner was famous for his parties,” Rudnick records in a telling detail, “but gays and straights were sometimes invited to separate ones.” 12 Northern New Mexico may have provided men like Bynner and Wells a safe haven, but it was not one that was entirely open. For Martin, these complicated social interactions meant that she maintained romantic relationships during her early years in New Mexico, though she kept them hidden until her death.13 Lesbians in Santa Fe and Taos, like those in New York or San Francisco, had the added challenge of negotiating their gender as well as their sexuality. “In the thirties and forties it was generally assumed that women without husbands and children were neurotic and unfulfilled,” Ann Gibson explains, “even though they themselves may have thought they were having a fine time.” 14 These assumptions were real in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Martin’s status as a single, self-supporting woman was an anomaly. As Gertrude Barrer observed, “Being a gay man was not a disadvantage for an artist” in the 1940s and 1950s, “but . . . being a woman, straight or lesbian, was.” 15 Patriarchal institutions such as galleries and museums, Gavin Butt similarly argues, did not take lesbian artists as seriously as male artists.16 Betty Parsons’s own gallery is a case in point, despite being led by a lesbian. Jeanne Miles remembered that Parsons “promoted the men more actively than she did the women. Betty’s being a lesbian didn’t mean that she was pushing women’s work. She thought like a man, in a way. She liked having women around. But she was not going to break her head against the wall for women artists. Men were in a position to do a lot for themselves.” 17 While Parsons’s early support for Martin was crucial in Martin’s New York debut, Parsons’s relative

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indifference to promoting Martin’s work eventually led Martin to leave for the Robert Elkon Gallery. Taos’s position away from these patriarchal institutions may have allowed Martin more freedom, but it also meant she had to cultivate an outsider status in order to have her art noticed in larger artistic markets. Martin sought an artistic environment that was relatively hospitable to lesbian artists in Taos, but her move did not signal a radical break from the homosexual cultures that she may have come in contact with in New York. Butt reminds us that “the prevalence of gay artists in New York bohemia in general, and Greenwich Village in particular, should not mislead us into thinking that it was some kind of gay haven,” citing Jasper Johns’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s efforts to keep their sexuality hidden.18 Rather, Martin gained a measure of reprieve from the overtly masculine narrative of abstract expressionism and began to show her paintings in a community that actively supported female artists. In her 1961 Art in America article, Elaine de Kooning observes that a “special feature of the Albuquerque scene is the high percentage of women artists—​about onethird,” a trend that was also true in Taos.19 Before Martin could get much painting accomplished in Taos, however, she accepted a teaching position at Eastern Oregon College in La Grande, Oregon, for the fall 1952 semester. There is no archival record of the courses Martin taught at the college (now Eastern Oregon University); and the Nightingale Gallery, the university’s art gallery, has not located any early Martin works. Cory Peeke, curator of the collection, writes that Martin “was very unhappy here and couldn’t wait to get out, so I doubt she left anything behind.” 20 Situated in the scenic Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, Eastern Oregon University is four and a half hours from the Pacific coast, where Martin had lived as a child and attended Washington State Normal School at Bellingham. Martin’s association with the Pacific Northwest began in 1919, when she moved with her family to Vancouver, British Columbia. “Vancouver is a wonderful place to be in your youth,” Martin recalled later in life, “because there [are] beaches all around; everybody can walk to the beach. We swam every day. I actually fished every day. There’s everything: sailing, skiing, hiking in the mountains; and now that I’m old I think that hiking and camping in the mountains is one of my best memories.” 21 Martin’s recollection paints a romantic vision of life in Vancouver, though the frigid temperatures of the water and the rainy winters call into question her assertion that she “swam every day” at the city’s beaches. Martin responded to the particular geography of the Pacific Northwest, where evergreen mountains seem to rise from the sea, and recorded a typical view in a small work on canvas from the late 1940s. (Fig. 27.) During this period, however, Martin utilized an increasingly abstract approach, capturing the essence of the landscape in a small work on Masonite. (Fig. 28.) Measuring fourteen by twenty-one inches, the work consists of an army green painted over the smooth side of a Masonite panel, with subsequent campaigns of orange and black.22 Within each black oval, Martin incised a form: a tree, a mountain, and a lake. Although the work has been dated circa 1949 by others, it does not bear a date in Martin’s hand. The artist’s use of

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Figure 27 Agnes Martin, View from the Porch, n.d., oil on canvas mounted on wood, 19 ½ × 23 ½ in., private collection, California.

layering (an underlayer of white paint brightens the orange she placed on top), as well as her use of color blocking and a series of dark, oval forms over an opaque, colored ground, suggests the printmaking techniques she utilized in her work at Teachers College. Martin’s use of incisions to define the stylized natural forms reappears in her work of the early 1950s in Taos, perhaps suggesting a date closer to 1952 for the work on Masonite as well. Martin’s unhappy experience at Eastern Oregon College in the fall of 1952 did not dampen her friendship with Mildred Kane, a native of Monmouth, Oregon, who purchased The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, circa 1953.23 (Fig. 29.) This painting straddles Martin’s interest in the legacy of surrealism and her use of figuration while introducing a new vocabulary of increasingly stylized abstract forms. Taos artist Jim Wagner recalled that Kane often visited Martin in Taos and purchased her work.

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Figure 28 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1949, oil on Masonite, 14 × 21 in., collection of Scott K. Stuart.

When I was growing up in Monmouth, Oregon, we had a family friend, Mildred Kane, who came by the house a lot. She’d been my sister’s kindergarten teacher, and she was a close friend of Agnes Martin. I think they’d gone to college together in Canada. Mildred often visited Agnes when she lived in Taos, it must have been the late 40s and early 50s, I was in the 4th or 5th grade, and she would always tell us these stories about Taos, what a great place it was for an artist, and she’d show us drawings and watercolors that she’d gotten from Agnes. Nothing like the grids she became famous for—​t hese were like nymphs or fairies running through graveyards, that sort of thing.24

Wagner’s descriptions of “nymphs or fairies running through graveyards” suggests something similar to a figurative drawing from 1952 that is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, though his description of running figures applies equally well to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve marks a dramatic shift in scale for Martin, as well as a return to painting. Given the size of the painting—​forty-eight by seventy-two inches—​and the relatively firm paperboard support, which would make it difficult to transport, it seems likely that Adam and Eve was created when Martin returned from Oregon to Taos after the end of the fall semester. The painting bears a similarity to the Museum of Modern

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Figure 29 Agnes Martin, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, ca. 1953, oil on paperboard, 48 × 72 in., private collection, Denver, CO.

Art’s 1952 drawing in Martin’s use of thin black lines to outline her figures and in the palette of pale pinks, blues, and yellows she employs. Mildred Tolbert photographed another painting, now lost, that also shows figures outlined in black arranged friezelike across a rectangular support, though the surviving black-and-white negative does not give any indication of the palette or the particular type of paint that Martin used.25 (See fig. 19.) Despite Martin’s residence in Taos, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden demonstrates that Martin’s interest lay in the art she encountered in New York: the painting is the most overtly surrealist of Martin’s surviving work from Taos. Martin’s experience with surrealism in New York was belated; by the 1940s, when she would have seen the Miró retrospective, and certainly by 1953, when she likely created this work, surrealism had lost its rebellious character and become a historical style worthy of admiration. That said, surrealism was still discussed in Taos as late as 1956, when a panel was convened at the Harwood Museum of Art to discuss Sir Herbert Read and modern art. Martin was a featured member of the panel and “gave an impassioned discussion on the importance of the subconscious.” 26

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Figure 30 Mark Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 1944, oil on canvas, 6 ft. 3 ⅜ in. × 7 ft. ¾ in., bequest of Mrs. Mark Rothko through the Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., Museum of Modern Art, 429.1981.

Martin’s understanding of surrealism, and especially Miró, as Adam and Eve demonstrates, was conditioned not only by seeing Miró’s work in the original but also by acknowledging responses to his work by contemporary artists.27 Mark Rothko, as gallery owner Sidney Janis remembered, “liked Miró very much”; when Janis hung a large Miró in his office, Rothko used to “come in specifically to look at that Miró.” 28 Thomas Crow has suggested that Miró’s The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 1923–​1924 (purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1936), provided inspiration for Rothko’s Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea from 1944.29 (Fig. 30.) Both works present a variety of forms that play across relatively flat fields of neutral color, and one senses the congruence of form, color, and line. Martin’s friezelike use of thinly outlined figures against a neutral ground, interspersed with small, abstract forms, in Adam and Eve demonstrates her knowledge of both paintings. Whereas Rothko’s debt to surrealism is understood as a period of apprenticeship, and Pollock and Newman absorbed surrealism in New York during the 1940s, Martin’s Adam and Eve stands as a testament to her efforts to understand the legacy of surrealism through the prism of abstract expressionism in New York and to find her own way through both movements. Rothko and Martin were not the only artists who looked to Miró. Arshile Gorky similarly “used Miró to propel himself out of Cubism into imaginative, Surrealist biomorphism.” 30 Indeed, the seeds of Martin’s own biomorphism can be seen in Adam and Eve, which is fundamentally a transitional painting. While the work has figural elements, Martin suggests figures only to subvert them: the scale of her figures bears little relation to that of human anatomy, since Eve’s proper right leg terminates in a

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Figure 31 Agnes Martin, Beach, ca. 1954, watercolor, gouache and ink on paper, 5 ½ × 8 ½ in., private collection, California.

half circle composed of alternating beige and white triangles. By 1954, Martin would abandon overt references to figures almost entirely and depend upon the abstract forms she began to develop in this painting. A series of abstract forms in Adam and Eve—​t he black, four-pointed form at the terminus of Eve’s proper left hand; the two black horseshoe shapes between Adam’s knees; the red form cutting across Adam’s torso—​show the initial development of an abstract vocabulary that Martin repeats throughout the early 1950s and that supplies the building blocks of her paintings of the mid-1950s. With this in mind, it is instructive to take note of Beach, circa 1954, a work in watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper measuring 5 ½ by 8 ½ inches. (Fig. 31.) Beach is titled and signed in Martin’s hand but not dated. The colorful work on paper depicts a brown beach, a sliver of blue-green water, and a vibrant orange sky. Against this scene are forms that can be variously interpreted as representational—​a seagull in silhouette at the upper left, one could argue—​but also as abstract forms, unmoored from representational content. These forms reappear in many of Martin’s paintings of the period, moving from quasi-representational works like Adam and Eve and Beach to more fully abstract paintings, such as Untitled, circa 1954. (Fig. 32.) When viewed together, Adam

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Figure 32 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1954, oil on canvas, 33 ⅝ × 47 ½ in., Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

and Eve and Beach provide evidence of Martin’s formal experimentation and her ability to shift similar forms between media, suggesting that her works on paper informed her painting during this period and vice versa. Photographs of Martin in her studio, taken by Mildred Tolbert, show a series of similar small works tacked to her studio wall below a larger painting, further demonstrating the fluidity with which Martin moved between differing media and scale. (Fig. 33.) The photograph also suggests that Martin painted far more small-scale works on paper than is usually assumed, given the paucity of extant works on paper today. If The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden draws from the art that Martin saw in New York, it is also rooted in the history and culture of New Mexico. The efficiency of Martin’s linear forms and the pale, sandy color of the ground in Adam and Eve are reminiscent of ancient pictographs, which could be seen throughout the Southwest in the mid-1950s. Excavations had begun at Chaco Canyon, for example, at the turn of the twentieth century, and the site was well known as a location of pictographs in the northwestern part of New Mexico. While there is no documentation showing that Martin traveled to Chaco Canyon, her interest in Native American culture

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Figure 33 Mildred Tolbert, Agnes Martin in her Ledoux Street Studio, Taos, ca. 1954, black-and-white photograph, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

and camping in the wilderness makes it likely that she traveled to the site, as does the popularity of the site as a tourist destination in the 1950s.31 Martin may have also visited Bandelier National Monument, an hour and a half from Taos by car, where the Ancestral Pueblo people created pictographs on the sides of dwellings carved high into the walls of the Frijoles Canyon. Closer to home, Spud Johnson reviewed Edgar L. Hewett’s The Pajarito Plateau and Its Ancient People in the Horse Fly section of El Crepusculo in June 1954. Drawings of pictographs were included next to the review.32 Whether Martin saw

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Figure 34 Agnes Martin, The Bluebird, 1954, oil on canvas, 28 ¼ × 40 in., permanent collection of the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM.

pictographs or simply reproductions in books such as Hewett’s, common pictographic symbols appear in many of Martin’s paintings of the period: in the upper-left corner of The Bluebird, 1954, a thin spiral is visible, for example, and a linear zigzag pattern can be seen at the center of Dream of Night Sailing, a small canvas from 1954.33 (Figs. 34 and 35.) The linear quality of these symbols is striking and may have resonated with Martin. If so, Martin would not be the first artist to draw inspiration from the pictographs of the Southwest. Adolph Gottlieb traveled to Tucson, Arizona, in 1937–​1938, gaining a deep appreciation of ancient southwestern arts and crafts. When he returned to New York City, Gottlieb spent time with the Native American collections at the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History.34 In fact, Gottlieb’s celebrated paintings from the 1940s are now commonly referred to as pictograph paintings.35 (Fig. 36.) A description of one of Gottlieb’s late pictograph paintings reveals his sources in the Southwest: In Figuration (Two Pronged), finished in 1951 . . . the stark geometry of the grid structure has been softened and patches of color and a group of simple line drawings of figures and

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Figure 35 Agnes Martin, Dream of Night Sailing, 1954, oil on canvas, 15 × 22 in., collection of Scott K. Stuart.

faces are superimposed over the now-subordinated linear grid system. The drawings are basic abstractions of the human form and closely related to American Indian pictographic images such as figures from the Ojo de Benado site in New Mexico that was published in Garrick Mallery’s 1893 study of pictographs entitled Picture-Writing of the American Indians.36

This formal description of Figuration (Two Pronged) could easily describe some of Martin’s works from this period, and the emphasis on Gottlieb’s “simple line drawings” and “linear grid system” suggests line as the organizing principle for this series of paintings. Gottlieb’s work was exhibited at the Samuel Kootz Gallery in Manhattan in January 1952, when Martin was enrolled at Teachers College. For Martin, an artist schooled in the rise of abstract expressionism in New York as well as in the indigenous cultures of New Mexico, the encounter must have provoked a profound sense of selfidentification—​and, perhaps, intimated that the aesthetic tools of ancient southwestern cultures could be used to create ambitious contemporary art. Martin worked steadily through 1953 to refine her vision, though few extant works from 1953 survive today. The paucity of paintings that remain from the mid-1950s is due, in part, to Martin’s repudiation of these works later in life. Martin spoke publicly about

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Figure 36 Adolph Gottlieb, Pictograph, 1948, gouache and crayon on paper, 18 × 24 in., Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection: Purchase, Stephens Inc. City Trust Grant, 1985.076.011.

her dissatisfaction with her paintings from this period and the bonfires in which she burned the paintings.37 In an interview of Martin conducted in 2000, her frustration with her early work and her regret that she sold some early paintings is palpable. Referring to an early painting on view at the Harwood Museum in Taos, Martin remarked: I painted a lot more paintings than most people did. I used to have a big stack. . . . At the end of the year and I burned them all. . . . These paintings, there’s one around the corner, I’m trying to get Bob [Ellis, then director of the Harwood] to take them down but he won’t. I was trying to get . . . I burnt them at the end of the year. But here in Taos I was starving, and I parted with, I sold a few of them, and I really have suffered because they are not what I want.38

Martin wanted, as she explained, art that was “really abstract[,] . . . practically without any cause in this world.” 39 Until recently, art historians, critics, and curators, with the exception of Lizzie Borden, have largely respected Martin’s wishes and begun their analyses of her career with the work she created in 1957 on Coenties Slip, an area of lower Manhattan inhabited by like-minded artists.40 Two of Martin’s retrospectives—​at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1973 and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1992–​1993—​began their surveys in 1957, neglecting the formative period of Martin’s art from 1947 until 1957. This strategy, while respectful, perpetuates an opinion that Martin held during the second half of her career, rather than casting critical light on Martin’s understanding and perceptions of her work during the 1950s, when it was created. A 2012 exhibition at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos and a larger

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Figure 37A. Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1952–​1954, ink and oil on Masonite, framed: 36 ⅞ × 49 × 1 7⁄16 in., gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation, Taos, New Mexico, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 2009.24.4 (verso).

retrospective at the Tate in 2015 sought to redress this oversight by exhibiting a larger proportion of Martin’s early work, signaling the reintroduction of Martin’s early work into the scholarship on her art. In an effort to contextualize Martin’s dissatisfaction with her paintings, David Witt takes a different approach. “One could speculate,” Witt writes, “that Martin destroyed her Taos works in the concern that they be judged derivative.” 41 In fact, the most important facet of Martin’s paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s is their very reliance on other models of artistic production, demonstrating Martin’s thorough knowledge of historical and contemporary art, as well as the vast, interconnected networks of information and images she used, and often discarded, as she struggled to create her own unique vision. In this sense, Martin’s process is akin to that of an unlikely source: Henri Matisse. “For my part I have never avoided the influence of others,” Matisse told Jacques Guenne in 1925. “I would have considered it cowardice and lack of sincerity towards myself. I believe that the artist’s personality affirms itself by the struggle he

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Figure 37B. Beatrice Mandelman, Circus, ca. 1955–​1957, oil on Masonite, framed: 36 ⅞ × 49 × 1 7⁄16 in., gift of the Mandelman-Ribak Foundation, Taos, New Mexico, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 2009.24.4 (recto).

has survived. . . . I have accepted influences but I think I have always known how to dominate them.” 42 With this in mind, it is instructive to consider the one surviving painting that Martin almost certainly meant to discard: an untitled work discovered on the verso of a painting by Beatrice Mandelman, Circus, now at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York. (Figs. 37a, b.) Martin’s painting is heavily worked, suggesting that she spent considerable time creating it, and it shows her experimenting with multiple artistic styles, demonstrating her range and her drive to work through multiple strategies in order to develop her own. Curators at the Albright Knox have dated Mandelman’s painting to circa 1955, though it is possible that the painting was created as late as 1957. As Peter Walch, the former director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, recounts, “When Agnes had her big Whitney retrospective, she and Bea (longtime pals) traveled to NYC together. While strolling through the exhibition, Agnes turned to Bea and asked, ‘Whatever happened to all those paintings of mine that I left with you when I moved to New York [in

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1957]?’ To which Bea replied, ‘Oh, I painted over them all.’ “ 43 Legend in Taos claims that Martin asked Mandelman to burn her paintings when she left for New York in 1957, and there is some dispute as to whether Martin knew that Mandelman reused rather than burned her paintings. “After her move to New York,” Witt relates, “Martin instructed a friend to gather up the remaining Taos work and destroy it.” 4 4 Mandelman, like many artists before her, may have decided that it was more economical to reuse Martin’s supports than to buy her own. This information does little to date Martin’s original work, Untitled, circa 1952–​1954. The painting measures 36 ⅞ by 49 inches and is on 1 7⁄16-inch-thick Masonite. Martin prepared the surface of the Masonite with a light-colored ground, and she drew and redrew her forms in black ink or oil paint.45 She applied the oil paint in thin, opaque layers using both a brush, as with the light-peach color in the lower left quadrant, and a palette knife, in the lower right quadrant. Her palette—​soft cream, taupe, beige, light brown, blush, light yellow, blue, and pink—​calls to mind the 1952 drawing Untitled, now at the Museum of Modern Art. Two figures can be seen on the right of the painting, and the left bears a large, brown, biomorphic shape. The juxtaposition of figural forms that recall those used in Adam and Eve is in stark contrast to Martin’s inclusion of a biomorphic form, which appears more regularly in her work after March 1954, when she returned to Taos after a brief seminar in education at Teachers College. For this reason, it seems likely that Martin would have painted the original painting in the year between the winter of 1952–​1953 and January 1954, when she left for Teachers College. The use of biomorphic forms was well established in American art by the mid-1950s. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie defined “expressionist biomorphic” paintings as those that contained “irregular shaped forms and calligraphic interlacing, bearing . . . a relation to organic or anatomical forms, composed usually in dynamic, symbolic or emotively suggestive relationships,” in a 1951 exhibition catalog for the Museum of Modern Art.46 Ritchie’s description squares neatly with the juxtaposition between figural line and the brown shape in Untitled, circa 1952–​1954, although Martin’s composition does not yet achieve the “dynamic, symbolic or emotively suggestive” relationship that he notes. Another undated painting, now lost, similarly shows a linear form that appears to be a figure (with the same leaflike motifs we see in Adam and Eve) placed next to a series of lines in which Martin has placed a dark, biomorphic form. (Fig. 38.) The work serves to establish that Martin’s movement from surrealist-inspired works such as Adam and Eve to works like Mid-Winter, circa 1954–​1955, was carried out over a series of transitional paintings. (Fig. 39.) Both Untitled, circa 1952–​1954, and the lost painting are by turn experimental, innovative, contingent, prophetic, and prone to failure. In these paintings, Martin tests formal strategies and negotiates the fraught divide between figuration and abstraction, with mixed results: she ultimately discarded Untitled, but she esteemed it enough at first to ask Tolbert to photograph it, along with other paintings, presumably to show a dealer or gallery owner. This is perhaps not the paradox it may seem. While Untitled represents

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Figure 38 Mildred Tolbert, photograph of a work by Agnes Martin, now lost. Date, size, and media unknown, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

Martin’s lifelong pattern of rigorously editing her paintings, her desire to show her work speaks to her ambition to win recognition as an artist. Such recognition is often singular, but Mandelman’s reuse of Martin’s Masonite support demonstrates just how deeply Martin’s work was embedded in the work of her fellow artists in Taos and vice versa. Martin stopped at the Mandelman-Ribak house every afternoon “for cocktails and conversation” after she finished painting, where she would run into Clay Spohn.47 Martin recalled, “Well, Bea and I were the social leaders in the artists group. . . . After I finished painting in the afternoon, I went to their house every day, for coffee. There were others there, you know, Clay Spohn. Clay Spohn was a regular like me, every single day. They were very entertaining, Bea and Louis.”  4 8 In addition to the company and conversation that Mandelman and Ribak offered, their home included an art library of over two thousand volumes, as well as art magazines.49 Mandelman, Ribak, and Spohn also offered another, more intangible asset to Martin: their status as successful artists in New York and San Francisco. During the 1950s, Mandelman and Ribak spent extended stretches of time in New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico, painting and promoting their work. They, like artists Edward Corbett and Clay Spohn, would have appeared as busy, successful artists to

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Figure 39 Agnes Martin, Mid-Winter, ca. 1954–​1955, oil on canvas, 33 × 48 in., Taos Municipal Schools Historic Art Collection, Taos, NM.

Martin, who, at the time, did not have gallery representation in Taos—​much less New York or San Francisco. As former faculty members at the California School of Fine Arts, Corbett and Spohn brought firsthand knowledge of abstract expressionism in San Francisco to Taos.50 (Their former colleagues included Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still.)51 A visitor to Taos, however, reported that Spohn and Corbett had left the polish of their urban days behind: “When I saw them, each had been far from urban surroundings long enough to acquire the comfort and custom of more casual attire. It was a question [of] which better revealed this fact—​Clay’s battered hat of a shape never dreamed of by Stetson, or Ed’s faded creaseless and form-fitting slacks. Both men were working hard with fine results. Corbett accomplished a series of highly sensitive drawings and Spohn had a number of highly individual paintings of great beauty.” 52 Spohn and Corbett showed their work in Taos, holding a joint exhibition with Diebenkorn and Robert McChesney at La Galeria Escondida.53 And while Spohn’s and Corbett’s reputations as successful artists may have garnered Martin’s interest at first, it was the quality of their art—​t heir “fine results”—​t hat ultimately held her attention. In fact, the heavily worked surfaces of Martin’s Untitled, circa 1952–​1954, and Unti-

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Figure 40 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1953, black crayon or pastel and oil on paperboard, 36 ⅛ × 47 ¾ in., anonymous gift in honor of Vernon Nikkel, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, 93.43.

tled, circa 1954, are directly related to the tactile, painterly surfaces of Corbett’s paintings from the period. Untitled, circa 1953, now in the collection of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, measures 36 ⅛ inches high by 47 ¾ inches wide and is executed in black crayon or pastel, and oil paint applied with both a brush and a palette knife on a ¼-inch paperboard support.54 (Fig. 40.) The composition consists of a triangular form with a star and two circles at the top left, and a series of thin, painted black lines that transverse and bisect a painted white ground and areas of exposed paperboard. The work is signed but not dated and has been variously published as dating to 1954 and 1955.55 A gallery label on the back of the painting records that the “oil” painting was owned by Mildred (Tolbert) Crews and exhibited at the Stables Gallery. Tolbert recalled that she took photographs of Martin, often surrounded by her paintings, “in her studio with the Solo Reflex and she traded me a painting for it” in 1953, suggesting a possible date of 1953 for Untitled, circa 1953.56 Later in life, Bea Mandelman described the bartering that many artists used to stay financially solvent in Taos during this period: “At the

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Figures 41a–​d. Agnes Martin, details from Untitled, ca. 1953, black crayon or pastel and oil on paperboard, 36 ⅛ × 47 ¾ in., University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque.

beginning we were very poor, I don’t know how we made it, we did a lot of bartering, which I don’t think that people can do today, which made it possible to go on as artists.” 57 Martin and Tolbert may have made such an exchange, which would have made financial sense for both artists. The Stables Gallery label on the verso of the work does not provide a date of exhibition for Untitled, circa 1953, and the gallery’s history does not provide any further information regarding a possible date.58 Martin’s use of a palette knife and her thick applications of paint, especially in the passages of opaque white paint in the lower right corner of Untitled, circa 1953 (Figs. 41a–​d), suggest Corbett’s white paintings.59 While mainly working on paper in Taos, Corbett completed four or five large paintings in which he applied a primary layer of color and built up subsequent layers of white paint.60 The only surviving white painting, smaller and created in 1957, bears witness to Corbett’s deft modulation of color, his restrained use of line and surface incident, and his use of layering to create dense areas of subtle chromatic depth. Despite similarities, Martin’s surfaces were not as uniform

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or pristine as Corbett’s, relying instead on a mixture of thickly applied opaque paint and drippy passages of thinned oil paint. Her paintings were closer to those of Diebenkorn, who showed an analogous affinity for varying textures of paint in works such as Untitled, 1951, a painting that he may have shown at La Galeria Escondida in Taos. Like that of Untitled, circa 1952–​1954, the surface of Untitled, circa 1953, is heavily worked. Martin created Untitled, circa 1952–​1954, in a number of campaigns, drawing and redrawing her forms in black ink or oil paint and using a range of implements to create differing thicknesses and opacities of paint. In Untitled, circa 1953, the two white, circular forms at the top of the painting show the range of Martin’s application of paint most clearly. The left circle is densely painted with a thick, opaque paint that sits up on the surface, while the right circle is painted with a thin application of paint akin to a wash, transparent enough so that the paper can be seen through the paint. Martin used a 2 ½-inch brush to apply many of the thinner coats of paint, as at the top left corner, while she used the flat side of a palette knife to smear thick gobs of white paint on the work at the lower left corner, just above the black line. Martin’s experimentation with the visual effects of the viscosity and opacity of paint, as well as with techniques of paint application, yields a dynamic composition that is visually stimulating. Martin’s experiments also herald an interest in surface texture that would continue throughout her career, providing depth and nuance to her increasingly spare paintings.61 The dynamism of Martin’s composition is also drawn from the vibrancy of her thin black lines—​a compositional choice that distinguishes her work from that of Corbett and Spohn. The lines swoop and flicker, forming arrows that, as at the center and center left, direct the viewer’s eye in an active model of spectatorship. The differing thicknesses of Martin’s lines encourage viewing that is fast and forceful, as in the case of the thicker lines at the upper left, but also offer areas where the eye is encouraged to slow down, such as the dwindling, spidery lines at the bottom left of the composition, and the skipping lines at the bottom of the center triangle and at the center right. The diversity of Martin’s black lines and the various speeds of looking that they prompt both demonstrate Martin’s early interest in controlling perception and anticipate the specific modes of attention that the graphite lines of her later paintings require.62 Untitled, circa 1953, confounds our expectations of a painting that is either a straight appropriation of an abstract expressionist work or a transitional work showing a clear path toward Martin’s next body of work. Nonetheless, the painting demonstrates two elements that become crucial in Martin’s later work: her deft use of line, and her interest in exploring the effects and textures of different viscosities of paint. While Martin’s development during this period does not proceed along a linear path, these elements combine with her exploration of increasingly abstract forms in the 1954 painting Autumn Watch, which can be characterized as her first protogrid painting. (Fig. 42.) Although Spohn and Corbett brought artistic sophistication to Taos, Martin was not content to let other artists reap the rewards of commercial gallery representation in New York and San Francisco. Martin’s trip to New York from January through March 1954

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Figure 42 Agnes Martin, Autumn Watch, 1954, oil and graphite on canvas, 35 × 53 in., Bidstrup and Mahaffey Collection, Paradise Valley, AZ.

was predicated upon her participation in a seminar at Teachers College, but she also visited Betty Parsons.63 Martin aimed high: Parsons was known for showing Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and her gallery was well respected. (Parsons was eager to “discover” her next new talent and so may have been open to the supplications of young artists.) Although it remains unclear what artwork Martin took to show Parsons, Parsons offered to show Martin’s work in New York—​a thrilling acknowledgment of the value and potential of Martin’s art.64 Parsons’s encouragement—​and the possibility of a venue in which to sell her work for New York prices—​may have influenced Martin’s decision to paint full time when she returned to Taos at the end of March. “I have been painting fifteen years and working at the same time as a teacher,” Martin explained in a November 1954 letter.65 “In February this year Betty Parsons Gallery offered to show my work in New York. Since that time I have been trying to get a show ready that I could consider to be both a mature expression and a helpful one. I expect to do this within a year.” 66 Martin’s return from Teachers College in late March 1954 heralded the start of an ambitious body of new work, more confident but still experimental in nature. Parsons remained a distant presence during Martin’s time in Taos, however, and would not fully engage with Martin’s art until 1957. On March 25, 1954, Regina Cooke of El Crepusculo’s Taos Art and Artists column

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reported, “Among new residents at Taos Cañon is Agnes Martin, who is painting, there.” 67 Martin waited another year for her work to be mentioned regularly in Taos Art and Artists, but this inaugural notice served to acknowledge Martin’s status as a serious, practicing artist within the Taos community—​perhaps fueled by rumors of her offer from Parsons. Four surviving works from 1954–​1955, Autumn Watch, The Bluebird, Dream of Night Sailing, and Mid-Winter, present a cohesive group of paintings that show Martin moving toward more firmly geometric compositional structures while continuing to hone her abstract vocabulary. Although Martin first settled in Taos Cañon, where she had likely lived during 1952–​ 1953, she moved to a studio apartment on Ledoux Street—​three blocks off Taos Plaza and near the Harwood Foundation—​during early April.68 The apartment, as Martin later described it, was little more than a modified goat shed: I paid fifteen here, over there—​you know the Pink Lily next to the toyshop? Well in the backyard there was a goat house, and somebody took the end out of it and put a whole window in the back. And I thought it was a terrific studio. I thought it was pretty great, even. But I went back and it was pretty small. You know, now it looks small. And then I thought it was a terrific studio. Fifteen dollars a month. It looked over, the view was over the plains. Yep.69

Martin relished her view over the plains, and the studio—​with “a whole window”—​ delighted her. Sculptor Ted Egri’s recollection is different, highlighting Martin’s exceptional poverty and her ardent desire to achieve recognition in New York: “Agnes Martin lived in the building next to mine, in a larger building which [sic] belonged to the same landlady. She was living on beans and painting these AbEx paintings. So we became friends. We did not know how badly off she was financially. She just rented a room. She wanted to get to New York and to the Betty Parsons Gallery, she wanted them to get interested in her.” 70 Egri’s economic situation during the mid-1950s was far from comfortable—​which makes his mention of Martin’s economic hardship all the more poignant. Indeed, there are rumors about Martin digging food out of the dumpster behind the local grocery store and painting on bed sheets, though neither claim can be corroborated. Artists across New Mexico struggled in the early and mid-1950s; art historian Joseph Traugott recalls that “artists like [Adja] Yunkers were forced to trade prints for food and medical services.” 71 Martin was not alone in the sacrifices she made in order to pursue her art, but her decision to paint full time was made at the cost of significant personal hardship. Just as telling, however, is Egri’s acknowledgment of Martin’s early artistic ambition. Martin’s later interviews, lectures, and writings develop a narrative in which inspiration is crucial to her artistic process, as this interview with Joan Simon demonstrates: Simon: How do you begin to work? Martin: When I set out to do a painting, I ask for an inspiration. And I follow it.

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Simon: Whom or what are you asking for inspiration? Martin: My mind. Simon: Does it sometimes not answer? Martin: Sometimes it dries up. I’ve had it dry up for as much as four months. Simon: And then what do you do? Martin: You have to wait it out.72

In this formulation, Martin does not acknowledge any outside influences and divorces herself from the creative process by suggesting that her paintings are inspirations that come into her mind fully formed. Martin explains that she cannot summon inspirations but must passively wait for the inspiration to come. “For something new, you have to have inspiration,” Martin explained to filmmaker Mary Lance. “Somebody’s got to sit down and really want it. That’s all you have to do; you don’t have to make any effort.” 73 This belief, promulgated by many of Martin’s critics, stands in stark contrast to the abundant effort that can be seen in Martin’s early work, and in Martin’s struggles, both in Taos and in New York, to have that work seen by prominent gallery owners like Parsons. Martin’s ambition, recognized by Egri in the mid-1950s, may have been evident even earlier, as Mary Fuller McChesney recalls: “When I first met Aggie Martin in New York—​I mean, New Mexico, boy, in 1950. She was painting these kinds of funky surrealist paintings. And she said, ‘I’m going to make it. I am going to make it. And I don’t care who I have to fuck or how I have to do it. I’m going to make it in the—​’ And she was not kidding.74 This palpable ambition, observed by two contemporaries, does not discount Martin’s later belief in inspiration but, rather, suggests that her belief in inspiration and her ability to paint her own vision, free of outside influences, was founded upon decades of dedicated toil. The best evidence that Martin was, as McChesney says, “going to make it” lies in the paintings she completed in 1954. Dream of Night Sailing is the only extant painting from 1954 that is dated in Martin’s hand, and it is in the best condition (see fig. 35). The painting is relatively small, measuring 15 by 22 inches, and is surrounded by a rough wooden lathe frame of approximately 1 ½-inch depth that Martin likely created and painted white. Executed in oil paint on a fabric support, the painting was stored in a dark attic for decades. As a result, the colors—​especially the white—​remain fresh and vibrant, and the textures of Martin’s brushstrokes are still visible. The brushstrokes are fluid and expressive, suggesting that Martin was looking at Spohn’s paintings of the period. While the painting’s predominant palette is gray, white, and black, Martin also uses aquamarine blue, brown, cream, pink, reddish-brown, and teal, showing her strong eye for color. The jolt of aquamarine blue on the underside of the stroke of teal at the center of the painting is an apt example: the thin stroke of color shows the utmost restraint but is electric. Martin’s modulation of color is much more adept as well, and the subtle variation of gray paint in the lower left corner augurs her gray paintings of the 1980s.

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In addition to utilizing different viscosities of paint, as she did in Untitled, circa 1953, Martin uses the back of her brush to create incisions in the paint, as in her Untitled work on Masonite from the Pacific Northwest. This technique, which adds depth and nuance to Martin’s surface, suggests that Martin considered erasure—​t he removal of paint—​as a compositional tool equivalent to the more standard additive practice of using layers of paint. Martin’s decision to include both additive and subtractive gestures foreshadows some of her most important work from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when she used complex layered structures, incisions, and skillfully manipulated areas of bare canvas to create celebrated paintings.75 Further, the incisions—likely made by running the back of a brush through wet paint—​demonstrate that while Martin may have worked in multiple campaigns of oil paint, she was also able to work quickly and decisively, a necessity in the dry climate of the high desert. Dream of Night Sailing is not a fully mature work, however, and we see evidence of Martin expanding her repertoire of abstract forms. First, Martin uses thin black calligraphic lines throughout the painting, as in much of her work from the early 1950s. She repeats the concentric circles, at the left of the painting, that we see in duplicate at the top of Untitled, circa 1953, and she employs spirals and crosshatch marks, which will reappear in other 1954–​1955 paintings, such as The Bluebird. While the painting is compositionally balanced through Martin’s use of line, color, and shape, it remains a hybrid of sorts, with effusive abstract expressionist brushwork—​reminiscent of both Diebenkorn and Spohn—​mixed with more abstract forms. Among Martin’s extant work during this period, the painting is unique for its relatively small size. Two other paintings from 1954 share a similar overall palette of black, brown, gray, and white, but they differ substantially from Dream of Night Sailing in their applications of paint, compositional structures, and scale. The Bluebird was executed in oil on a medium-weight cotton duck support, though the painting has subsequently been wax-lined onto a Masonite support (see fig. 34). The painting is horizontal in orientation and measures 28 ¼ by 40 inches—​nearly double the size of Dream of Night Sailing. It is signed at the lower right corner. The painting depicts a series of rectangular forms with rounded edges above a long rectangular shape that culminates in a circular form in which Martin has placed the stylized silhouette of a bird, painted electric blue. The paint is applied thinly, as the drips visible in the interior gray rectangle at the center of the painting demonstrate; and in some areas, as in the white form at the upper right corner, the paint is almost translucent. Martin built up the surface through many thin layers of paint, some of which (notably the interiors of the white and black rectangles at the center left and center of the painting) show through subsequent layers of paint. As a result, the surface of the painting is smooth, a characteristic heightened by the later, likely erroneous, application of a varnish. Martin’s use of the bluebird—​one of the last fully representational forms included in her painting—​is akin to the colorful shot of aquamarine in Dream of Night Sailing. The electric blue acts as a visual jolt against the predominant brownish-grays of Mar-

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tin’s palette, and the pupil of the bird is raised black impasto, a witty counterpoint to Martin’s otherwise thin, smooth surface. Martin is directing the viewer’s eye not only through the manipulation of color but through the precise application of texture as well. If Martin’s ambitions were on full display in the early 1950s, The Bluebird demonstrates that her technical skill had advanced to the point where she could use her considerable wit at the same time. From a compositional standpoint, however, The Bluebird is significant for an entirely different reason: it remains one of Martin’s first extant paintings that codifies her use of rounded organic shapes into a gridded geometric structure. The painting is divided into three horizontal registers, and Martin places the forms along three vertical axes, creating a grid structure within the rectangular format of the painting. This may relate to Gottlieb’s pictograph paintings, although Martin’s painting does not feel as constricted as many of Gottlieb’s pictograph works, nor as prescriptive.76 Martin’s use of a grid structure developed in tandem with her use of line, and the sense of modularity that we get in The Bluebird—​t hat each of the geometric forms could be picked up and moved into a different configuration—​is echoed in works that jettison grid structures altogether, like Untitled, circa 1954, and Dream of Night Sailing. Martin’s experimentation in 1954, in other words, was far more expansive than a steady march toward the eventuality of the grid. Autumn Watch, an oil and graphite on canvas created in 1954, is an example of the messy, often conflicted, and ultimately compelling experimentation that characterized Martin’s work of the period. Measuring thirty-five by fifty-three inches, Autumn Watch is executed in a palette of black, cream, gray, taupe, and white, with hints of brown undertones. The proliferation of thin black lines, applied over and under one another and various layers of paint, demonstrates Martin’s interest in the accumulation of marks and surface incidents. While many lines outline a shape, some lines are placed to achieve other ends—​to provide compositional tension, to link two parts of the canvas, or to enhance the underlying grid structure of the painting. The painting was heavily worked over an extended period of time, as evidenced by Martin’s multiple layers of paint (visible in the upper right and lower left corners), steady buildup of lines, and careful incisions, which can be seen in the top center and upper right corner of the painting. This material evidence of consistent effort is unsurprising, because Autumn Watch combines two aspects of Martin’s formal and stylistic development in a single painting: her use of thin calligraphic lines calls to mind her earlier, surrealist-inspired paintings, while the rounded shapes bear an affinity to shapes in paintings such as Mid-Winter. Martin uses these shapes in a manner similar to those in Beach and Untitled, 1951–​ 1952, establishing a vocabulary of forms that she rotates throughout a series of paintings during this period. Martin experiments with an all-over composition in Autumn Watch, employing contiguous forms that extend to the edges of the canvas. Rather than p ­ roving mutually exclusive, Martin’s deft use of calligraphic line and increasingly abstract forms result in the distinct—​and surprising—​armature of a grid. While Mar-

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tin would not fully realize her celebrated grid paintings until the early 1960s, the seeds of their development lie in this experimental, ambitious painting. While precedents for the combination of calligraphic line and abstract shapes that Martin uses in Autumn Watch can be located in her work of the period (as Untitled, circa 1953; The Bluebird; and Mid-Winter reveal), Autumn Watch also bears a marked similarity to Richard Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque paintings. The resemblance is belated, since Diebenkorn left Albuquerque in the summer of 1952 to teach at the University of Illinois’s Urbana-Champaign campus.77 Martin, however, worked through her understanding of the abstract expressionists’ reception of surrealism on her own time, making her belatedness with regard to Diebenkorn’s work unsurprising. Further, Diebenkorn showed his work at La Galeria Escondida, and gallery director Eulalia Emetaz “continued to be among [Diebenkorn’s] supporters and acquired two of his canvases, which she included in group shows as examples of his early work” after he left the state.78 Like Corbett and Spohn, Diebenkorn brought a deep knowledge of the abstract expressionist movement in San Francisco with him to New Mexico. Diebenkorn related his use of rounded, abstract forms in Albuquerque paintings such as Miller 22, 1951, to his study of Gorky, Miró, de Kooning, and Hassel Smith.79 (Fig. 43.) Martin was looking at many of the same sources, and both Miller 22 and Autumn Watch depict soft, contiguous forms outlined by black lines. Even the palettes of the two paintings are similar, though Martin never acknowledged the influence of the desert as directly as Diebenkorn.80 In an essay on Diebenkorn’s time in Albuquerque, Mark Lavatelli isolates two other formal breakthroughs: Diebenkorn’s use of line and his expansive, all-over compositions.81 Diebenkorn was interested in line not just for its ability to outline shape but also as a mechanism that moves independently of color, field, or shape, and as something that exists “behind or within color fields.” 82 The result was a series of paintings and works on paper where lines assume a myriad of functions, describing shapes while acting as vectors that add a sense of tension and velocity to the works. This can be seen in works such as Albuquerque 10, 1951; Albuquerque 22, 1951; and Albuquerque, 1951. Martin’s lines, in works like Autumn Watch, are similarly multifunctional and mark an analogous transition from semirepresentational subject matter to abstract compositions. Martin’s choice to expand the compositional field in Autumn Watch has echoes in Diebenkorn’s work as well. Diebenkorn’s decision to place forms at the edge of his canvases—​indeed, even letting them slip over the edge—​was inspired by his time in San Francisco, as he recalled: I remember some of the older painters felt that they had to contain, and corners were sort of rounded; there was an avoidance of the corners. We young Turks felt that this was a real cop-out. But at any rate this kind of space . . . would also provide maximum breadth for the painting’s formal activity . . . sort of Mondrian-like. The ideas were to empty the center and to consider the sphere of the painting activity to be somewhat or infinitely larger than that of the support.83

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Figure 43 Richard Diebenkorn, Miller 22, 1951, oil on canvas, 45 × 57 in., bequest of Josephine Morris, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2003.25.1.

Lavatelli notes that Diebenkorn’s paintings and works on paper from this period have forms that “extend toward or appear to be cut off by the framing edge,” an observation that likewise distinguishes Autumn Watch from the more centralized composition of The Bluebird and the more open compositions of her earlier surrealist-inspired work.84 Martin continues the extension of her forms toward the framing edge in a series of paintings of circulating biomorphic shapes, such as Untitled, circa 1954, and Untitled, circa 1955. (Fig. 44.) Martin’s interest in enlarging “the sphere of painting activity” should be seen as a development that emerged as an alternative to—​rather than a replacement of—​her more contained, centralized compositions. Much as Martin chose to add layers of paint while simultaneously removing them in Dream of Night Sailing, her grid paintings from the 1960s employ networks of lines that extend past the edge of the support and grids that are held within the firm boundary of a border of exposed canvas. Martin’s decision to test the efficacy of one strategy by employing its opposite is characteristically exacting and speaks to her ability to hold two contradictory ideas at once, within a state of balanced tension.

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Figure 44 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1955, oil on canvas, 46 ½ × 66 ¼ in., private collection.

By the fall of 1954, when Autumn Watch was painted, Martin had achieved a measure of recognition in Taos and in Albuquerque. Martin worked as a substitute teacher in the Taos schools “in order to finance myself” but was painting at the same time.85 As noted earlier, Bill Howard of the Museum of Modern Art in Albuquerque visited the Ruins Gallery in early September and chose one of Martin’s paintings to exhibit at the museum during a 1955 exhibition that also featured the work of Alfred Rogoway and Wolcott Ely.86 The museum was “a cooperative art center that organized exhibitions and classes” in a converted bean warehouse at 3800 Rio Grande Boulevard in Albuquerque’s North Valley.87 Howard’s selection of Martin’s work in the fall of 1954 stands as the first formal recognition of Martin as a modern painter, a year and a half before she would be a part of the well-known “Taos Moderns” exhibition at the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico.88 In just six months—​from the time she rented the Ledoux Street studio in March to the point when she was selected for the Albuquerque Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition in September—​Martin achieved a remarkable degree of artistic success. On October 28, 1954, a front-page article in El Crepusculo announced that the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation would be located in Taos. The article noted that the foundation

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“has as its primary aim the stimulation and encouragement of creative work in the field of art, literature and music. . . . Mrs. Wurlitzer has long felt the need for an institution which could give aid to those students and professional workers in the field of art, music and literature who would—​w ithout aid—​be unable to pursue or continue their creative work.” 89 Wurlitzer envisioned giving aid through the awarding of residential fellowships, as well as scholarships, grants-in-aid, and “assistance of other sorts falling within the aims and objectives of the foundation.” 90 An heiress to the Wurlitzer Organ fortune, Wurlitzer became a part-time resident of Taos in 1942 and soon began supporting local artists on an ad-hoc basis.91 She invited artists to dinner, collected their work, and anonymously paid their medical bills.92 The establishment of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation formalized her charitable efforts. Artists interested in receiving aid were directed to write to executive secretary Henry Sauerwein.93 A week and a half later, Martin did just that. In her letter she requests “assistance as an artist” to complete paintings for an exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.94 “It would speed my work tremendously if for just this year I could have assistance,” Martin writes. “My present need is sixty dollars a month.” 95 Before making this practical request, though, she lays out her hopes and aspirations as an artist: “I would like to say that my efforts and interests are directed toward assisting in the establishment of American Art, distinct and authentic, that I feel that we, myself and other artists will very soon succeed in making not only a successful but an acceptable representation of the expression of the American people with the help of patronage such as the Wurlitzer Foundation. And I feel that it is very thrilling to be ‘in’ almost at the beginning as we are.” 96 Martin’s aspirations stretched far beyond the high desert of Taos, encompassing nothing less than the “establishment of American Art” and “an acceptable representation . . . of the American people.” While applications often call for lofty statements, Martin could not be accused of lacking ambition—​a testament to her tenacity as well as her desire to exhibit her work, as Corbett, Diebenkorn, Mandelman, Ribak, and Spohn were doing, on a national scale. Martin followed her initial letter of November 8 with a formal application on December 5, repeating her request for sixty dollars a month. She specifies that she felt “sure that I could get a show of twenty paintings or more ready and placed in the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.” 97 Martin also raises the stakes with the Wurlitzer by noting that the Betty Parsons Gallery “has already accepted some of my work and indicated that they would accept a whole show,” although she does not specify which paintings or works on paper Parsons accepted for sale in February.98 On the attached application form, Martin takes two years off her age, as well as listing her educational background and four references: Arthur Young, a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Teachers College, Columbia University; Lez Haas, professor of fine art at the University of New Mexico; Betty Parsons; and Clay Spohn. The geographic spread of Martin’s list of references demonstrates her presence in both New York and Taos, and the mixture of referees—​t wo professors of fine art, a gallery owner, and an established

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artist—​­suggests that she was calculated in her choices, constructing an image of a successful emerging artist. Martin’s first check from the Wurlitzer Foundation was mailed on January 3, 1955, in the amount of forty dollars. Martin used the funds for artistic supplies—​many of which she purchased at the Tony Reyna Indian Shop, which sold arts and crafts from nearby pueblos—​and she dutifully submitted receipts each month. Although this material record of Martin’s industry exists, few of Martin’s 1955 canvases survive. Following the cycle of seasons, Mid-Winter, circa 1954–​1955, was likely painted during the winter of 1954–​1955, after Martin’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Albuquerque and her application to the Wurlitzer Foundation (see fig. 39). In fact, Mid-Winter may be a reference to the Harwood Foundation’s annual midwinter exhibition of Taos artists, which that year opened on February 24, 1955. Martin exhibited Autumn Watch in the show; the headline in El Crepusculo read “ 31 Artists in Harwood Mid-Winter Show,” providing a possible date for the painting as well as a source for Martin’s title.99 Mid-Winter measures thirty-three by forty-eight inches and is executed in oil on a cotton duck support. The original strainer bears notations in Martin’s hand recording the title of the work, her name, and the location. What appears to be a previous title has been marked out in Martin’s hand, suggesting two possibilities: that she reused an older canvas to create Mid-Winter, or that she changed the orientation of the painting. The tacking edges of the cotton duck support are frayed and barely reach over the edge of the wooden strainer, demonstrating her continued frugality with her materials. The construction of the strainer indicates that Martin made it, rather than purchasing one premade, a practice she continued intermittently through the late 1950s. Only two inches shorter and five inches narrower than Autumn Watch, Mid-Winter provides a streamlined variation upon Martin’s prior manipulation of abstract forms. While Martin achieves a sense of depth in Autumn Watch through her use of line, the variation in the viscosity of her paint layers, and the keyhole openings of her forms, MidWinter provides a more graphic, streamlined image. Martin has reduced the number of her forms and uses line solely to outline each form, with the exception of an intriguingly off-kilter dotted line at the left edge. In doing so, Martin creates visual interest by means of the contiguous shapes of her forms, the distribution of light and dark colors, and her use of matte and reflective paint. (The large brown-and-black form at the upper left, for example, is painted using a medium-rich paint, making it particularly shiny against the matte paint Martin used throughout the rest of the painting.) Martin’s distillation of form in Mid-Winter is analogous, in many ways, to the work of Milton Avery, an artist whom Rothko and Gottlieb both admired.100 Like Avery, Martin used flat abstract shapes, strong contours, and color in ways that might easily be understood as a “simple” response to complex pictorial problems. Instead, Martin’s simplified forms can be seen to function as a distillation of her sustained investigation of abstraction, revealing her technical skill and pictorial sophistication in the process. One of Martin’s most inventive paintings of the period is Untitled, circa 1954 (see fig.

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32), which at 33 ⅝ by 47 ½ inches is almost exactly the same size as Mid-Winter.101 A tour de force expressing Martin’s earlier ideas about abstraction, Untitled remains technically surprising. Untitled utilizes forms that recall Martin’s playful forms in works like Beach, Dream of Night Sailing, and Untitled, circa 1952–​1954. Unlike in Mid-Winter, Martin’s forms are not contiguous; rather, they float upon a varied sand-colored ground similar to that of The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The forms are held in a dynamic relationship, and Martin places as much emphasis on the tension between the forms—​and the spaces they create—​as on the forms themselves. This attention to negative space would reappear in her work in the late 1950s. Martin experimented with the charged spaces between Rothko’s floating rectangles, ultimately using this knowledge to achieve the tensile quality of her celebrated grid paintings. In Untitled, circa 1954, Martin’s forms are executed in a range of colors—​from black to pink—​and keyhole openings, like the ones that she used in Autumn Watch, develop a sense of compositional depth. Each shape is outlined in graphite or black ink and then filled in with color, with the exception of the areas that she leaves tantalizingly empty: unexpected swaths of exposed cotton duck fabric. These areas demonstrate both Martin’s appreciation of the fabric of the canvas and her unconventional use of it as a compositional element. Her understanding of texture is evident, since the softness and weave of the cotton duck function as a counterpoint to the slick, hard surfaces of the oil paint. Martin heightens this juxtaposition by highlighting some of her forms, most notably the white form at the center top, with gold leaf, now faded. The gold leaf would have functioned as a reflective surface, providing an even greater contrast with the exposed canvas.102 Martin’s unexpected juxtapositions in Untitled suggest that she, like many artists, was aware of how her material choices affected the ways in which viewers experienced her work. Martin would not articulate this aim until later—​the work “doesn’t exist unless people respond to it,” she observed—​but the seeds of her response-centered approach can be seen in Untitled.103 Around the same time, Martin asked Mildred Tolbert to photograph her work in her Ledoux Street studio, as well as to take her portrait. Martin financed the photographs and slides with her Wurlitzer stipend, as she explained to Sauerwein: “I am sorry to be late with these bills and I have no excuse. I wanted to secure a bill from Mildred [Tolbert] Crews who has taken black and whites of my paintings and colored slides and my portrait. I now owe her ($50) fifty dollars that I shall pay off at the rate of ($5—​) five dollars a month. After this I will get a receipted bill from her. Thank you for all considerations.” 104 The sum of fifty dollars is only ten dollars short of the full amount of financial support that Martin requested from the Wurlitzer each month—​and ten dollars more than she was awarded—​making the payment plan necessary. Martin presumably commissioned the photographs as a way of showing Betty Parsons, and perhaps other dealers, her most recent work without having to pay to ship her work from Taos to New York. She may have also wanted an index or catalog of her work to date, since many paintings were photographed leaning against the adobe wall of her studio. Martin’s willingness to

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Figure 45 Mildred Tolbert, Agnes Martin in her Ledoux Street studio, Taos, ca. 1954, black-and-white photograph, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

spend a large percentage of her overall funding on these photographs indicates that she felt her work was strong enough to warrant publicity, and it confirms the importance she placed on having her work seen by Parsons. Tolbert’s portraits of Martin may have been commissioned as artist’s portraits, meant for placement in gallery brochures or exhibition leaflets or to offer to clients who could not meet Martin in person. While the ultimate efficacy of Tolbert’s photographs as a means of promoting Martin’s work remains unclear, the photographs and portraits offer a view into Martin’s Ledoux Street studio in the mid-1950s. (Figs. 45–​47.) Natural light pours into the studio from Martin’s prized window, and Martin hung paintings on her adobe walls as well as stacking them against the wall. One photograph shows as many as seventeen unframed paintings leaning up against a wall, with further paintings visible in other stacks.105 A second series of photographs show other paintings at the front of Martin’s stacks, suggesting either that Martin and Tolbert moved paintings to give other works prominence,

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Figure 46 Mildred Tolbert, Agnes Martin in her Ledoux Street studio, Taos, ca. 1954, black-and-white photograph, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

or that the photographs were taken over multiple days. Many of these stacked paintings may have been painted between 1952 and 1955 and were simply stored in Martin’s studio, but the accumulation of paintings indicates that Martin was hard at work in Taos. In two of Tolbert’s portraits, an abstract painting is visible at the back of Martin’s studio, over her proper right shoulder. The work is Untitled, circa 1955, an oil painting that measures 46 ½ by 66 ¼ inches (see fig. 44). The painting is signed in the lower left quadrant but not dated. Martin’s use of her cotton duck support is frugal, as in MidWinter: the fabric is stretched to the sides of the wooden support but not around the

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Figure 47 Mildred Tolbert, Agnes Martin in her Ledoux Street studio, Taos, ca. 1954, black-and-white photograph, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

back. She uses a thin, cream-colored ground layer and then uses graphite to outline her forms, which she fills in with thin layers of oil paint and gold leaf. By this point, Martin’s use of paint and her manipulation of color forms have become increasingly complex. For example, the black, mandala-shaped form at the lower center of the painting has a layer of brown underpaint, while the multiple cream-colored oval forms were created by placing a warmer, light-salmon color over an earlier layer of brownish-cream paint. These layers allow Martin to achieve more subtle and varied tones than she could by using multiple layers of the same color of paint. She also uses paints with different levels of reflectance and different viscosities throughout the painting, from the thick, highly saturated black paint of the mandala-like form to the washy gray of the three-armed

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form at the top left of the painting. Martin’s forms extend off the edges of the painting at the lower left corner, continuing her interest in all-over compositions. Her use of clean shapes upon a flat ground provides a distilled composition, defined by the subtle nuances of her technical skill. As 1955 progressed, curators, critics, and other artists began to recognize Martin’s increasing sophistication as a painter. In June, jurors at the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico chose one of Martin’s paintings for the 1955 Annual Exhibition for New Mexico Artists.106 Jurors Kenneth Adams of the University of New Mexico, artist Roderick Mead, and Frederick A. Sweet of the Art Institute of Chicago chose 63 paintings out of a field of 350 entries.107 The exhibition opened on June 12, and Martin exhibited Father and Son, an oil painting on canvas that measured forty by fifty inches.108 The painting is no longer extant and images of the work do not survive, so it remains difficult to say whether Father and Son was one of Martin’s recent works or an older painting.109 The exhibition gave Martin wider recognition in New Mexico—​Martin’s success was also noted in the Taos Art and Artists column in El Crepusculo—​and introduced her work to the curator of a major American museum. Father and Son was selected to travel with the exhibition, offering further exposure for Martin and her work. Between the fall of 1954 and the summer of 1955, Martin exhibited her work at the Museum of Modern Art in Albuquerque, the Harwood Foundation in Taos, and at the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico—​a trifecta of the state’s most prestigious art institutions in the mid-1950s. While Martin was working toward the promise of a major show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, she continued to show her work in smaller venues as well. For example, Martin also showed a “modern” painting at the opening of the new Ribak Gallery in Taos in 1955. “Recently built on their home property, the [Ribak] gallery . . . includes work in various media by both Ribaks and Agnes Martin.” 110 Martin also exhibited two of her paintings in the bookstore and gift shop of her friends Diana and Joe Stein in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 1955, signaling that her lofty ambitions and recent success did not prevent her from organizing more community-oriented endeavors.111 Martin continued to paint during 1955, though most of her canvases from this period are now lost. A particularly successful painting can be seen in the background of one of Tolbert’s black-and-white portraits of Martin, taken in 1955. Martin, wearing a striped smock, rests her hand on a stack of paintings while smiling at the camera (see fig. 47). Behind her is a large canvas that displays a series of curved forms in various tones: two large, commanding black forms, as well as a series of lighter forms, often in two or more colors. The work appears to be executed on a flat, uniform ground, similar to Untitled, circa 1955, though Martin’s forms feel more inventive and playful, as in Untitled, circa 1954. Hung next to this work is a smaller painting with an altogether different sensibility: a rectangular painting with smaller, abstract lines and forms spread across a flat ground. Although the work includes three or four curved forms, many of the smaller forms recall the marks that Martin created in The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the

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Figure 48 Agnes Martin, Untitled, ca. 1955, oil on canvas, 33 × 53 in., private collection, Santa Fe, NM.

Garden of Eden, especially the vinelike forms at the lower right corner. The juxtaposition of two such different works in such close proximity raises a host of questions. Is the second work an earlier work simply being stored in Martin’s studio until she secured an exhibition? If so, why would Martin hang this painting, when she presumably had other, more recent works to hang as backdrops for her promotional photographs? Or is the second work a recent work, dating to 1955—​one that shows a different sensibility than that of her increasingly distilled paintings? Such questions are difficult to answer with more than speculation, but Untitled, circa 1955, is a similarly enigmatic painting from Martin’s time in Taos that also defies easy categorization. (Fig. 48.) The painting measures thirty-three by fifty-three inches and is executed on a cotton duck support. The painting was photographed by Tolbert propped up outside Martin’s Ledoux Street studio, and it was acquired by Aline Porter, an artist who was married to the photographer Eliot Porter and who lived outside of Santa Fe.112 The Porters were friendly with Georgia O’Keeffe and other cultural figures in New Mexico during the 1950s, including Spud Johnson and Cady Wells. The acquisition of Martin’s painting by Aline Porter would thus have introduced Martin’s work to a highly cultured circle of New Mexican artists, as well as to occasional visitors from New York. Martin’s painting can be seen hung high on a wall in the Porters’ living room in

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Figure 49 Rosalie Thorne McKenna, Aline Porter, Painter, Tesuque, New Mexico, 1962, 13 ¾ × 10 ⅔ in., Center for Creative Photography.

a 1962 photograph, next to a traditional kiva fireplace. (Fig. 49.) The work is painted in a quiet palette of cream, taupe, and white, with thin black lines defining a series of upright forms at the lower center of the painting. Many of Martin’s forms are drawn from her vocabulary of abstract shapes, as with the quatrefoil form at the upper left corner of the painting (seen in Adam and Eve as well as the 1958 work on paper Night and Day). (Fig. 50.) However, the rounded square form outlined in black seen at the right edge of the painting has a near twin in the same location in the painting Untitled, circa 1955, making the painting difficult to date. Neither linear elements nor organic forms dominate this painting. The very inability to categorize Martin’s paintings of this period—​the difficulty of assigning each work a specific date or creating a teleological structure for the development of Martin’s work—​reminds us that Martin’s progress in 1955, like her previous development, was bimodal and experimental rather than linear and neatly compartmentalized. Indeed, the understanding of edges and borders that Martin discovers, and the tension she develops in the negative spaces between her forms, serve as fundamental compositional tools in her paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, just as those works could not exist without the simultaneous development of Martin’s taut, highly charged lines. While Martin’s work was well represented in group shows in 1954 and 1955, it was not until November 1955 that Martin secured her first two-woman exhibition. The selection of Martin’s work to travel with the 1955 Annual Exhibition for New Mexico Artists may have called her work to the attention of the curators of the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico, who extended an invitation for Martin to show her paintings alongside the

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Figure 50 Agnes Martin, Night and Day, 1958, casein on paper, 6 ¼ × 9 in., private collection, Santa Fe, NM.

work of Emma Lou Davis. El Crepusculo reported, “Emma Lou Davis and Agnes Martin are having a joint exhibition of their work at the Art Gallery, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe. Miss Davis is represented by 22 works, including paintings and sculptures. Miss Martin is showing 12 paintings. The exhibition is abstract and expressionistic in character.” 113 There is no surviving brochure for the exhibition, nor a checklist of works, but the description of the works as “abstract and expressionistic in character” mirrors the extant works that Martin created during this period. However, the exhibition was not received as well as Martin may have wished. In a review for the Santa Fe New Mexican, Dave Weber demonstrates that, even early on, Martin’s work was not immune to significant gender bias: “In the next alcove Agnes Martin of Taos presents, without a foreword, nothing other than puzzles. I heartily rec­ ommend this for the children. There should have been a ‘hello mamma’ in one. These archaistic distortions have no chance of recognition in any society’s gallery today. They are obsolete. . . . The disappointing note in this alcove is the tendency towards theatri­ cality.” 114 Weber’s observation that Martin presented “nothing other than puzzles” indi­ cates that Martin may have exhibited some of her works, such as Mid-Winter, in which the forms are contiguous. The charge of “archaistic distortions” once again brings Gott­

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lieb’s pictographs to mind and causes one to wonder if Martin also included earlier, figurative works such as Adam and Eve, or whether Weber responded to works such as The Bluebird. Finally, the quiet palette of most of Martin’s work from this period, as well as the lack of any overwrought, artificial, or dramatic sensibility, contradicts Weber’s claim of theatricality. Weber’s review is exceptional, in the corpus of early criticism of Martin’s work, for its demeaning and dismissive tone. Martin may not have felt the sting of Weber’s review immediately, since El Crepusculo reports, “Miss Martin left last week for New York where she will spend a month visiting galleries and museums.” 115 Martin’s monthlong trip to New York during the fall of 1955 confirms that she was eager to keep up with the latest developments in contemporary art as well as with new exhibitions at major museums. Martin met with Betty Parsons and again tried to secure an exhibition for her work, as she noted to Helene Wurlitzer in a letter thanking Wurlitzer for her financial support in January 1956. “I am grateful for the assistance I received last year through the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. It gave me the materials I needed and a certain amount of security and enabled me to make a very good try for my New York show. This did not succeed but Miss Betty Parsons whose gallery I will eventually show in assured me that in one more year she thought I could make it which is not discouraging.” 116 While it remains hard to believe that Parsons’s verdict on Martin’s 1955 work was not discouraging, Martin maintained a hopeful tone in the rest of the letter, in which she detailed her accomplishments of the past year and her plans for the future. I was able to have a two artist show at Santa Fe with Miss Emma Lou Davis a local sculptor that was quite successful in its expression, I think, and a three-artist show in the Albuquerque Museum of Modern Art with Alfred Rogoway and Wolcott Ely. I also contributed to the State Fair and the New Mexico Artists Show in the Santa Fe Museum and to two traveling shows from the latter. I painted all together one hundred canvases of which I had a good opinion and sold seven. My trip to New York was rewarding and on my return I was fortunate enough to secure a part time job with the Red Cross here which will give me financial security for the coming year.117

Martin’s claim that she painted “over a hundred canvases” suggests a staggering level of productivity—​a painting roughly every three and a half days—​especially given the relatively large size of most of her surviving canvases of the period. Martin further qualifies her statement by noting that these paintings were the ones “of which [she] had a good opinion,” suggesting that her output could have been larger. While Martin was writing to the Wurlitzer Foundation, Ted Egri and Raymond Jonson were organizing an exhibition of contemporary art to be held at the Jonson Gallery at the end of February 1956. As the primary aim of the exhibition was to show the work of Taos’s modern artists, Egri’s approach to the exhibition was inclusive: “The show

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of Taos Moderns opening Sunday . . . will include all Taos painters using principally the modern idiom except for a very few who are away and can’t be reached.” 118 Egri’s approach—​similar to the democratic approach of the Ruins Gallery—​gathered a critical mass of modern artists from Taos and had the consequence of branding the artists as the “Taos Moderns,” a term Jonson coined for the exhibition’s title.119 The Taos Moderns were never a stylistically cohesive group, and David Witt notes that the accumulation of modern artists “was [not] in any sense an organized coalescing—​t hese artists were more anarchic. . . . What bound these artists, made them identifiable as a group, at least loosely, [was] their modernist approach to art, however different their images were from one another.” 120 This description fits Martin’s independent mind-set. Martin did not identify with the Taos Moderns beyond the confines of the Taos Moderns exhibition, which subsequently traveled to the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico in October 1956.121 Established as a Taos Modern, Martin continued to show in various venues in Taos during the spring and summer of 1956. She participated in an exhibition at the Ruins Gallery at the end of May as a “new member” of the gallery and showed in the annual summer exhibition at the Harwood in July.122 Most significantly, Martin sold an oil painting, Mountain Monument, hanging at the Ruins Gallery, to Betty Parsons in late August.123 A work titled Monument to Mountains, an inversion of Martin’s title, appears on an undated inventory list for Betty Parsons’s gallery in New York, listed as an oil painting on canvas measuring forty-eight by seventy-one inches and dated to 1954.124 Monument to Mountains was shown in Martin’s first group show with Betty Parsons in the fall of 1958, priced at $650.125 If either El Crepusculo’s reporter or Parsons inverted the title of Martin’s painting, then Martin’s second major step toward her New York debut—​t he purchase of a painting by a prominent dealer—​was accomplished in Taos. Martin remained in Taos from the summer of 1956 through the fall of 1957, continuing to paint. She showed her work at the spring show at the Harwood in May 1957 and showed a work titled Black Triangle at the annual summer exhibition at the Harwood.126 Although images of this work do not survive, the title indicates that Martin was moving in an increasingly geometric direction. In September, Betty Parsons returned to Taos, checkbook in hand: “From the Stables Gallery last week, Betty Parsons of the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, purchased from the two-man show by Clay Spohn and Oli Shivonen ‘Yellow Shapes,’ an abstract oil by Mr. Spohn, and two drawings by Mr. Shivonen. Earlier, Miss Parsons purchased two oils from Agnes Martin.” 127 While Martin recalled, later in life, exhibiting work at the Stables Gallery (perhaps referring to Tolbert’s Untitled, circa 1953), her recollection of Parsons’s purchase suggests an alternate scenario: “Another boy and I rented a store in Ranchos, an empty store for nine dollars a month. Nine dollars a month. Can you imagine? So we had one man shows, one after another. So when Betty Parsons came I happened to have a one-man show hanging.” 128 Barbara Haskell confirms Martin’s account, noting that an “endorse-

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Figure 51 Agnes Martin, Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), ca. 1956, oil on composition board, 47 ½ × 71 ¼ in., private collection of Stanley D. Heckman, New York City.

ment” by Parsons’s traveling companion, Kenzo Okada, “of Martin’s work validated Parsons’ own positive response when she viewed it in the storefront Martin and another artist had rented for the occasion.” 129 Haskell contends that Parsons offered to show Martin’s work on the condition that she relocate to New York.130 As Martin recalled, Parsons “bought enough paintings so I could afford to go to New York. So I went and she said she’d show them as long as I stayed in New York.” 131 Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), circa 1956, is one of the paintings that may have convinced Parsons that Martin was ready to exhibit her work in New York, since it shows the compositional elegance and economy of means that would come to define Martin’s work in the late 1950s and early 1960s.132 (Fig. 51.) Parsons kept her promise and used an image of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) on the announcement for Martin’s first solo exhibition.133 (Figs. 52a–b.) Martin’s account of her sale of paintings to Parsons in 1957 underscores the ambition, determination, and resourcefulness that characterized her desire to create paintings of the highest quality and to have them seen—​and shown—​by respected gallery owners. During her years in Taos, Martin endured significant financial hardship while utilizing the networks of resources available to her, both in New York and in Taos, to c­ reate

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Figures 52a–b. Betty Parsons Presents a First New York Showing of Oil Paintings by Agnes Martin, 1958, Betty Parsons Gallery, announcement (front and back): 1 folded sheet; 6 ¼ × 8 ⅔ in. Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

artwork that could compete with the most advanced art in America. She looked at the work of others and often emulated it, and she was relentlessly experimental. Ultimately, however, Martin discarded the compositional strategies and technical knowledge that did not move her painting forward, and she had the confidence and skill to work in multiple styles at one time. Martin’s work—​created in a goat shed and shown in adobe ruins, rundown stables, and abandoned storefronts—​was tough, heavily worked, and hard won but, as Parsons understood, had the power to become something more.

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3 THE PROGRESSION OF A PAINTER’S WORK I painted for twenty years without painting a painting that I liked. I never painted a painting I liked until I got to New York, and they were completely non-objective, then I liked them. When I started out painting, I painted everything from landscapes and Indians to flowers and everything. I even taught portrait painting at the University of New Mexico. Gradually, over twenty years, my work became more and more abstract. It was a process.1

Reflecting upon her career in this 1993 interview with Irving Sandler, Agnes Martin declared that she “painted for twenty years without painting a painting that [she] liked,” thereby establishing a period of apprenticeship—​and aesthetic dissatisfaction—​that lasted for two decades. Martin neatly divides her oeuvre into works she completed before her return to New York in the late fall of 1957 (“I never painted a painting I liked until I got to New York”) and works that she completed in New York and after, which she deems “completely non-objective.” Scholars have largely accepted this chronology, even though Martin produced nonobjective works while in Taos in the mid-1950s and used many of the strategies she had developed in her earlier representational paintings during her residency in New York from 1957 to 1967. Despite Martin’s rigid categorization of her work, her last two sentences in this quotation offer the possibility of another interpretation: the development of her art as a “gradual . . . process” that occurred over time, a process that foregrounded continuity but allowed room for innovation and experimentation. Martin does not elaborate further in her interview with Sandler, but her work from the late 1950s and early 1960s offers ample evidence of her nonlinear patterns of development, her crucial moments of transition, and her periods of aesthetic discernment. What specific conditions, one may ask, characterized the “process” of her move to abstraction? Martin arrived in New York in the late fall of 1957, after Betty Parsons urged her to relocate to New York City from Taos and purchased enough paintings to finance Martin’s move across the country.2 Martin lived with Parsons in her studio at 143 East For-

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tieth Street, between the New York Public Library and the United Nations, during her first weeks in the city.3 “Betty helped me when I came to town,” Martin remembered. “She put me up until I found a place to stay. She really was helpful.” 4 Shortly thereafter, Ellsworth Kelly, one of the artists Parsons represented, told Parsons that a loft was available downtown on Coenties Slip.5 Parsons liked to take collectors to see her artists in their studios, and so the potential of having Martin so close to other gallery artists, such as Kelly and Jack Youngerman, must have appealed to Parsons.6 (Kelly had moved to 3–​5 Coenties Slip after his return from Paris in 1956, and Youngerman had taken up residence in 1957.) Coming from the close-knit artistic community of Taos, Martin may have liked the proximity to other artists that life on the Slip promised. “I met Agnes when Betty Parsons brought her to Ellsworth Kelly’s studio on Coenties Slip to introduce her to the people down there,” Youngerman recalled. “Martin didn’t know anybody.” 7 Robert Indiana (then known as Robert Clark) had moved to the Slip in 1956, and Lenore Tawney, a weaver, came in 1957. James Rosenquist and Ann Wilson soon followed. Despite not knowing anyone, Martin liked a loft at 27 Coenties Slip and rented it for forty-five dollars a month.8 Jonathan Katz describes Coenties Slip in the late 1950s as “one of America’s only largely queer artistic enclaves” and argues that Martin’s “mature style first emerged within the only queer social world she would ever really know.” 9 Martin was likely aware of Parsons’s sexuality when she moved to New York; what she knew about the sexuality of the other artists on the Slip, whether gay or straight, is more speculative. However, Katz’s contention that Coenties Slip was “the only queer social world” that Martin would “ever really know” dismisses the well-known lesbian culture of Taos as well as Martin’s prior relationships. In addition, it ignores Martin’s significant artistic development in New Mexico. Katz’s argument perpetuates the idea of Martin as an artist who emerged fully formed in the 1960s—​the “Venus-from-the-sea effect” that Schjeldahl lobbies against—​t hus reducing a complicated series of personal and professional discoveries to a single moment of artistic and personal self-realization.10 Katz’s argument also downplays the significant role that Parsons played in placing Martin among her stable of young, promising artists. Parsons was eager to foster a community of artists on Coenties Slip for many reasons, but chief among them was the need to maintain the vitality of her gallery. Parsons was known for her discoveries of Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and Still, and her reputation as an arbiter of taste still held considerable sway over younger artists in New York in the late 1950s.11 As Youngerman explains, “The Betty Parsons Gallery was important. Reinhardt and Newman were there, and Rothko had just left to go across the hall to Janis. . . . Betty said herself that she wasn’t any good at business. She was better than that, in a way. Clement Greenberg said that she ran her gallery as an extension of an artist’s studio, and there’s a lot of truth to that.” 12 Youngerman’s analysis of Parsons’s importance within the New York art world is at once nostalgic for Parsons’s prior success at spotting first-rate talent and clear-eyed about her limitations as a businesswoman. After suffer-

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ing the departures of Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and Still, Parsons was trying to rebuild her stable of artists in the late 1950s, in no small part to compete with the increasing number of new galleries in New York. Parsons, as her biographer Lee Hall recounts, “began to discover artists at an alarming rate” during the 1950s, though not all were of the same quality.13 This included such notable finds as Kelly, who in turn led Parsons to look at the work of Youngerman. Parsons’s decision to represent Martin—​after two false starts—​can be traced to her desire to find the next Pollock or Rothko, as well as to the opening of a new satellite gallery designed to show the work of emerging artists. Section Eleven, Parsons’s satellite gallery, was the brainchild of Susan Hilles, the wealthy wife of a Yale professor and a friend of Parsons’s. Hilles decided to support Parsons’s pursuit of new talent by subsidizing the rent of a satellite gallery for two years. Parsons “agreed on the spot” to Hilles’s idea, and many of Parsons’s friends, among them Annie Laurie Witzel and Hope Williams, supported the plan.14 Artists such as Barnett Newman “thought it was a good idea,” as did Martin.15 Newman had not shown his paintings in New York since April 1951, when his show at the Betty Parsons Gallery was panned by critics, and so was speaking in a largely advisory role.16 But Martin had more of a stake in Hilles’s idea, since she had spent the end of 1957 and the beginning of 1958 waiting for her long-promised first solo exhibition at Parsons’s gallery.17 (Martin’s anxiety about securing an exhibition with Parsons was not ill-founded; Parsons firmly declined to visit Jasper Johns’s studio—​foreclosing all hope of showing his work—​in 1957.)18 A satellite gallery focusing on new talent promised to expedite that process. Parsons introduced Section Eleven, named for the gallery’s address at 11 East FiftySeventh Street, through a 1958 press release that clearly articulated her second act as a dealer: After a full cycle of pioneering; after having introduced many of the major American painters including Pollock, Rothko, Newman, Still, Tomlin, Stamos, Lipton; Betty Parsons will undertake once again to introduce gifted but as yet unknown painters. Section Eleven will be an annex of the Betty Parsons Gallery in which the emphasis will be on developing fresh talent and organizing unusual theme exhibitions of a genre seen often in Europe but rarely in New York. . . . Mrs. Parsons, herself an artist, understands that the artist should be seen and encouraged now, when he is ready, even if the public is not yet ready for his vision.19

By reminding readers of her earlier success, Parsons lays the foundation for her introduction of “gifted but as yet unknown” painters with “fresh talent.” Martin, desperate for a solo exhibition at an established gallery in New York, was thus swept into Parsons’s revisionist public relations strategy, which centered on the “discovery” of new talent. In return for her New York debut with Parsons, in other words, Martin was willing to be “discovered”—​or more accurately, rediscovered, by a new audience—​despite her prior success as an exhibiting artist in New Mexico.

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Martin’s biography from the Betty Parsons Gallery makes no mention of her previous exhibitions in New Mexico and lists only collectors based in New York City, despite the placement of some of her works with friends and relatives in New Mexico and Oregon.20 It thus comes as no surprise that when Parsons decided to write a statement of support for Martin, it would focus as much on her own role as a visionary dealer as on Martin’s talent: “Agnes Martin is one of the most interesting painters I have found in the last ten years.” 21 Despite Parsons’s public relations strategy in regard to both Section Eleven and Martin’s work, Martin’s painting did not undergo as dramatic and immediate a change upon her move to Manhattan as has usually been assumed.22 Rather, Martin used the tools she developed in Taos to continue to refine her compositions, her palette, and her technique, carefully studying the work of other artists, such as Newman, Reinhardt, and Rothko. In fact, Martin’s first year on Coenties Slip is reminiscent, in many ways, of the 1951–​1952 academic year she spent at Teachers College. Taking advantage of the resources that New York offered her to see original works of art, Martin tested the strategies she gleaned from the paintings of abstract expressionists in an attempt to more precisely define her own aesthetic vision, consistently refining her means of visual communication. The end of 1957 through the end of 1958 thus represents Martin’s final period of apprenticeship while simultaneously marking her transition into a fuller engagement with her fellow artists on Coenties Slip. During 1958, and certainly in 1959, Martin’s contact with artists such as Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, and Lenore Tawney, as well as her interest in contemporary artistic movements such as assemblage and pop, precipitated a creative exchange that prompted some of the most innovative, experimental, and unexpected work of her early career. Rather than representing the model of rupture that Parsons’s narrative implies, the work that Martin first created on Coenties Slip owes a demonstrable debt to her earlier work in Taos. This is most visibly the case with Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), circa 1956, a painting that Martin began in Taos.23 (Fig. 51.) The painting is relatively large, measuring 47 ½ inches high by 71 ¼ inches wide, and is executed in oil on composition board. The size of the painting, the material of the support, and the type of paint are consistent with those of The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, circa 1953, though the composition and style of the two paintings are dramatically different.24 A closer comparison may be drawn between Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) and Untitled, n.d., an oil painting on Upsom board that measures 48 by 72 inches. (Fig. 53.) Both paintings depict a series of open and closed forms placed in geometric arrangements upon a relatively flat field of color. While only black-and-white reproductions of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) survive, the palette of creams, sandy tans, beiges, and lavender in Untitled suggest the palette of the high desert in Taos. Further, the large tan form at the upper right corner bears a resemblance to many Spanish colonial churches in New Mexico, including the famous San Francisco de Assisi in Ranchos de Taos. If Martin’s form can be understood as an abstraction of the adobe church at Ranchos de Taos—​which

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Figure 53 Agnes Martin, Untitled, n.d., oil on Upsom board, 48 × 72 in., private collection.

cannot be conclusively proven given the available evidence—​her use of carefully placed linear forms throughout the remainder of the painting demonstrates her inclination toward increasingly spare, geometric compositions. Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) follows this trend, and many of the forms and strategies that Martin used in earlier paintings in Taos—​squares that extend beyond the borders of the canvas; circular forms within other, larger circles; forms placed in precise linear relationships with one another—​are in evidence here. The balance of positive and negative space is precisely calibrated, and there is again a sense of dynamic tension between the forms. This strategy, while developed and at least partly executed in Taos, appealed to Betty Parsons’s eye and her sense of the artistic climate in New York. A work titled simply L.T., which is likely this painting, was shown at Martin’s first group exhibition at Section Eleven, from September 19 through October 18, 1958.25 Drift of Summer, a 50-by-35 ¾-inch oil on canvas executed in 1957, functions almost as a detail of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.): Martin isolated the rectangular form containing the four circles in the upper right corner of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), rotated it ninety degrees clockwise, and set it against a cream-and-tan ground. (Fig. 54.) Water Sign, also created in 1957 but now lost, is composed of six equal circles placed in a two-by-three grid within a pale-colored rectangle, which is enclosed on three sides by a dark border. (Fig. 55.) In

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Figure 54 Agnes Martin, Drift of Summer, 1957, oil on canvas, 50 × 35 ¾ in., private collection.

Figure 55 Agnes Martin, Water Sign, 1957, oil on canvas, 38 × 49 in., location unknown.

the space of a few months, Martin formalized the wavy rings in Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) into modular circles arranged in a grid format, while purging extraneous forms and creating a linear, increasingly stylized compositional structure. Martin did not work in a serial manner at the end of her time in Taos or at the beginning of her time in New York, but this progression of paintings demonstrates the ways in which her ideas and strategies developed over time and across multiple canvases. In addition, they establish, contrary to the popular belief that Martin’s painting changed immediately upon her return to New York, that Martin’s increasingly austere geometric compositions are rooted in—​ and, indeed, came out of—​t he rich trove of semiabstract paintings she created in Taos between 1955 and 1957. Martin began to utilize refined, stylized geometric forms in her paintings during the second half of 1957. Just as Martin’s development in Taos was bilateral, establishing her facility with line while investigating the possibilities and limitations of biomorphism, her use of circular forms as a compositional device in 1957 was accompanied by a simultaneous exploration of squares, rectangles, and triangles. Martin’s concurrent use of circles and rectangles can be seen in Drift of Summer and Water Sign and is a motif that she would return to repeatedly throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Despite the relative simplicity that such a strategy implies, Martin’s turn toward geometric compositional structures forms part of a larger search, at the end of the 1950s, by New York artists to find a compelling departure from the all-over canvases of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock—​when, as Lucy Lippard notes, “everyone was casting about for a way out of Expressionism.” 26 Beach, circa 1957, is one attempt at such a departure. (Fig. 56.) Measuring forty-eight

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Figure 56 Agnes Martin, Beach, ca. 1957, oil on canvas, 48 × 38 in., private collection, San Francisco, CA.

inches high by thirty-eight inches wide, Beach is roughly the same size as Water Sign. The painting consists of a multilayered composition of squares and rectangles, and Martin uses a similar juxtaposition of light and dark tones to differentiate the forms. While Martin’s use of rectangular forms can be traced to her Taos paintings—​t he rectangular forms in The Bluebird and Autumn Watch come to mind—​the flatness and frontality

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Figure 57 Mildred Tolbert, Clay Spohn, Ad Reinhardt, Eulalia Emetaz, and Edward Corbett in front of La Galeria Escondida, Taos, 1951, black-and-white photograph, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

of Beach suggests another possible alternative: a familiarity with the paintings of Ad Reinhardt. Reinhardt taught at the University of Wyoming in Laramie during the summer of 1951, and during the course of that summer he traveled to Taos.27 Reinhardt’s trip to Taos was likely at the invitation of Edward Corbett or Clay Spohn. (He had taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco during the previous summer, where he met Corbett and, possibly, Spohn.)28 The three men are seen chatting with Eulalia Emetaz outside La Galeria Escondida in a photograph taken that summer in Taos; Reinhardt, not used to the strong sun of the Southwest, is conspicuous in his dark clothing.29 (Fig. 57.) Given Martin’s close friendships with Corbett and Spohn during this period, it seems likely that she would have met the artist during his visit. (When asked, at the end of her life, if she had been a good friend of Reinhardt’s, Martin replied, “At least I hope I was.”)30 By the time Martin arrived in New York for the 1951–​1952 academic year at Teachers College, Columbia University, Reinhardt was showing his work at Betty Parsons’s and Sidney Janis’s galleries, in addition to exhibiting work at the 1952 Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. Martin’s subsequent return to

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New York in the late fall of 1957 coincided with the 1957 Whitney Annual, which ran from November 20, 1957, through January 12, 1958, and included Reinhardt’s painting Number 1, 1957.31 Between Reinhardt’s visit to Taos in 1951 and his inclusion in the 1957 Whitney Annual, his work shifted from gestural paintings dominated by small, regularized blocks of color—​his so-called bricks—​to monochromatic paintings of balanced, interlocking square and rectangular forms that made up geometric compositions.32 Although Lippard notes that it is “almost impossible” to “establish the date of [Reinhardt’s] first monochromes,” by 1956 Reinhardt had given up the brightly colored red and blue paintings of the early 1950s in order to focus on the creation of his dark paintings.33 In a 1956 review, Thomas Hess focuses on Reinhardt’s compositional innovations, and Hess’s analysis applies equally well to Martin’s Beach, circa 1957: “[The] canvas-filling cross- or -shapes [are] equally made up of background and foreground, neither of which thus exists. Such simple symmetry eliminates ‘balancing’ because the shapes are pre-balanced. The closeness of hues, in a way, eliminates color, for in extreme closeness violet or brown or green act the same.” 34 Hess’s perceptive observations provide a method for understanding the compositional complexity of Reinhardt’s dark paintings. The placement of Reinhardt’s “pre-balanced” squares and rectangles confounds preconceived notions of pictorial space, creating a space in which “neither . . . [background nor foreground] exists,” while the closeness of Reinhardt’s hues likewise “eliminates color.” It is these fundamental renunciations that Martin responds to with Beach, though in a notably lighter key and without Reinhardt’s close hues. While Beach does not utilize a “cross- or H-shape” as in many of Reinhardt’s works, the composition is nonetheless made up of two central U-shaped forms, which are surrounded by two cream-colored rectangles on either side and two U-shaped forms at top and bottom. The center of the painting is bisected into two horizontal rectangles, the top cream and the bottom brown. The shapes appear to be interlocking from a distance, but close inspection reveals that they are individual in nature; their edges rarely meet. The composition is symmetrical and balanced—​or, as Hess might say, “pre-balanced.” However, while Reinhardt’s compositions foreclose the idea of background and foreground, Beach is less successful in this regard. The central U-shaped forms appear to move forward in space, as does the brown rectangle at the center of the composition. This is largely due to Martin’s use of color, which is not as carefully calibrated as that in Reinhardt’s dark paintings or, in point of fact, some of his earlier red and blue paintings. Martin’s colors are distinctly her own, however, and remind us that her appropriation of Reinhardt’s compositional strategies and color relationships remain in the service of her own aesthetic vision. The questions of foreground and background that Martin investigates in Beach would become increasingly important in her work in the early 1960s, and would not be fully resolved until the advent of her famous grid paintings—​which, in turn, rely upon subtle modulations of color. Martin continued her investigation of Reinhardt in at least three more paintings

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Figure 58 Agnes Martin, Desert Rain, 1957, oil on canvas, 25 × 25 in., private collection.

from 1957: Desert Rain, Wheat, and Window. (Figs. 58–​60.) Each of these paintings utilizes a square format, which Reinhardt had used before 1957 but did not use exclusively until 1960, and employs a variation of a cruciform composition.35 Of these, Desert Rain is the closest in feeling to Beach, because Martin uses a similar palette and light, feathery application of paint.36 Wheat, which measures forty-nine inches square, is executed in oil on a cotton duck support and is signed, titled, and dated “’57” on the verso of the painting. Martin’s palette is similar to that of Desert Rain, though her application of paint feels more assured and her proportions more balanced. The most significant departure is that of Window, where Martin abandons the bisected format and bordered

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Figure 59 Agnes Martin, Wheat, 1957, oil on canvas, 49 × 49 in., private collection, San Francisco, CA.

compositions of Desert Rain and Wheat in favor of a more hard-edged, clearly defined arrangement of four stacked rectangles. These paintings demonstrate Martin’s sustained effort to understand Reinhardt’s compositional strategies, which offered Martin a model of formal clarity and balance in a completely nonobjective format. In Reinhardt’s work, Martin located a precedent for a method of geometric abstraction that crystalized many of her nascent ideas from Taos—​the stacked forms of The Bluebird, for example—​and that was sanctioned by Betty Parsons through her regular shows of Reinhardt’s work. In many ways, Martin is an unlikely heir to Reinhardt. As Lippard notes, “Recogni-

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Figure 60 Agnes Martin, Window, 1957, oil on canvas, 38 × 38 in., Dia Art Foundation, New York; anonymous gift, 2002.002.

tion of Reinhardt’s full stature was left to artists of a still younger generation, who had carefully considered his ideas, especially Joseph Kosuth, Robert Smithson and Carl Andre.” 37 Reinhardt’s work, in other words, was resonant for the group of minimalist and conceptualist artists who came of age in the mid-1960s, at the moment when Reinhardt showed his work in three galleries simultaneously.38 Among Reinhardt’s admirers during this period were Robert Morris and Frank Stella.39 Reinhardt’s reputation as “the father of minimalism” was further cemented by Barbara Rose’s essay “ABC Art,” but Yve-Alain Bois argues that “the labels ‘Minimalist’ or ‘Conceptualist’ have adhered to

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Reinhardt to this day as much as that of ‘mystic,’ and have prevented a genuine understanding of his art.” 4 0 Artists like Martin, who were looking closely at Reinhardt’s work in the late 1950s, are likewise left out of the discussion. This is a mistake, in large part because Reinhardt’s legacy was fundamental to Martin’s subsequent artistic development. Martin’s careful study of Reinhardt in 1957 could easily be written off as that of a student-copyist, a highly derivative phase passed through on Martin’s path to realizing her own aesthetic vision. Bois’s essay on Reinhardt, “The Limit of Almost,” prompts another idea: that Reinhardt’s contribution to Martin’s work is the assertion, made repeatedly through the example of his paintings, that sustained “understatement”—​and not just the immediacy and bravado that characterized abstract expressionism—​can yield moments of sublime clarity. “The reward of this timeless instant,” Bois writes of the experience of viewing a Reinhardt, “is only available to those who have faith enough to withstand its infinite duration.” 41 Critics routinely describe what Bois calls the “hypnotic” effect of looking at a “black” Reinhardt painting in much the same way that they describe the effect of seeing one of Martin’s paintings. These narratives are based upon duration and temporality: the longer you look, the more you see. Bois declares this temporality to be “one of the most extraordinary features of Reinhardt’s later works,” and he notes that Reinhardt’s dual attention to temporality (or timelessness) and light (or the absence of light) has the effect of “dematerializing the beholder” in front of the painting.42 While such a dematerialization is not literally possible, Bois’s suggestion of a transformation in the viewer is well taken. Reinhardt’s struggle, in the 1940s and 1950s, was to create an audience that would understand and appreciate his paintings: “He proposed an understatement to a beholder equipped only for an overstatement; he murmured in ears trained to hear only shouts. It took him a long time to understand that he would first have to transform his auditor, to alter the phenomenological conditions of the perceptibility of his art in such a way that the beholder, at least if he or she were willing to take it even mildly seriously, would have to renounce completely any usual expectations.” 43 The repudiation of “any usual expectations” that Reinhardt sought was never fully realized during his lifetime, though the retrospective of Reinhardt’s work at the Jewish Museum in 1966 signaled that the tide was shifting. But Reinhardt’s legacy is more nuanced, and fartherreaching, than Bois’s conclusion suggests. Reinhardt was transforming not only his viewers during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s but also those who would look at Martin’s difficult, equally durational grid paintings. As a result, while Reinhardt’s compositional structures and his color relations are his most obvious legacy to Martin, evident in her aesthetic development in 1957, his insistence on the power of sustained understatement is the most lasting. When Martin arrived in New York in 1957, not “know[ing] anybody,” Betty Parsons set about introducing Martin to the artists in her gallery.44 Among the artists Martin met was Barnett Newman, whose Front Street studio was around the corner from Martin’s studio on Coenties Slip. The two artists became friends, and Parsons specifically

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enlisted Newman’s help in launching Martin’s career in New York before her first solo exhibition in 1958. As Annalee Newman remembers, “Barney did everything he could for Agnes—​first, because she was Betty’s friend. . . . He went to parties Betty gave for Agnes. He brought friends. He talked to other people about her work, and, right from the beginning, he hung all her shows. Barney had a terrific eye for new young talent, and he recognized Agnes’ possibilities. But he wouldn’t have done all that if Betty hadn’t made it clear how important Agnes was to her.” 45 If Newman’s efforts on Martin’s behalf were somewhat self-interested—​insofar as Parsons was also his dealer—​t hey had a considerable impact on Martin’s career. Newman’s support of Martin’s work gave her paintings legitimacy within the New York scene and created interest in her first exhibitions. The artist Robert Murray recalled that when he arrived in New York in 1960, he was similarly “overwhelmed by Barney’s generosity with his time.” 4 6 Newman took Murray to “all the secret places in New York where many of the painters of his generation got their materials,” and he showed Murray his work.47 Newman’s offer to show his paintings had a profound effect on Murray’s art; Murray later called it “a great sort of post-doctoral class for me.” 4 8 Martin’s own, largely self-taught “postdoctoral class” in Newman’s painting was well under way by 1957, as evidenced by Untitled, 1957.49 (Fig. 61.) The painting measures thirty-four inches square and is executed in oil paint over an artist-applied priming on a finely woven cotton duck support.50 The painting consists of two black triangles split by a central strip of white paint, with smaller, gray triangles in each corner. The strip of white paint in the center of the painting is a direct homage to Newman’s “zips,” which he discovered while he was testing “the effect of using a bright orange-red against his brownish red” by painting the orange-red on top of a piece of masking tape he applied to the center of the canvas, so that he could pull the tape off if the color was incorrect.51 What began as a standard color-experiment became a compositional revelation for Newman. Richard Shiff describes this as Newman’s “metaphysical act”: “It created a space, rather than merely occupying existing space by ‘illustrating the void’ with ‘biomorphic forms.’ . . . Contemplating Onement I, Newman realized that he had not divided but had united the space of the canvas.” 52 Newman’s work before Onement I, 1948, was concerned with biomorphic forms, much as Martin’s was, as well as with what Newman termed “illustrating the void”—​a concept he used to describe the process of filling the pictorial space of the canvas with meaningful content. (See, for example, Pagan Void, 1946.) But with Onement I, Newman moved into new territory: instead of merely “illustrating” a spatial concept or filling pictorial space, Newman, in Shiff’s reading, “created a space.” This was achieved through a vertical band that Newman called a “zip” and which, through the division of space, paradoxically “declared the whole area as a single, total area.” 53 Untitled, 1957, which remains one of the strongest of Martin’s early works, is an exploration of Newman’s methods. The symmetry, variable brushwork, and direct composition are all reminiscent of Newman’s work, especially Onement IV, 1949. Martin

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Figure 61 Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1957, oil on canvas, 34 × 34 in., Dia Art Foundation, New York, 2002.001.

used Newman’s compositional approaches in an attempt to define her own abstract, “completely non-objective” pictorial space. Newman’s zip unifies her composition and shows Martin’s efforts to create a cohesive sense of space through purely abstract means. However, Martin’s choice of triangular—​rather than rectangular—​forms differentiates Untitled, 1957, from Newman’s work at the time. Martin used triangular forms during her time in Taos, most notably in the forceful pen-and-ink lines of Untitled, circa 1953. Martin continued to rely upon the formal vocabulary that she developed in Taos during her time in New York, reusing her forms in radically different contexts in order to test their efficacy as tools in her quest for a compelling form of abstraction.

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While many critics cite Newman’s 1959 exhibition at French & Company as the moment when Newman’s “neglected” work became a touchstone for younger artists such as Martin or Stella—​following the same narrative of fortuitous rediscovery that is often applied to Reinhardt—​Martin’s engagement with Newman’s work predates the French & Company exhibition.54 This correlates with Jack Youngerman’s understanding of the mutual regard that artists in Parsons’s stable had for each other. In fact, Youngerman describes Martin’s time on Coenties Slip not as a linear surge toward a minimalist aesthetic but as a series of productive confrontations with other artists in Parsons’s gallery: “Remembering the paintings that Betty brought from Taos and knowing what Agnes has done since then is always, for me, an extraordinary example of how art has to do with confrontation, not isolation.” Martin’s engagement with other artists on the Slip, Youngerman continued, “triggered what we think of as Agnes’s work, which of course was latent.” 55 Youngerman’s analysis sets Martin on a more even stage with better-established artists such as Newman, though his contention that Martin’s later work was “latent,” waiting to be unlocked by confrontations with other artists, denies Martin the significant knowledge she brought with her from Taos, the conceptual work that allowed her to create her paintings, and full ownership of her creative powers. Youngerman, perhaps realizing a potentially gendered gaffe, then backpedaled: “What was true for Martin was true for all of them. [Robert] Rauschenberg said he was influenced by everybody. In a sense, that’s true of all artists.” 56 This type of active exchange more accurately defines Martin’s time on Coenties Slip. As Untitled, 1957, demonstrates, Martin looked carefully at Newman’s work and incorporated aspects of his formal methods into her work in the late 1950s. (Newman’s model of reciprocity is particularly useful here: “Just as I affect the canvas, so does the canvas affect me.”)57 But Martin’s investigation of multiple artistic strategies—​an investigation, we remember, that stretched over two decades—​was defined by her own, highly personal search for a method of nonobjective painting that satisfied her rigorous aesthetic vision. Martin’s attempt to define her own abstract, nonobjective pictorial space would take many forms over the course of the late 1950s and early 1960s, from the geometric arrangement of circles or rectangles on flat fields of color to dense networks of graphite grids over exposed fabric or monochrome grounds. If Martin’s attention to Newman’s work was not as sustained as her investigation of Reinhardt’s, it is because she grasped Newman’s aims so fully and intuitively. Having learned to “create . . . a space” within a painting through Newman’s use of the zip, as demonstrated in Untitled, 1957, Martin ultimately marshaled a network of intersecting lines to achieve a unified sense of boundless, unbroken space in her grid paintings. First, however, Martin would continue to evaluate the legacies—​both the lessons and limitations—​of abstract expressionist painters in her attempt to define pictorial space. In a panel discussion on January 9, 1958, at the Club, a gathering place for artists, Alfred Barr wondered aloud whether the dominance of abstract expressionism would—​

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finally—​be overturned by a new group of artists.58 “I look forward to a rebellion,” he said, “. . . but I don’t see it. Am I blind or does it exist? Are painters continuing a style when they should be bucking it? . . . I hope that I am wrong [and] that something new is happening.” 59 Barr had his answer soon enough. The exhibition of a young, downtown artist named Jasper Johns opened at the Leo Castelli Gallery on January 20, and Barr purchased, directly or indirectly, no less than three paintings.60 Johns’s Target with Four Faces made the cover of ARTnews the same month, further solidifying the idea that a new crop of artists was pushing to the forefront of the New York scene. Johns’s exhibition at Castelli was followed by an exhibition of Rauschenberg’s work in March, the same month that Youngerman had his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. This crop of younger artists was buttressed, however, by shows of more established artists at uptown galleries. In January, for example, Andre Emerich showed Adolph Gottlieb, Samuel Kootz presented the work of Hans Hofmann, and Sidney Janis showed new paintings by Mark Rothko. While these galleries could rightly be accused of displaying conservative taste in their choice of artists, Barr’s comments remind us that Johns’s, Rauschenberg’s, and Youngerman’s “rebellious” early work was seen by New York audiences in 1958 within the context of late-period abstract expressionism. Martin’s thorough studies of the work of Reinhardt and Newman appear less belated when we remember 1958 as the year of Allan Kaprow’s first Happening and Frank Stella’s first stripes.61 It seems fitting, then, that Martin would have her first New York exhibitions during 1958: a late-September group show at Betty Parsons’s Section Eleven; a solo show in December, also at Section Eleven; and a second group show, the “Christmas Show,” in late December.62 The September group show inaugurated Parsons’s Section Eleven gallery and attracted a fair amount of press. Martin showed her work alongside that of David Budd, Judith Godwin, and Sidney Wolfson, who were also “relatively untried painters” in New York.63 Parsons hung five of Martin’s paintings in the exhibition, including The Field, priced at $750; Pacific, also priced at $750; L.T., priced at $650; Monument to Mountains, priced at $650; and Heather, priced at $750.64 In two rare exhibition photographs dated to the opening of the exhibition on September 29, 1958, we see L.T. just to the left of the man on the left of the photograph and Heather hanging by itself at the end of the room.65 (Figs. 62 and 63.) Between L.T. and Heather is a painting that remains unidentified; given the size of the work, it is likely either The Field or Pacific. Notably, Parsons gives pride of place in her long, narrow gallery to Heather, perhaps to signify her support of Martin’s work. Despite the organic forms in L.T., critics such as George Stiles characterized Martin’s paintings in geometric terms, invoking Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. “Agnes Martin contributes a sequence of pale, horizontal patterns or rigidly austere vertical patterns, which, like her fellow exhibitor, Sidney Wolfson’s, derive from the rectangularities and singularities of Mondrian as enriched by Albers.” 66 Martin may have seen Mondrian’s paintings in New York; the Museum of Modern Art acquired Broadway

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Figure 62 Ellen Auerbach, installation view of the opening of the inaugural Section Eleven show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, September 29, 1958, blackand-white photograph, 9 ½ × 7 ¾ in. Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 63 Ellen Auerbach, installation view of the opening of the inaugural Section Eleven show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, September 29, 1958, blackand-white photograph, 9 ½ × 7 ¾ in. Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Boogie Woogie, 1942–​1943, in 1943 and had, by that time, other Mondrian paintings in their collection. Likewise, knowledge of Albers filtered through New Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s owing to students who had attended Black Mountain College, and Rauschenberg’s time with Albers at Black Mountain was well known in New York circles by the mid-1950s. Unlike the work of either Mondrian or Albers, however, Martin’s paintings were not made up of hard-edged lines or strict boundaries but, rather, of feathery, floating edges that showed her attention to the work of Rothko. Ellsworth Kelly referred to Martin’s early work from this period as “blocks of color, Rothko-like.” 67 Fairfield Porter, who reviewed the exhibition for ARTnews, notes Martin’s paintings are made up of “squares” and “rectangles” and are defined by subtle distinctions of color and value: “Agnes Martin shows square paintings in which two equal rectangles are compared on an almost white background. The distinctions are subtle ones of color and value; the greys, browns and yellows are soft, pale and dry.” 68 Dore Ashton echoed Porter’s observations of Martin’s geometric compositions and “pale” palette, but noted that these tools created an almost “dreamlike” feeling: “Agnes Martin is a more assured painter with a personal style. Her canvases are pale, luminous studies in which square and oval forms float in spacious areas of diaphanous off-whites. Her quiet, dreamlike mood is consistent and well-articulated.” 69 In this passage, Ashton uses notably poetic language—​Martin’s paintings are “float[ing],” “luminous,” and “diaphanous”—​in order to communicate the ways in which Martin’s formal and material choices engender specific emotional effects in her viewers. For Ashton, that effect is almost spiritual—​a reflexive nod, perhaps, to both Ashton’s and Martin’s knowledge of Rothko’s paintings from the 1950s. (Ashton wrote of Rothko’s “luminous abstractions . . . composed of simple squared forms bearing magical films of color,” which “are most often characterized as ‘transcendental’ ” in a 1958 article, further characterizing his paintings as “contained, serene and serving as symbols for pure emotions such as joy or melancholy.”)70 Indeed, Rothko used the term “luminous” to describe his paintings and critics often described his rectangular forms as “floating” on colored grounds.71 Martin, as we know, looked carefully at Rothko’s work during 1951–​1952, and specifically at many of his early drawings and paintings. As a result, it is not unexpected to see Martin returning to Rothko’s work at the end of the 1950s, when she was using geometric forms to articulate her compositional space but was reluctant to give up the softness and variability of her painterly brushstrokes, as we saw in Untitled, 1957. While Heather remains lost, and proper images of the painting do not survive, a number of square paintings with rectangular forms survive from 1958, demonstrating the variety and depth of Martin’s engagement with Rothko’s work from the late 1940s and the 1950s. Just as Martin explored cruciform structures in multiple works from 1957, including Beach, Desert Rain, Wheat, and Window, she investigated compositions based upon two rectangles in a series of paintings from 1958, including American, David, Study for Rain, This Rain, Unbeckoning Grass, and White Study.72 Martin’s understanding of the tension created by Newman’s zips can be seen in the spatial relationships between the two

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Figure 64 Agnes Martin, The Spring, 1958, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 in., Dia Art Foundation, New York; anonymous gift, 2002.006.

rectangles in American and Heather, and her careful attention to the scale of Rothko’s rectangles within a composition can be seen in paintings such as The Spring, This Rain, Unbeckoning Grass, and White Study. Of these works, The Spring, 1958, provides a particularly useful example of Martin’s study of Rothko. (Fig. 64.) The work is fifty inches square and is executed in oil paint on a cotton duck support. Martin’s composition consists of two large, pale-green rectangular forms bordered by cream paint, which are set against a flat field of taupe and separated by three purple horizontal bands. Interestingly, the painting is analogous

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not with Rothko’s contemporary work—​in 1958, he was increasingly using a darker palette, which becomes especially visible in his Seagram murals—​but with No. 7 / No. 11 (Untitled), 1949. This work, shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 and mentioned in Art Digest the same year, is rectangular rather than square in format and significantly larger than Martin’s painting, measuring 68 ⅛ inches by 43 ¼ inches.73 Rothko’s use of a series of rectangular forms at the top and bottom of the composition is split by a series of thinner, horizontal bands at the center of the painting (painted in red, blue, and salmon-pink), providing a model for Martin’s formal structure in The Spring. While the hallmarks of Rothko’s later, classic paintings of the mid-1950s are visible—​t he subtle, modulated layering of paint; the feathery brushstrokes; the articulated edges and the sense of forms “hovering” in space—​No. 7 / No. 11 does not come together as a fully realized whole in the manner of some of Rothko’s celebrated paintings of the 1950s, such as White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), 1950. This sense of contingency may have been the work’s appeal for Martin, who was similarly trying to develop a compelling nonobjective compositional strategy, as we have seen with her forays into Reinhardt’s cruciform structure and Newman’s bilateral symmetry. By breaking the square composition into thirds through the use of rectangular forms, with borders on either side and at the top and bottom, Martin creates a balanced composition—​but one that manages to feel flat and somewhat mechanical, without the movement or depth of No. 7 / No. 11. While Rothko’s forms advance and recede in the viewer’s eye, Martin’s forms are fixed in place. This is even more strongly articulated in Untitled, n.d., a square painting roughly the same size as The Spring, measuring 49 ¾ by 55 ¼ inches. (Fig. 65.) Here, Martin again utilizes the forms of rectangles and thin bands of color, but the forms are more stylized and appear modular. Untitled demonstrates Martin’s eagerness to put the lessons she learned from Rothko to use, evolving her strategies through continual experimentation. Martin’s translation of Rothko in The Spring and Untitled, her readings and misreadings, provide insight not only into her experimentation with different formal structures but also into her interest in the material handling of oil paint. Dan Rice, Rothko’s assistant, recalled that Rothko used “a very brushy brush,” a characteristic that can be seen in the layer of white paint over the blue rectangle in the lower third of No. 7 / No. 11.74 Martin, too, used a “brushy brush,” which is evident in the green rectangles of The Spring; and the edges of these rectangles as well as of the purple bands demonstrate that Martin was aware of the indeterminate, feathered edges on Rothko’s forms. Further, Martin’s use of multiple layers of thin oil paint reflects Rothko’s effective use of layering, though she did not immediately achieve the same sense of depth or movement. Martin’s reengagement with Rothko’s work during 1958, both formally and materially, is hardly the “rebellion” that Barr called for at the Club. But Martin’s work also does not conform to Barr’s oppositional category of slavishly “continuing a style,” since we see Martin critically evaluating Rothko’s strategies and techniques in the service of her own aesthetic vision. In this light, Rothko’s “Statement on His Attitude in Paint-

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Figure 65 Agnes Martin, Untitled, n.d., oil on canvas, 49 ¾ × 55 ¼ in., private collection, California.

ing” is relevant to Martin’s continuing development as an artist: “The progression of a painter’s work, as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity: toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer. . . . To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” 75 The varied reviews of Martin’s work shown at her first group exhibition at Section Eleven suggest that Martin was on her way to being “understood” by critics, but it is Rothko’s invocation of the “progression” of a “painter’s work” that is most applicable to Martin’s time on Coenties Slip in the late 1950s. Although Martin deliberately situated herself within an enclave of artists on Coenties Slip; engaged artists in Parsons’s stable, such as Newman; and sought out examples of contemporary art, her return to New York does not signal a rupture in her artistic production. By contrast, the surprisingly cosmopolitan networks in Taos prepared Martin for the level of artistic discourse in New York. Martin’s early

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New York paintings are thus a model of continuity, demonstrating how seamlessly the strategies she developed in Taos translated to the New York art world. During the last quarter of 1957 and the first months of 1958, Martin looked carefully at the work of abstract expressionist painters and engaged in a period of critical evaluation and discernment that mirrors her time at Teachers College during the 1951–​1952 academic year. Absorbing the formal and material techniques of Reinhardt, Newman, and Rothko, Martin tested aspects of their approaches against her aesthetic vision. Continually refining her means of expression, Martin sought the formal and intellectual clarity that Rothko describes. It is thus fitting that she showed The Spring, 1958, a work indebted to Rothko, at her first one-woman exhibition at Betty Parsons’s Section Eleven in December 1958. Hanging on the wall at Section Eleven, The Spring marks a crucial transitional moment in Martin’s career: her debut in the New York art world, and the moment at which Martin’s long apprenticeship came to an end.

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4 FINDING THE GRID “The Lines Began as Points in Space”

Martin’s first, long-awaited one-woman show at Betty Parsons’s Section Eleven, titled Betty Parsons Presents a First New York Showing of Oil Paintings by Agnes Martin, opened on December 2, 1958, and ran through December 20. Parsons’s records document that Martin showed twenty-eight works that she created from 1954 through 1958, all executed in oil paint. They included paintings ranging from twenty-five inches to eighty-nine inches; those created through 1957 were in rectangular formats, and those painted in 1958 were exclusively in square formats. Parsons sold ten of the works in the exhibition, just over a third of the assembled paintings.1 The buyers were an amalgam of Parsons’s friends, such as Annie Laurie Witzel, who bought David, 1958, and Drift of Summer, 1957; fellow artists on Coenties Slip (Lenore Tawney bought The Field, 1957); professionals such as Dr. V. L. Swanson and A. M. Prince, MD, who acquired Rain, 1958, and American, 1958, respectively; and Parsons herself, who purchased Black & White, 1958. As many dealers did, Parsons sold some of the works, such as David and Black & White, before the exhibition began, and Witzel purchased Drift of Summer after the show had closed, on February 26, 1959. Parsons therefore sold three or four works during the course of the exhibition and one on Christmas Eve. With the exception of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), the paintings that Parsons chose to show were unassuming, balanced compositions that were largely geometric in character. The extant works from the exhibition can be divided into three groups: works in which Martin utilizes variations on a cruciform structure (Beach, Desert Rain, Wheat, all from 1957); works in which Martin uses a series of circles arranged in geometric formats

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(Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), Drift of Summer, Harbor No. 1, Water Sign, all from 1956–​1958); and works in which two rectangles, either vertical or horizontal in orientation, form the main compositional elements (American, David, Heather, The Spring, Study for Rain, This Rain, White (Study), and Unbeckoning Grass, all from 1958). In each group, Martin cultivates a pared-down aesthetic vocabulary in which the scale and placement of her forms, as well as her brushwork and subtly modulated colors, take precedence. Martin’s palette moved between moody blue-grays to paintings that employed dusty creams, browns, taupes, and yellows. Martin’s one-woman show in December 1958 did not represent a radical break in either form or content from the work she showed in the September group show, according to reviews of the exhibition. (Indeed, she showed four of the same works: Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), Heather, Monument to Mountains, and The Field.) Edith Burckhardt’s ARTnews review of Martin’s one-woman exhibition at Section Eleven echoes, in many cases down to her choice of words (“pale,” “soft,” and “quiet”), the reviews of Martin’s group show. “Agnes Martin . . . makes her debut with large quiet abstractions,” Burckhardt writes of Martin’s solo show. “Wide fields softly and evenly painted with pale greys, lemons, tans, divide into fields, show a pane, a moat around an amusing irregular ring, a whole whimsical cluster of ovals. Though one senses an underlying contemplation, a retiring, deliberate temperament, refinement and playfulness make them verge on the decorative. It is as if some canvases were playgrounds seem from above, or a layout of a modern nursery.” 2 Burckhardt’s understanding that this exhibition is Martin’s “debut” shows the effectiveness of Parsons’s marketing, and her observations of “wide fields softly and evenly painted” drawn from “an underlying contemplation” and “a retiring, deliberate temperament” demonstrate an early attempt to connect Martin’s painting with her biography and personality—​or, perhaps more accurately, her presumed personality. Burckhardt’s assumptions about Martin’s source material (“playgrounds seen from above, or a layout of a modern nursery”) are notably gendered. It remains difficult to imagine Ellsworth Kelly’s brightly colored paintings of the period, which have a directness and clarity of form that might appeal to children, being characterized in such a manner. Additionally, Burckhardt’s allegation that Martin’s paintings appear “decorative” is meant as a distinct slight, though one that was commonly used at the time to dismiss nonobjective art.3 Dore Ashton deploys an intimate knowledge of Martin’s time in New Mexico, given their shared history in the state in 1950, which she uses to critically position Martin’s work: Agnes Martin, whose talent was seasoned on the New Mexican desert, is exhibiting her oils for the first time in New York at Betty Parsons’ Section Eleven Gallery, 11 East FiftySeventh Street. Miss Martin offers an evanescent, infinitely simplified communication—​ one that is quite apparently the result of many years of refinement. She has eliminated all but essentials for her poetic expression. The result is a group of paintings, all in pale,

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floating keys. In one, for instance, the artist paints two seemingly equal squares bordered by a pale beige ground. The squares, in different tones, create the illusion of movement, slipping now forward, now backward in the most subtle of transitions. Sometimes there is slight stroking in the rectangle, like a window, and this suggests—​as the artists intended it—​t he flow of rain. The warm glow and the carefully controlled optical illusions in these delicate paintings seem to be the observed and deeply felt essences of the mesa country, so long Miss Martin’s home.4

Ashton’s review is prescient, and it established many of the critical assumptions and tensions that would come to define criticism of Martin’s work for the next half century. As a result, it is worth analyzing the review in detail. By immediately linking Martin to New Mexico, Ashton invokes the mythology of the American West, which had proven a powerful sales mechanism in New York with regard to certain earlier painters, such as Albert Bierstadt. (Bierstadt’s paintings of Yosemite, for example, were renowned on the East Coast.) More contemporaneously, Georgia O’Keeffe, who had moved to New Mexico in 1949, cultivated an image that relied heavily on her surroundings amid the mesas outside of Santa Fe. By connecting Martin to this legacy, Ashton positions Martin as an artist responding to a specific physical and cultural environment.5 The New Mexico that Ashton conjures, however, is notably reductive, especially given her firsthand knowledge of the complexity of the artistic communities in Albuquerque and Taos during the period in question. Returning to New Mexico at the end of her review, Ashton locates the “warm glow” and “carefully controlled optical illusions” of Martin’s paintings in the “observed and deeply felt essences of the mesa country.” Ashton’s romantic assessment of Martin’s painting comes as a strong counterpoint to George Stiles’s October review, which, as previously noted, placed Martin’s “pale, horizontal patterns or rigidly austere vertical patterns” in line with “Mondrian as enriched by Albers.” 6 Such divergent views underscore a crucial difference in the understanding of Martin’s paintings. By linking Martin’s paintings so directly with the landscape of New Mexico, Ashton posits that Martin’s work remains fundamentally grounded in representation. (Ashton makes this explicit in describing a work that is likely Window, 1957: “Sometimes there is slight stroking in the rectangle, like a window, and this suggests—​as the artist intended it—​t he flow of rain.”) By contrast, Stiles understands Martin’s work to be primarily abstract—​informed by relationships of color, form, and line. Critics over the subsequent half century have continued to grapple with these divergent views, offering analysis that is deeply bound up in Martin’s biography and geography or that eschews such details for highly theoretical or phenomenological readings of her work. Martin’s debut with a solo exhibition at Section Eleven celebrated her arrival as an artist in New York while simultaneously marking the end of her long apprenticeship. Martin’s development as an artist is characterized not by the dichotomy between biography/geography and phenomenology, as her later critics would have it, but by her partici-

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pation in dense networks of visually literate artists in New Mexico and New York. In fact, the divergent reviews of her first group show in New York suggest just how much Martin brought with her from Taos and, in turn, how much currency that transfer of knowledge had among critics in New York, who were soon equating her work with modern masters such as Mondrian. Martin’s development during her first years in New York is not a model of rupture but one of continuity and transference—​a model suggested by the earlier movement of Mandelman and Ribak between Taos, New York, and Los Angeles. In addition to utilizing this model of interconnected networks, Martin attempted to replicate the close interaction between artists that she enjoyed in Taos. By renting a loft on Coenties Slip, Martin placed herself among a group of young, ambitious artists who depended upon one another for artistic support and were eager to define their work against the pervasive legacy of abstract expressionism. In a review from Arts Magazine in January 1959 that encompasses both of Martin’s shows at Section Eleven that fall, Anita Ventura captures Martin in this moment of transition. She notes that Martin’s painting Pacific “looks like a deep landscape,” and she characterizes “L.P.” in terms that suggest abstraction: “contained forms . . . deployed against expansive fields in these light-colored, gently persistent abstractions.” 7 In conclusion, Ventura observes that Martin had not achieved a fully realized artistic statement: “In the exclusion of anything stronger or chancier, she has, at least, defined a style.” 8 Ventura’s comments are not entirely positive, suggesting—​as Martin likely would have agreed—​that Martin had not yet defined her own, fully mature style. For that, Martin would need a new network: the artists of Coenties Slip. Coenties Slip is a triangular piece of land at the tip of lower Manhattan, between Broad Street and Hanover Square, near the South Ferry and Pier 11. The Slip had been used as a port for sailors and merchants since the nineteenth century and has a rich literary history—​including being cited by Herman Melville in the opening lines of Moby-Dick. The unique triangular plan of the Slip meant that the old warehouses lining Jeanette Park had views of the East River, the mouth of the Hudson River, and, in the distance, the Upper Bay of the Atlantic Ocean. “The best thing about the slip was that it was a triangle,” Martin recalled, “so it slanted so all the lofts looked across the triangle to the river. So we were all on the river, even though we were up on the triangle. It was a nice place to live. You could walk along the waterfront.” 9 The sweeping water views visible from many of the buildings on Coenties Slip thus differentiate those buildings from many typical New York residences, which are predicated upon the coordinates of sidewalks and skyscrapers rather than those of sky and sea. In this respect, the Slip may have reminded Martin of her youth in Vancouver and the city’s views of English Bay and Vancouver Harbor.10 Further, the expanse of water visible from Coenties Slip would have functioned as a symbol of abundance for Martin after nearly a decade in the arid desert of New Mexico. Martin’s predilection toward such stark oppositions—​t he ocean and the desert—​signal her comfort in moving fluidly between two seemingly divergent conditions. As her friend Woody Gwynn

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remembered, “When in New York, Agnes would go to the movies to see Westerns for the scenery.” 11 The availability of large, inexpensive lofts made Coenties Slip popular with artists, as a 1958 article from Cue magazine demonstrates. “In a neighborhood once better known for ship chandler’s shops, tattoo parlors and seamen’s missions,” the article reads, “a group of young artists have established a colony that may be New York’s last stop for the non-conformist. It is a Bohemia on the waterfront.” 12 By the mid-1950s, the characterization of the area as a “Bohemia” was accurate, both in terms of the physical conditions of the buildings and in the sense of romantic creativity they inspired. Many of the buildings on the Slip had become rundown, for example, and the streets of lower Manhattan were known to be dangerous after dark. Renting lofts for domestic rather than commercial use was still illegal and required tact and ingenuity.13 As James Rosenquist explains, “An artist would go to the landlord and say, ‘I have a small business and I’d like to rent a floor.’ If you asked him, ‘Would you mind if I sleep there overnight?’ the owner would say, ‘What you do there is your business, don’t bother me, just pay your rent, keep your mouth shut.’ “ 14 The area also lacked basic amenities, as Youngerman described: “There was one little grocery store. One laundry. That was it. That was all the amenities. After 6 p.m. the streets were empty because we were close to Wall Street, and all the office workers had gone home. Coenties Slip was a backwater. I think that’s what everyone liked about it. And the way that seamen were the only people you’d see. They were between shipping out: they were often alcoholics, living on the street almost, so there wasn’t much connection there.” 15 Ann Wilson, a young artist who lived on the Slip, remembered that many of the lofts lacked plumbing and kitchen facilities, so that many of the artists on the Slip ate their meals and showered at the nearby Seaman’s Church Institute.16 Despite the practical difficulties of living on the Slip, a contemporaneous article in Esquire magazine romanticized the artists’ colony on Coenties Slip and named it an “in place to live.” 17 Tellingly, the article distinguished Coenties Slip from other areas of Manhattan that were known to be centers of artistic production, such as Fifty-Seventh Street and Tenth Street. Fifty-Seventh Street, the article noted, was “the Street of Culture” and home to established galleries, while Tenth Street was the center of the abstract expressionist movement.18 Abstract expressionism was still the dominant form of painting in New York, and the remote location of Coenties Slip offered a refuge—​”geographic and otherwise,” as art historian Michael Lobel notes—​for artists who were interested in creating something other than second-generation abstract expressionist paintings.19 The artists on the Slip were, as Rosenquist remembered, “quite apart from the uptown arts scene and virtually unknown. . . . A lot of artists down there had underground reputations, but none of us had done much of anything at all.” 20 Although Rosenquist defines the artists on the Slip in distinction to other groups of artists, notably the abstract expressionists, the artists on the Slip, much like those in Taos, did not form a tightly knit, cohesive group that could be easily identified through a

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single category or name. Lobel suggests that the artists on the Slip were “a loose, de facto grouping of artists” rather than a “thriving artistic community.” 21 This is supported by Martin’s recollection that the artists on the Slip “weren’t a group where there was any likeness at all. We were all completely different.” 22 While these claims certainly hold up against a consideration of the artists’ career trajectories—​one would hardly mistake Martin’s 1964 painting The Tree for Robert Indiana’s 1964 Love print for the Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas card—​close analysis of the work they created on Coenties Slip suggests underlying similarities, especially on a formal level, that Martin did not acknowledge in her interviews and writings. These informal creative dialogues sparked crucial transitional moments in each artist’s career, especially with regard to Martin and Indiana. Rather than the creation of a singular artistic movement, the confluence of artists on Coenties Slip in the late 1950s and early 1960s facilitated individual encounters between artists that often fundamentally changed the direction of their work. Martin’s group and solo exhibitions at Section Eleven were held during the fall of 1958, the same season that Allan Kaprow’s essay “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” was published in ARTnews. Pollock was still a formidable presence in the New York art world, as evidenced by the Museum of Modern Art’s 1956–​1957 retrospective of Pollock’s work and Sidney Janis’s one-man show in November 1958, but younger artists felt that Pollock’s contributions were “by now clichés of college art departments,” as Kaprow observes.23 “The innovations are accepted,” Kaprow writes; “they are becoming part of textbooks.” 24 Confronted with this reality—​t he same one identified by Alfred Barr at the Club—​K aprow similarly saw two alternatives: artists could continue in the same vein as Pollock, or they could give up painting entirely. Kaprow forecast the latter, that they would abandon the sanctuary of the studio for the rough-and-tumble material culture of Forty-Second Street: Pollock . . . left us at the point where we must be preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists. . . . All will become materials for this new concrete art.25

Kaprow was trained as an art historian as well as an artist, and his essay functioned, as Alan Solomon has noted, as “a manifesto of the new art.” 26 Interested in the work of John Cage at the time, Kaprow would certainly have been aware of Johns’s constructed paintings, like Target with Four Faces, 1955, as well as Rauschenberg’s early “combines.” (Rauschenberg’s Bed, 1955, while not strictly a combine, was reproduced in Newsweek in January 1958.)27 And while Kaprow’s own art suggested something far beyond the

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confines of traditional categories of painting and sculpture, his identification of found objects—​“paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things”—​as legitimate art materials opened up a new realm of possibility for many artists, Martin among them.28 Coenties Slip was not quite Forty-Second Street in the late 1950s, but the docks and streets around the Slip offered scavenging artists a ready supply of found objects and discarded materials: boat spikes, metal objects, stencils, and wooden beams. These objects offered “consistent reminders of a maritime history stretching back into the city’s past,” according to Lobel; but they also reflected contemporary historical conditions, because many of the warehouses on the Slip—​built from the masts of nineteenthcentury ships—​were being torn down to make way for skyscrapers and wider roads.29 Lobel cites the plight of Indiana, who had to move to another building on the Slip when his first loft, at 31 Coenties Slip, was torn down to clear space for a parking lot.30 Johns and Rauschenberg moved from 278 Pearl Street, which was likewise slated for demolition, to a building at 128 Front Street in March 1958.31 While art historians such as Lobel have made arguments about the intertwined roles of obsolescence and renewal in the development of Rosenquist’s work on Coenties Slip, for example, artists’ use of found materials was often more practical in nature. “I thought of myself as a painter and a poet and became a sculptor because the potential raw materials were lying outside my studio door,” Indiana observed.32 Importantly for many artists, these materials did not cost anything. “I didn’t have money,” Indiana further explained, “and the only way to make a splash in the art world in those days was with large canvases. So I would go out at night and pilfer this old wood from the demolition sites around Coenties.” 33 Assemblage thus offered an efficient and inexpensive alternative to the legacy of abstract expressionism, and Indiana cites the use of found materials, rather than large canvases, as one way in which younger artists, by choice or necessity, consciously distinguished themselves from abstract expressionist painters.34 “As long as I haven’t money enough for canvas and stretchers,” Indiana wrote in his journal, “perhaps it is just as well.” 35 As we have seen, Martin’s investigation into the works of Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko demonstrates her affinity for abstract expressionist painting.36 However, by 1958–​1959 Martin was searching for her own “style,” as Ventura writes, one that was less reliant on prior models of abstract expressionism and more in tune with the work being done by her fellow artists on Coenties Slip. One method of declaring a measure of aesthetic independence from historical models was to join Indiana in scavenging the docks for found materials. Martin made at least four constructions from found objects during 1958, including Water, Kali, The Garden, and The Laws, as well as at least one later construction, Burning Tree, 1961. (Figs. 66–​70.) Noting the prevalence of similar constructions among downtown artists at the time, Indiana observed that “assemblages were in the air, everybody was making assemblages. . . . Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who I knew (Ellsworth introduced me to them the very first year on

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Figure 66 Agnes Martin, Water, 1958, painted wire and bottle caps and wood, 39 × 39 in., private collection, Chicago.

the Slip), . . . were both . . . very concerned with assemblages.” 37 This “concern with assemblages” is verified by Youngerman, who also recalled the prevalence of assemblage on and around Coenties Slip: “Bob Indiana was making constructions at the same time . . . Jasper was two blocks away, doing his numbers, grids. They were all in the area. These things were around.” 38 Conservator Carol Mancusi-Ungaro notes, for example, that the rectangular doors at

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Figure 67 Agnes Martin, Kali, 1958, boat spikes and oil on wood, 11 × 11 × 4 in., private collection.

the top of Johns’s Target with Plaster Casts, 1955, were “fashioned from a piece of found wood. Extraneous holes and nicks throughout the wooden members attest to their former use.” 39 The wood that Martin used on her constructions also bears the marks of former use, as in the unpainted wooden rectangles inset into The Garden, which show similar small holes. The rough, uneven heads of the boat spikes Martin used in The Laws also display notable signs of previous wear. Describing Garden, a work that is now lost, Martin explained that she acquired these materials by scavenging: “I made a construction with the heads of three thousand nails that I fixed onto boards,” Martin recalled. “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

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Figure 68 (Left) Agnes Martin, The Garden, 1958, oil and found objects on wood, 53 × 10 × 2 in., Des Moines Art Center’s Louise Noun Collection of Art by Women, 2001.29. Figure 69 (Right) Agnes Martin, The Laws, 1958, oil and boat spikes on wood, 93 ¼ × 18 × 2 in., private collection, Switzerland.

Figure 70 Agnes Martin, Burning Tree, 1961, wood and metal, 13 × 21 in., private collection.

Garden” (see fig. 1). 4 0 She also used discarded wooden pegs, as in Kali (1958), in which she placed thick, round black and white pegs into a square, unpainted wooden support fashioned from seven wooden blocks. For Martin, who had previously worked across many artistic disciplines, including drawing, prints, and sculpture, assemblage provided a means to test her evolving ­compositional ideas through different media, exploring issues of color, depth, form, scale, texture, and repetition. In fact, Martin’s development of the grid owes as much to her sculptural work as to her painting. The Garden, which measures fifty-three inches high by ten inches wide and has a depth of two inches, is executed on a rectangular piece of wood with a curved bottom, though pieces of wood are notably missing from the upper right corner, the lower right edge, and the bottom edge.41 Martin uses circular forms along the left edge of the work, varying their colors, textures, and groupings to provide a sense of visual syncopation. Martin places a rectangle, this one painted a lighter blue, at the top right of the construction, anchored by three circular wooden forms that look like drawer pulls. The use of circular objects on a square or rectangular ground is reminiscent of Martin’s forms in the upper right corner of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.),  as well as in Drift of Summer. The off-centered syncopation in The Garden is absent in Kali, The Laws, and Water, constructions that present more balanced, overtly geometric compositional structures. (This pattern is analogous to Martin’s movement from works such as Dancer No. 1 [L.T.] to paintings such as Window, 1957, and Wheat, 1957.) All three constructions, which differ significantly in scale, color, and shape, use the repetition of small quasi-circular forms—​metal and wooden boat spikes as well as bottle tops—​to create a grid pattern. According to curator Barbara Haskell, “These scavenged nails, bolts, and knobs gave her modular, pre-existing images that avoided issues

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of personal handwriting,” an analysis that hews closely to Martin’s desire to escape the legacy of abstract expressionism.42 Haskell’s use of the term modular identifies the repetition of standardized units that Martin used across various constructions, but Haskell neglects Martin’s sophisticated understanding of the physical properties of sculpture in her desire to focus on the anonymity of modular forms. This is perhaps the fault of hindsight, and the familiar teleological pressure to cast Martin’s early work as a precursor to minimalism. However, Martin’s specific, tactile knowledge of her materials is precisely what allowed her to produce the visual effects she sought, both in her wooden constructions and, importantly, in her later paintings. Although Haskell argues that Martin chose scavenged materials in order to avoid “issues of personal handwriting,” her hand remains of paramount importance. Water, which measures thirty-nine by thirty-nine inches, is a useful example in this regard. The construction consists of a square wooden support over which Martin has strung taut metal wires in a vertical orientation, held down by nine bottle caps placed in three symmetrical rows. In Water, Martin creates a balanced composition through the interplay of precisely placed squares and circles while simultaneously providing visual interest through the depth, reflectance, and texture of the wire and bottle caps. The thin, reflective lines of silver wire are examples of modular, preexisting forms, but they are deployed with Martin’s characteristic awareness of their physical properties: the silver color, the reflectance of the metal wire, the circumference of that particular thickness of wire. In these characteristics, they anticipate the thin, reflective lines of graphite that Martin would use to create her grid paintings in the early 1960s—​lines that are consistently characterized as markers of Martin’s hand. Water also provides a precedent for Night Harbor, 1960, an oil painting on canvas that depicts three rows of six circles against a dark ground.43 (Fig. 71.) The comparison of Water and Night Harbor demonstrates Martin’s use of sculptural effects in painted form. In Water, the protrusion of the bottle tops from the support casts shadows that emphasize the distance between the bottle tops and their support, while in Night Harbor Martin outlined each circular form with graphite. Catching the light, the graphite creates the effect of lifting the forms from the flat ground. This detail activates the painting, providing a sense of depth akin to that evoked by Water’s cast shadows and signaling the artist’s sensitivity to reflectance and light. Water and Night Harbor demonstrate Martin’s penchant to work through formal and compositional ideas across a variety of media. This is especially the case with regard to Kali, a construction that, measuring eleven inches square, is the smallest of Martin’s 1958 constructions. Martin drove thirty-seven black or white painted wooden boat spikes into seven attached pieces of wood. Martin sold both Kali and The Laws to her friend Lenore Tawney, a talented weaver who lived and worked on Coenties Slip. A photograph of Tawney in her Spring Street studio, in 1967, shows the artist working

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Figure 71 Agnes Martin, Night Harbor, 1960, oil and graphite on canvas, 25 1⁄16 × 25 1⁄16 in., private collection.

at a large desk. (Fig. 72.) To the right, we see Kali—​rather surprisingly hanging on the wall, rather than set on a table, as it has been published in nearly every book or catalog to date. Hung on the wall, protruding four inches, Kali suddenly appears to be a relief, rather than a sculpture. Just below Kali, Tawney has hung a twelve-inch-square painting by Martin titled Homage to Greece, which is signed and dated 1959 on the verso. The painting consists of sixteen three-inch squares of canvas, painted white, which have been affixed in four rows of overlapping sections to a used wooden board. Martin then hammered

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Figure 72 Clayton J. Price, Lenore Tawney in Her Spring Street Studio, 1967, black-and-white photograph.

twenty-one nails into the surface of the work in the shape of an arc. Nearly equivalent in size, the two works are both composed of supports that are pieced together—​sections of wood or squares of canvas—​into which Martin inserted round spikes or nails. Tawney’s installation encapsulates Martin’s distillation of the three-dimensional form of relief into the shallower plane of a painting. Given these works, it can be argued that Martin does not turn away from assemblage so much as refine the underlying strategies and apply them to her painted formats.44 Martin made the connection between her later grid paintings and the tactile nature of Homage to Greece explicit in a conversation with the artist Ann Wilson. Referring to the lines of her grid paintings, Martin explained, “I began the lines ten years ago, lines in pigment. I cut up squares of canvas and pasted them on a small rectangular canvas. They are not exact squares. These were painted white, then I nailed down nails in a slight arch line near the top. I called it Homage to Ancient Greece, just the edge of an arch across the top. . . . The lines began as points in space.” 45 Martin’s remark that “the lines began as points in space” confirms the importance of her sculptural work to her painting, and she specifically cites Homage to Greece as the moment in which her line shifted from a robustly material presence—​shiny silver tacking nails—​to the more subtle media of pigment and sparkling silver graphite. Martin’s description of the creation of Homage to Greece presents a remarkably logical progression: Martin cut up squares of canvas, pasted them on a larger canvas, and then “nailed down nails” in an arched line across the top of the work.46 When Martin concludes that her “lines began as points in space,” the listener reflexively agrees—​largely because Martin presents her artistic process in such a compelling sequence of events that the end result, her grid paintings, feels almost predetermined. Careful examination of specific examples of Martin’s art from 1959, however, reveals a more complicated, less linear model of artistic practice—​layered, revisionary, contingent, and above all, exploratory—​t hat owes much to her encounters with other artists on Coenties Slip. The material facture of The Book, 1959, demonstrates that Martin repeatedly altered her compositions to achieve the aesthetic impressions she desired.47 (Fig. 73.) The Book is executed in gouache and ink on paper mounted on primed canvas. As conservator Brad Epley notes in a technical examination, The dimensions of the red form were modified through the course of completing the work as both the background and red colors overlap each other in different areas along the form. . . . The artist modified the height of the [two white] rectangles. Incised lines, ⅛" up from the white rectangles’ initial bottom edges, were used to indicate the reduced height. A wide stroke of the slightly more opaque yellow color, running the complete width of the yellow rectangle, was then applied along these incised lines to complete the alteration. White paint appears both within and over the incised lines, indicating that an additional layer of white was applied to reinforce this alteration. Finally, the new bottom edges of both white rectangles were reinforced with incised lines through the paint.48

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Figure 73 Agnes Martin, The Book, 1959, gouache and ink on paper mounted on primed canvas, 23 15⁄16 × 17 ⅞ in., Menil Collection, Houston, TX.

Martin’s decision to modify the length of the white rectangles by ⅛ inch in a work that measures 23 15⁄16 inches in length shows her exacting eye for scale and confirms her comment that “if I don’t get the exact scale it’s no good.” 49 Martin used incisions throughout the work, cut after the paint and ink had dried, to reinforce the top and bottom edges of her forms.50 The considerable material evidence of Martin’s modifica­ tions to The Book suggests that Martin was revising her compositions as she painted, producing paintings that function as records of her material and intellectual process. Martin’s revisionary practice remains at odds with the predetermined narrative that she often employs when speaking about her work, as her description of Homage to Greece demonstrates. Ann Wilson suggests that this is a false dichotomy, arguing that Martin’s corrections are not a result of the artist changing her conception of the work as she painted but, rather, of Martin’s attempts to reconcile the image she was creat­ ing with the one in her mind. “The evidence of how the canvas was worked (penciled lines, corrections, erasures),” Wilson observes, “shows the painter correcting the canvas according to some vision that exists independently of the canvas. This vision is not discovered in the act of painting.” 51 The layered surface of The Book bears witness to Martin’s active pictorial experimentation, and Wilson’s observation suggests the equally important role of contemplation and discernment in Martin’s creative practice. The year 1959 marked a change in Martin’s circumstances, since she moved from her loft at 27 Coenties Slip, where she had settled in 1957, to 3–​5 Coenties Slip.52 Wilson visited Martin in her studio at 3–​5 and, later, recalled the spare precision of Martin’s liv­ ing and working space: “To enter her loft . . . was to enter large quiet. White walls, gray floors, the long rectangular brown of a table she made, with exact square benches lined on either side of it. A large brown square work surface in the far corner; a stove; these were the room’s exact contents. Spaced and arranged on the walls, suspended in still­ ness, were her paintings.” 53 Wilson’s description of Martin’s studio unexpectedly hinges on observations of sound and movement: a “large quiet” and “stillness.” Youngerman recalled Martin’s studio in similar terms, noting, “What I remember about the studio was the infinite patience and quietude that the paintings required. It was very quiet. I remember these paintings with hundreds of little lines and dots. I remember those paintings best from that period. I was almost annoyed by it, because I had so little of that myself. There was such an absence of agitation.” 54 Wilson and Youngerman’s multi­ sensory observations suggest that Martin’s studio was a space apart from the bustling city—​a space of quietude, stillness, and patience. Martin’s studio at 3–​5 Coenties Slip was in “Ellsworth’s building,” as Youngerman called it, perhaps in deference to the fact that Kelly was the most established artist working on Coenties Slip in the late 1950s.55 As Rosenquist bluntly notes, “Kelly had a career, but the rest of us didn’t. He owned a Volkswagen, and to us that was wealth. He’d shown with Betty Parsons.” 56 Kelly moved into a loft at 3–​5 Coenties Slip in July 1956, shortly after he had a one-man exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Kelly had

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Figure 74 Robert Indiana, Source I, 1959, oil on Homasote, 46 ⅛ × 61 ½ in., collection of Robert Indiana.

arrived in New York two years earlier (after spending six years in Paris), and his lack of knowledge of contemporary movements in American art allowed him to move forward with his investigations of shape, line, and color without recourse to the legacy of abstract expressionism.57 Coenties Slip, for Kelly, represented “a world apart, consciously leaving behind the heritage of de Kooning and Pollock.” 58 Kelly’s relative autonomy and the freshness of his flat, hard-edged paintings provided an entirely new model for artists such as Martin and Indiana.59 “Meeting Ellsworth Kelly,” Indiana observed, “ . . . was my first head-on contact with painting of any geometric or clean, hard-edge style. I had never been introduced to it personally, never known a painter who worked in this manner, and had never very seriously thought of this kind of painting.” 60 Indiana’s aptly named Source I, 1959, is an abstraction based on the form of an avocado seed. (Fig. 74.) (Contemporary photographs show that both Indiana and Kelly grew avocado plants in their lofts.) Indiana’s use of flat, bright colors, curving shapes and hard edges against a white ground all suggest Kelly’s work. Indiana was astute enough to realize that this reliance on Kelly was also a liability; in his journal, he recorded his fear of being “too Kelly.” 61 Martin’s relationship with Kelly is less obvious in her extant work from 1957 to 1960, though it is well known that the artists maintained a close relationship. (Fig. 75.) “Well, I was closest to, I guess, Ellsworth Kelly,” Martin recalled. “All of them down there, the rest of them, I was pretty good friends with Indiana and I was friends with all of them.” 62 Kelly and Martin had breakfast together in Martin’s loft every day for a year and a half, and Martin’s encouragement is often cited as the reason that Kelly created his first sculpture, Pony, 1959.63 Kelly has noted that besides his dealer Betty Parsons, “no

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Figure 75 Hans Namuth, Agnes Martin, and Ellsworth Kelly, 1958, black-andwhite photograph, approximately 11 ⅘ x 10 ⅖ in., Center for Creative Photography.

one else could appreciate what I was doing then. Agnes appreciated it right away.” 6 4 The appreciation was mutual, as Kelly recalled that he showed Martin “all my early work—​ and she did the same.” 65 Kelly observed that he and Martin struggled to get past putting their personalities into their art (citing Picasso as “the great personality”), as well as past the abstract expressionists’ use of gesture, aiming instead for “stillness” in their work.66 One could easily argue that Martin never fully achieved this goal, given the insistently handmade nature of her later graphite lines. However, Martin’s adoption of the regularized forms of circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles during this period—​as in Earth, Earth II, Reflection, and The Lamp—​suggests a desire for clean forms without direct representational content. (Figs. 76–​79.) It is here, on the level of intent rather than facture, where one finds the most striking overlap between Martin and Kelly. Parsons held Martin’s second one-woman exhibition at Section Eleven just after the Christmas holiday in 1959, from December 29, 1959, to January 16, 1960. Parsons’s decision to give Martin a second one-woman exhibition signals her confidence in Martin’s work, though the late-December time-slot was not ideal, since many potential buyers would have been out of town for the holidays. Martin worked steadily through 1959 to prepare for the exhibition and received an “advance on sales” of $400 from Parsons on November 10, 1959.67 Martin showed twenty-two works, including eighteen paintings, three constructions, and one watercolor on paper and canvas, ranging in price

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Figure 76 Agnes Martin, Earth, 1959, oil and graphite on canvas, 49 ¾ × 49 ¾ in., Dia Art Foundation, New York; anonymous gift in Honor of Kirk Varnedoe, 2004.002.

from $300 to $1,200.68 Although Wheat does not appear on Parsons’s price list for the exhibition, Ashton notes seeing the painting in her review for the New York Times.69 In a statement to Martin dated February 4, 1960, Parsons records that she sold Buds, circa 1959 ($600); Prospect, 1958 ($300); Rain, circa 1958–​1959 ($300); Unbeckoning Grass, 1958 ($400); and The Word ($125).70 The exhibition spanned two years of Martin’s work and highlighted her transition from the cruciform composition evident in Wheat and the hazy rectangular fields in

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Figure 77 Agnes Martin, Earth II, 1959, oil on canvas, 71 ½ × 48 in., private collection.

Unbeckoning Grass to more hard-edged, repetitive arrangements of circles. In Buds, Earth, Night Harbor, Reflection, The Lamp, The Laws, and Water, Martin placed circles—​ some complete in themselves, others ringed with a thin circular line—​in varying configurations of grids: five by ten, five by seven, five by five, five by three, four by six, three by six, and three by three.71 (Fig. 80.) “I did a whole show of circles after I began with the lines,” Martin recalled, though, in fact, her use of circles can be traced to Dancer No. 1 (L.T.).72 Martin’s comment remains valuable, however, because it complicates the neat teleology whereby her “lines” led directly to her grid paintings. Instead, she pursued her investigation of circles and, at times, rectangular forms (as in Earth II) concurrently, working out compositional questions of repetition and scale as well as shifting her palette and considering various methods of paint application. Trying to determine the size and format that best suited her vision, Martin chose supports ranging from 25-inch, 32 ½-inch, and 50-inch squares to a 72-by-48-inch rectangle. Although Martin would ultimately settle on a 72-inch square as her preferred format, the range of sizes and formats she used in the late 1950s demonstrates that she was still experimenting with questions of scale. Similarly, the number and placement

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Figure 78 Agnes Martin, Reflection, 1959, oil on canvas, 7 ½ × 48 in., location unknown.

of Martin’s circles and rectangles within each composition suggest that she was playing with scale in the size of her supports as well as in her use of formal devices. Martin’s compositions are ordered and balanced: she uses a one-to-one ratio in her placement of twenty-five circles on a 49 ¾-inch-square canvas in Earth, and then uses a one-to-two ratio in Earth II, where twenty-four rectangles are placed on a canvas 71 ½ inches long and 48 inches wide. As these ratios suggest, Martin’s compositional structure is based on the format of a grid—​t hough she had not yet created an explicit grid on the surface of her canvas though the use of line. Martin also shifted her application of paint from the feathery brushstrokes visible in The Spring to a sharp, hard-edged style (likely owing to her contact with Kelly), as seen in her crisp applications of paint in Earth and Reflection. Additionally, while Martin painted Buds using the yellows previously seen in Drift of Summer, she executed Earth, Reflection, and The Lamp in a new palette of black, brown, and cream. Night Harbor, one of her most haunting early paintings, uses a deep green against a dark blue ground bordered at the top and bottom with black.73 Ashton notes that Martin’s palette had deepened since making the works she showed the year before, and she observes Martin’s new use

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Figure 79 Agnes Martin, The Lamp, 1959, oil on canvas, 32 × 32 in., location unknown.

of circles over thin washes of oil paint: “Last year’s exhibition was filled with the palest of canvases—​t he sands of the desert seemed to have impregnated her imagination. But in this exhibition, Miss Martin has gone to deeper earth colors, loam browns, deep siennas, clay yellow, and brown-blacks. . . . The motif that recurs is a dark circlet that seems to be boring deep into the earth. At times the circles, laid in rows over diaphanous washes, symbolize more nearly growing things, or, as in one painting, buds.” 74 Ashton records Martin’s shifting palette, but does so within the organic, naturalist rubric that she consistently employs with regard to Martin’s early paintings—​a rubric that, two years after Martin’s return to New York, was increasingly anachronistic. Given the experimentation evident within Martin’s oeuvre, her 1959–​1960 exhibition at Section Eleven is remarkable for her relatively conservative approach to painting and

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Figure 80 Agnes Martin, Buds, ca. 1959, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 in., Titze Collection.

for her steadfast adherence to her own aesthetic vision. At least two influential exhibitions were shown in New York during the winter of 1959–​1960. Eleanor Ward’s School of New York: Some Younger Artists exhibition at the Stable Gallery, which featured the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers, among others, closed on December 15, and the famous Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art ran from December 16, 1959, through February 14, 1960. In the latter, Dorothy Miller showed the work of Jay DeFeo, Wally Hendrick, James Jarvaise, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Alfred Leslie, Landes Lewitin, Richard Lytle, Robert Mallary, Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg, Julius Schmindt, Rich-

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ard Stankiewicz, Frank Stella, Albert Urban, and Jack Youngerman. Given the number of artists in the exhibition who lived or worked on the Slip or downtown—​roughly a quarter—​Martin must have been disappointed not to be included in the exhibition, especially as Miller notes that “it seemed desirable to include a larger proportion of newcomers to the New York scene” in the exhibition.75 “Six of the sixteen [artists] have not yet had one-man shows in New York and several others have shown but once or have held shows not truly pertinent to their present work,” Miller states. Adding insult to Martin’s injury, Miller concludes, “Perhaps it is not too much to claim for Sixteen Americans an unusually fresh, richly varied, vigorous and youthful character.” 76 Miller’s selection of art and artists in the exhibition shows the lingering vestiges of abstract expressionism, as in James Jarvaise’s paintings, but also charts new directions by including Rauschenberg’s “combine-paintings” and Nevelson’s “wooden wall constructions,” as well as DeFeo’s and Johns’s paintings, both of which relied on thick, objectlike accumulations of oil paint and encaustic.77 Kelly and Youngerman offer yet another direction: a “cooling corrective” of “unity of surface,” “color,” “contour,” and “hard, crisp edges,” according to critic E. C. Goossen, while Carl Andre’s notes on Frank Stella, the youngest artist in the exhibition, read today as if Stella’s work were a precursor of minimalism: “Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. . . . His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.” 78 Miller’s Sixteen Americans exhibition thus does not present a unified group of artists but, rather, illustrates the options available to younger artists during a moment of profound transition within the New York art world. Ashton’s review of Martin’s 1959–​1960 exhibition at Section Eleven did little to suggest the “unusually fresh” approach that Miller sought. “Even though her recent paintings at Betty Parsons’s Section 11 Gallery, 11 East Fifty-Seventh Street, are the work of her past two years in New York,” Ashton notes, “Miss Martin’s deepest feelings are related to nature—​the vast, maddening infinitude to which she is drawn.” 79 In line with this thesis, Ashton accounts for Martin’s turn from representation to abstraction by citing Martin’s frustration in trying to capture the “power” of the mountains in Taos, and her subsequent “need for symbolic—​or abstract—​means.” 80 This neat summation accords with Martin’s oft-quoted comment that her “mountains looked like ant hills” in her representational works, but it emphasizes Martin’s relationship to nature at the expense of acknowledging her deep knowledge of modern art, which she gained through her contact with other artists in New Mexico; her repeated trips to New York; and her engagement with artists such as Indiana, Kelly, and Youngerman.81 By contrast, Barbara Butler, Lawrence Campbell, and Stuart Preston all understood Martin’s paintings within the context of abstract art. Preston succinctly characterizes Martin’s work as “delicate oils [that] contain esoteric symbols,” while Barbara Butler notes their organizational similarity to De Stijl paintings: “an art in which ‘logic is made concrete.’ “ 82 Butler may have been responding to the “equilibrium and harmony”

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of paintings of the De Stijl movement, as well as to their “austere abstract clarity.” 83 For example, she notes the “simple vertical and horizontal patterns” in Martin’s paintings, which produce “an illusion of balance and exact measure.” 8 4 Butler also invokes Martin’s study of Newman and Rothko by suggesting Martin’s attention to the surface plane and to “light or its absence.” 85 Butler grounds her analysis in the history of abstract paintings and concludes that, rather than being informed by the landscapes of the American West, “these paintings are as simple, logical as a mathematical formula; their quiet beauty remains a mystery of the artist’s talent.” 86 Lawrence Campbell, writing for ARTnews in January 1960, characterizes Martin neither as a product of the Wild West nor as an abstract painter with a modernist lineage, but rather, and unfortunately, as “a specialist in teaching children creative activities.” 87 (In this context, it is worth noting that Robert Indiana also taught art to children, but he was not identified as a teacher in the contemporary critical literature on his art.)88 Searching for a way to describe Martin’s paintings, Campbell likens her “centered,” “balanced” compositions of circles, rectangles, and squares to common household objects, though without any recourse to the medium of assemblage: “The large paintings are statically-balanced, centered arrangements of color disks—​like buttons on a card—​or small rectangles—​like light through a Venetian blind—​spaced equidistantly from each other, on rectangular, horizontal bands or fields of subdued unsettled color. The disks and rectangles seem to swell, jump or skip. After a while the paint surface itself seems to disappear, to be replaced by the reflected light, and all that is left is a ghost of an image floating in the mind. The total effect is unsettling and entertaining.” 89 Martin likely did not appreciate the comparison of her carefully wrought compositions to commercial packages of buttons or Venetian blinds, especially given her aim of creating “completely non-objective . . . abstract” paintings.90 However, Campbell’s observation of the effect of movement that Martin’s paintings engender and the seeming “disappearance” of the painted surface in favor of reflected light prefigures the optical qualities of Martin’s grid paintings of the 1960s.91 Although Ashton, Butler, and Campbell offer different appraisals of Martin’s exhibition at Section Eleven, all three critics note the balance of Martin’s compositions: Martin’s “fine feeling for balance,” the “illusion of balance” that she creates, and her “statically-balanced, centered arrangements of color disks.” 92 Much as assemblage was “in the air,” Martin’s use of circles in balanced, gridlike compositions was not unique: Robert Indiana created an analogous series of work in 1959. Indiana created precise compositions of regular columns and rows of circles using white gesso and gold leaf against a raw ground of wood or Homasote, a commercial building material akin to drywall, torn from the walls of his Coenties Slip loft.93 The formal similarities to the work Martin was doing at the time are remarkable, as one sees with a comparison to Martin’s Dominoes, 1960, a thirty-six-by-twelve-inch work on paper mounted on canvas.94 (Figs. 81– ​83.) The composition consists of two circles, placed above and below a field of ninety-eight dominoes arranged in seven rows of fourteen, on a paper support that has

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Figure 81 Agnes Martin, Dominoes, 1960, gouache, ink, and graphite on paper mounted on canvas, 36 × 12 in., Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL, gift of the Betty Parsons Foundation, 85.186.

Figure 82 John Ardoin, Robert Indiana’s Coenties Slip studio, ca. 1960, black-and-white photograph. Figure 83 Robert Indiana’s 25 Coenties Slip studio, 1959, black-and-white photograph.

been mounted on canvas. As Haskell notes, “Several months into the series, [Indiana] experienced a moment of doubt when he saw the latest work of Agnes Martin, which utilized a similar modular layout of geometric shapes. ‘This begins to make it rather hard . . . [that] we should be using [the] same motif,’ he wrote in his journal. ‘Unfortunate for me, not for her.’ “ 95 Indiana’s journal entry is startling in its acknowledgment of the similarity between his work and Martin’s, and is made all the more so by the fact that he immediately ceded priority to Martin—​a rare occurrence for a female artist in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This type of direct creative exchange mirrors Martin’s time in Taos, when she regularly conversed with Mandelman, Ribak, and Spohn about her work. More important, Indiana’s observations demonstrate that by 1959, Martin had developed a strong enough aesthetic voice that her “motif” was recognized as her own, an apt indicator that her days as a student, studying and testing the work of more established artists such as Reinhardt and Rothko, were over. What remains the most striking aspect of this unexpected convergence, however, is how the artists used their shared means for vastly different ends—​Martin veering toward the rigor and restraint that would come to characterize minimalism, while Indiana used his precise grids of circles as a platform for pop. The transformation of Indiana’s 1960 painting Agadir into its second state in 1961, renamed The American Dream, is a case in point. Because Agadir was painted over, a page from Indiana’s journal is the best surviving representation of the original work. (Fig. 84.) The distinctive angles of the pentagons in Agadir, which activate the negative space at the center of the composition, are similar to the angled shapes found in Kelly’s work, while the brown-and-white palette and the use of circles remind one of Martin’s Dominoes, painted the same year. Utilizing hard-edged abstract forms, a reduced palette, and flat color, Indiana was well versed in an emerging language of nonobjective painting, yet he remained unsatisfied. Instead of pushing farther into the realm of nonobjectivity, he removed any index of artistic personality by, paradoxically, filling the painting with recognizable symbols through the use of an old-fashioned mechanical aid: a stencil. Using nineteenth-century brass stencils found in a friend’s loft as a model, Indiana repainted the entire work and inscribed the vacant circles of Agadir with prefabricated typography and symbols. The introduction of text and other easily reproducible symbols into his work has been cited by Thomas Crow as the decisive moment in which Indiana’s work turned toward the combination of text and geometry that would earn him widespread recognition as a pop artist.96 As Crow observes, “The old-fashioned stencils represented an archaic form of Pop that was transmuted in the early 1960s into a sign of the contemporary, largely through Indiana’s formal discipline—​his control over flat, uninflected color divisions—​and the timeliness of his references.” 97 Crow’s analysis reinforces Indiana’s earlier statements. “I was never fond of t[he] designation [pop] at all,” Indiana complained to an interviewer. “Both Kelly and I were in shows related to formalism and I considered myself a formalist.” 98 Agnes Martin is the last person whom critics would consider a pop artist—​not even

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Figure 84 Robert Indiana, journal, Wednesday/ Thursday, March 2–​3, 1960, ink, gouache, and collage on paper, no dimensions specified, collection of Robert Indiana.

Campbell, with his invocation of buttons and Venetian blinds, went that far. But if we understand Indiana’s pop art to be dependent upon a strict formalism, we realize that the formalism of Dominoes depends on game pieces that are firmly part of popular culture. Dominoes not only form a central compositional element of Martin’s work but also determine the larger format of the work, which conforms to that of the one-to-one doublet domino (in which a single dot, or “pip,” represents the number on each half of the domino). Martin’s doubling—​in which the work of art represents and mimics the form of a domino—​suggests a certain engagement with and awareness of popular culture that is usually assumed to be foreign to Martin’s aesthetic. Dominoes were a popular entertainment for children and adults in the 1950s and early 1960s in America, but they also provided a ready-made graphic formula that was aesthetically compelling and which fit within Martin’s previous use of found objects in geometric arrangements. In fact, Martin’s dominoes are not entirely divorced from the grid formations of Andy Warhol’s dollar bills, created two years later, especially when one remembers the handmade facture of Warhol’s early work. Martin understood the logic of pop and possessed the tools necessary to create works of pop art, but ultimately elected to pursue a very different conception of art. For all of the flirtation with the strategies that would be codified as pop art in the 1960s, Dominoes remains a curious anomaly within Martin’s larger body of work. While

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Martin used dominoes as a compositional element within her work, she ignored their function as game pieces and ultimately disavowed their status as commercial objects in favor of utilizing their formal possibilities in her search for the nonobjective mode of abstraction that would characterize her grid paintings of the early 1960s. Just as Martin borrowed approaches from assemblage while ultimately rejecting the overall format, she utilized the ready-made graphic formula of pop while jettisoned the use of popular culture in favor of abstract compositions.99 In many ways, Dominoes is akin to Martin’s earlier painting Autumn Watch, 1954, which is also an anomaly within her oeuvre. While both paintings seem, at first glance, prototypical of certain movements in American art—​Autumn Watch as an example of surrealist biomorphism, and Dominoes as an example of pop—​both works are predicated upon the underlying structure of the grid. As such, they function as reminders of just how long the idea of the grid gestated in Martin’s mind, and they establish that Martin’s decision to foreground the visible structure of the grid came after years of using the format as a compositional device that, as in Earth II or Reflection, was felt but not seen. Indeed, Martin’s use of the grid can be traced as far back as the stacked forms in The Bluebird, 1954, demonstrating that her interest in orthogonal compositions was evident during her time in Taos. Protogrids can be seen in works such as Autumn Watch, 1954, and Window and Wheat, both from 1957, as well as in the arrangement of boat spikes in Kali and The Laws, from 1958. The bottle tops in Water, 1958, are also in a gridded arrangement, as are the three-inch squares of canvas in Homage to Greece, 1959. These structures become even more apparent in paintings from 1959, such as Untitled, Earth, and Earth II. Martin’s use of precisely placed circles or rectangles in these paintings gives way to her use of smaller, repetitive forms, such as the pips in Dominoes, which in turn become the series of dots and dashes she uses to create a larger, all-over grid in works such as White Flower, 1960. (Fig. 85.) Over time, these dots and dashes solidify into the graphite lines of works such as The Tree, 1964, long recognized as one of Martin’s classic grid paintings. (Fig. 86.) This continuity suggests that Martin’s use of the grid was neither predestined, as some have argued, nor the result of her sudden contact with contemporary art in New York. Rather, it was a formal and intellectual solution to Martin’s decadelong quest to create abstract paintings that provoked distinct emotional responses in her viewers. Martin’s use of the grid as a compositional format was hardly unique in New York in 1960, however, since many artists were using grids at the same time. As Rosalind Krauss notes in her well-known essay “Grids,” the structure of the grid was prominent throughout the twentieth century: “In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest[,] . . . no form within the whole of modern aesthetic production has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so impervious to change.” 100 Krauss cites

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Figure 85 Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960, oil on canvas, 71 ⅞ × 72 in., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; anonymous gift, 1963, 63.1653.

the “sheer number of careers that have been devoted to the exploration of the grid” as being impressive, and illustrates her essay with images of works by Piet Mondrian (Composition 2, 1922, and Composition 1A, 1930), Joseph Cornell (Nouveaux Contes de Fées [Poison Box], 1948), Jasper Johns (Gray Numbers, 1958), Robert Ryman (Yellow Drawing #5, 1963), and, appropriately for our discussion, Agnes Martin (Untitled, 1965). Krauss’s examples provide a temporal span across the first half of the twentieth century, but the example most relevant to Martin would have been Johns’s Gray Numbers. (Fig. 87.)

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Figure 86 Agnes Martin, The Tree, 1964, oil and graphite on canvas, 72 × 72 in., Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund, Museum of Modern Art, 5.1965.

Created in 1958, Gray Numbers consists of eleven rows of eleven rectangles, each of which contains a number from 0 through 9. The work is executed in encaustic and collage on canvas, measuring 67 by 49 ½ inches, and it was created at Johns’s Pearl Street studio or his later studio on 128 Front Street, where he moved in March 1958.101 Johns’s reliance on the structure of the grid is readily apparent in Gray Numbers, which Dorothy Miller purchased from his 1958 exhibition at Castelli. Johns’s affinity for the grid can also be seen in the neat rows of stars—​six rows of eight stars each—​in Flag, 1954–​1955, and in White Flag, 1955, both of which were on view at Castelli.102 In addition, Castelli

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Figure 87 Jasper Johns, Gray Numbers, 1958, encaustic and collage on canvas, 67 × 49 ½ in., collection of David Geffen, Los Angeles.

showed White Numbers, 1957, which, while not as clearly segmented as Gray Numbers, nonetheless shows Johns lining up his stencils in a gridded structure.103 The structure of the grid is more explicit in Robert Rauschenberg’s 1957 combine Untitled, which incorporates a sheet of printed ledger paper at the upper left of the composition. (Fig. 88.) As Branden Joseph observes, “In th[e] early period of Rauschenberg’s Combines, he primarily adopted a loose, gridlike arrangement of materials. While the grid is a geometrical form both clearly symmetrical and consistent throughout the visual field, it is also a compositional means so immediately evident as not to require any hermeneutic of interpretation or any search for internal motivation—​‘a symmetry,’ [John] Cage noted, ‘so obvious as not to attract interest (nothing special).’ “ 104 Rauschenberg’s use of the grid, like that of Johns and Martin, was, for composer John Cage, “nothing special.” Joseph cites the “self-evidence” with which Rauschenberg deployed the grid as a compositional structure, noting the “loosely stacked grid arrangements” in Untitled,

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Figure 88 Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1957, combine: oil, graphite, fabric, and paper on canvas, with letter in a sealed envelope, in a wood-and-glass frame, 16 × 20 in., private collection.

circa 1954; Odalisk, 1955–​1958; and Interview, 1955, as well as the section-by-section construction of Collection, 1954; Charlene, 1954; and Red Interior, 1954, as examples.105 The prevalence of the grid in Rauschenberg’s early combines demonstrates the artist’s reliance on the form, as well as the ubiquity of the grid. Leo Steinberg likens the grids of Rauschenberg’s early combines to “charts [or] bulletin boards . . . on which data is entered” in his famous essay on the flatbed picture plane, but Joseph cites the priority of another reference: the “compositional layout of the newspaper.” 106 The formal structure of a newspaper page is both a conceptual idea and a material fact in Rauschenberg’s combines, as the newspaper on the left side of the first panel of Collection, 1954, demonstrates.107 “I began using newsprint in my work to activate a ground,” Rauschenberg explained, “so that even the first strokes in a painting had its [sic] own unique position in a gray map of words.” 108 Rauschenberg’s reference to “a gray map of words” underscores his understanding of newspapers not just as vehicles of content—​noting the news, the weather, or the latest baseball scores—​but also, and fundamentally, as a gridded structure that could be usefully appropriated for his own artistic process. Rauschenberg was not the only one interested in newspapers at the time; Johns created Newspaper in 1957, and Chryssa, who used a single name to identify herself, made a series of “newspaper images” between 1958 and 1962. (Fig. 89.) Martin had “a close relationship” with Chryssa, an artist whose work ranged from paintings and prints to neon sculptures.109 “What especially interested Chryssa in 1958 was the structural theme of the front page,” Pierre Restany observes, “its monumental frontal design, or again that of the classified advertisements, where measured columns are divided into

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Figure 89 Chryssa, Newspaper Page, Sock Advertisement, 1959–​1962, two-color screenprint, oil, and graphite on paper, sheet (irregular): 39 × 24 ¼ in., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist, 72.140.

regular masses.” 110 Newspaper Page, Sock Advertisement, 1959–​1962, a two-color screenprint with graphite and oil on paper, is a relevant example. The overall effect of Chryssa’s newspaper grid is not unlike that of Martin’s later grid paintings, though Martin’s grids have little to do with the vernacular connotations of daily newspapers. Just as Martin utilized specific aspects of assemblage and pop, she predicated her use of the grid not upon the cultural or anthropological associations of newspapers, as Rauschenberg and Chryssa did, but upon the interpretive possibilities offered by the consistent, symmetrical geometric format of the grid as a structural device.

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Critic Natalie Edgar notes, in the October 1961 issue of ARTnews, Martin’s use of the grid for structural, or “schematic,” purposes, likening the format of the grid not to newspapers but to “woven fabric.” 111 Indeed, many historians have suggested that Martin’s use of the grid is linked to Lenore Tawney, who had a particularly close relationship with Martin during this period.112 Eleanor Munro, for example, writes that Martin’s early grids “were all near-literal renditions of woven textiles with warp and weft clearly delineated.” 113 (See Tawney’s Floating Shapes, 1958.) More recently, Frances Morris suggests that Tawney provided Martin “with an important point of reference,” and that there are “exact compositional equivalents to details in Tawney’s woven forms” in Martin’s work.114 But when asked about her relationship with Tawney’s work—​and Tawney’s role as a possible source of artistic influence—​Martin vehemently denied any connection between her work and Tawney’s weaving: Simon: It’s been written that your structuring of your works with finely drawn, emphatically taut horizontals, often gridded against verticals, shows an affinity with weaving—​pulling the weft across the vertical warps. Martin: Oh, don’t give me that. Simon: What do you think was meant by raising those possible relationships? Lawrence Alloway talked about the idea of repetitive points on the canvas looking like stitches. Nonsense? Martin: Somebody undercutting me, saying it was like weaving.115

Martin’s denial of any relationship between her work and Tawney’s during this period may be due to distinctions she placed on the differences between fine arts and crafts, though her tone—​at once combative and dismissive of any relevance in Tawney’s work—​ suggests a more nuanced relationship between the two bodies of work.116 Tawney “drove [her] Daimler from Chicago [to New York] with [her] cat, Pansy” in November 1957, roughly the same time that Martin left Taos.117 Tawney quickly found a studio at 27 Coenties Slip; she noted in her journal that the loft “needed everything—​ painting, heating, but first, cleaning out. I had sent only a very small bed, refrigerator, loom and threads.” 118 Tawney spent eight months at 27 Coenties Slip before moving to a nearby sailmaker’s loft at 27 South Street; the cathedral ceilings, meant to accommodate sails, allowed Tawney to significantly expand the scale of her woven forms.119 Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen have argued that the physical expansion Tawney’s loft provided was mirrored by a creative expansion that allowed her tapestries to “open up,” utilizing mixed combinations of wools and exposed warps that allowed the “silhouette of yarn” to become “a strong compositional element.” 120 Much like that of Martin and Indiana, Tawney’s art was affected by the found objects that littered her studio and the docks surrounding Coenties Slip. “She was subconsciously aware of the strong, hard forms around her—​the winches and paraphernalia of a sail loft, the great iron spikes, the precision of old brass stencils (which she gave

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to Bob Indiana), the stark reality of river patterns and her own newly structured metaphysical reality.” 121 Although Tawney is remembered for her weaving, she created a series of wooden constructions during the late 1950s and early 1960s, much as Martin did. Judith Stein describes Tawney’s “quirky, mixed media assemblage 20 ½, 1958,” as including “a vintage hat mold with a lid” and “a tapering wooden spike used to separate rope strands.” 122 Tawney’s use of a wooden spike echoes Martin’s Kali, which Tawney owned, and which was made the same year. Kali and 20 ½ thus demonstrate a conceptual and material similarity that grounded the creative relationship between the two women. While this relationship has been characterized as a linear, one-to-one exchange, Tawney’s awareness of “the great iron spikes” (as seen in Martin’s The Laws, which Tawney also owned) and the “old brass stencils (which she gave to Bob Indiana)” suggests instead that Tawney was at the center of the network of artists on Coenties Slip, who were all using a common language—​t he found objects of the lofts and docks of the Slip—​to define their own aesthetic aims. With this in mind, the comparison between Tawney’s weaving and Martin’s grids, which she often painted upon exposed fabric supports (where the warp and weft were clearly visible), seems at once inevitable and overly reductive. In purely formal terms, both women were using the grid as the structural basis for their work; and materially, both were interested in the aesthetic properties of fiber—​Tawney as her central medium, and Martin as the often exposed support for her paintings. Color, texture, and shape were central to each artist, and the knots and plaits of Tawney’s woven forms gave her pieces a distinct tactility. But the points of contact between the two artists were more far-reaching—​at once conceptual and material, haphazard and routine, practical and spiritual. Martin, for example, introduced Tawney to the daughter of the collage artist Anne Ryan, who subsequently gave Tawney her mother’s handmade papers, encouraging Tawney to continue to work in the medium of collage.123 Tawney named many of Martin’s works when Martin was too ill to help prepare one of her exhibitions, and Martin, likewise, “named . . . [Tawney’s pieces] The King, The Queen, The Bride, The River, The Fountain, The Veil, The Arc, and so on.” 124 It thus comes as no surprise that both Martin and Tawney have pieces titled The Dark River. Martin wrote statements supporting Tawney’s work, including the introductory brochure for Tawney’s solo exhibition at the Staten Island Museum in 1961 and an “explanation of [the] tapestry” titled Nativity in Nature.125 In addition, Tawney, who had a private income, assisted Martin financially at various times during Martin’s decade in New York from 1957 through 1967.126 In a letter, Martin observed how Tawney’s support would enable her to continue to work: “Now I can take my time and really get to work. The whole scene is changed. There is no way to grasp the size of it. There is no way for me to get hold of it at all. I do not think you will be able to imagine even a small part of the enormous changes in my position.” 127 Martin’s letter to Tawney is reminiscent of her thanks to Helene Wurlitzer, another independently wealthy woman who supported Martin’s artistic pursuits in the 1950s.

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Written in 1963, Martin’s letter to Tawney speaks of the “enormous opportunity” that Tawney has made possible and Martin’s desire to “really get to work” on her paintings.128 Not coincidentally, many of Martin’s critically acclaimed grid paintings were created the same year. Whether or not the gridded warp and weft structures of Tawney’s woven forms influenced Martin’s early grids or, as Martin suggested, served to “undercut” her artistic contributions, Tawney’s support allowed Martin to create some of her most celebrated grid paintings. As the work of Martin’s downtown contemporaries has shown, the format of the grid was being used by a wide variety of artists to suit their own artistic ambitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s in New York. That is, the grid was, as Krauss says, a “relentlessly sustain[able]” model of “modernist ambition” and, in Cage’s words, “nothing special.” 129 Martin viewed the advent of the grid in her work, however, as an epiphany, and it is worth restating Martin’s explanations of “finding the grid” within this altered context: I painted for twenty years without painting a painting that I liked. I never painted a painting I liked until I got to New York, and they were completely non-objective, then I liked them. . . . Gradually, over twenty years, my work became more and more abstract. It was a process.130 It wasn’t till I found the grid, in New York in 1960, that I felt satisfied with what I was doing. When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and I thought the grid represented innocence, and I still do. So I painted it, and I’ve been doing it for thirty years.131 I had a vision of a grid and I painted it.132

Martin’s descriptions of “finding the grid” are all, tellingly, before-and-after stories; the advent of the grid marked, in her mind, the definitive break between her early work and what she considered to be her mature work. The grids, for Martin, are, to borrow from Cage, certainly “[some]thing special,” a qualitative distinction that has been borne out by a half century of criticism. What, then, accounts for this crucial disjunction between the unremarkable status of the grid as a compositional format in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the exalted status of the grid within Martin’s own body of work? A clue may be found in Martin’s 1961 introduction for Tawney’s exhibition at the Staten Island Museum, in which she writes, “To see new and original expression in a very old medium, and not just one new form but a complete new form in each piece of work, is wholly unlooked for, and is a wonderful and gratifying experience.” 133 Martin did not create a new medium in her choice of oil on canvas—​in fact, as we’ve seen, she consciously rejected new mediums—​but she did infuse an old form, the grid, with “new and original expression” throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. Through her careful attention to scale and composition, as well as to the material aspects of her paintings, Martin made the omnipresent form of the grid her own. As Krauss observes,

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“The grid’s mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction). The work of Reinhardt or Agnes Martin would be instances of this power.” 134 Martin, by her own recollection, “never painted a painting [she] liked” until she got to New York, and was not “satisfied” with her artistic production until she “found the grid.” 135 Given such a long period of dissatisfaction with her work—​a period that coincides with her long apprenticeship, both in New Mexico and New York—​her newfound confidence in her work signals a new phase of artistic production but also, and just as important, her own identification as a mature artist. At the same time, the positive reviews of her exhibitions continued to generate a strong critical reputation for Martin, even if sales did not always follow. In this sense, Martin’s text for Tawney’s Nativity in Nature becomes at once more personal and more poignant: “That which is new, with the support of those who appreciate it, slowly gathers force.” 136 To this end, Martin took three works on paper to William Lieberman at the Museum of Modern Art on April 24, 1961, with the hope that they would be considered for inclusion in Fifty Drawings: Recent Acquisitions, an exhibition planned for April 10 through August 12, 1962. Martin wrote to Parsons: Dear Betty, I took 3 Drawings Monday April 24 ’61 1. The Robe 20" × 30" 1961 2. Arrow 24" × 24" 1961 3. Words 24" × 24" 1961 To Mr. Wm. Liberman at the Museum of Modern Art labeled as on the enclosed sample Thank you for thinking of my work for this show. I have received no word from him Sincerely Agnes Martin137

Martin’s choice of three works on paper conforms to the restrictions of the exhibition, and the drawings, priced at three hundred dollars, also represent a smaller investment for the museum than the purchase of a painting. For an artist who was just achieving success in New York, Martin’s strategy for placing her work at the museum was calculated and realistic. In addition to seeking the publicity that inclusion in such an exhibition would provide, Martin was likely eager to place her work within the context of the Museum of Modern Art, where works by Newman, Pollock, and Rothko, as well as Johns, already hung. Lieberman, however, declined to exhibit or purchase Martin’s drawings.

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Despite this setback, Parsons remained convinced of the merits of Martin’s new paintings and drawings. Instead of showing Martin’s work in December at Section Eleven, as she had in 1958 and 1959, Parsons gave Martin the first slot of the fall season, from September 25 through October 14, 1961, at the Betty Parsons Gallery for her solo show.138 Martin created a smaller exhibition than she had for her previous solo shows, showing just sixteen works: six large paintings priced at $1,500 (Honey, The Desert, The White Flower, Islands, The Cry, Singing); Contemplation, which was priced at $1,800; six works priced between $250 and $450 (Words, Arrow, The Islands [drawing], Tree [oil], Number 5, Number 6); and three smaller works priced at $100 (Keys [drawing], Study for Islands, and The Cry [drawing]).139 The grid paintings that Martin showed in her 1961 exhibition were at once an extension of the constructions, paintings, and works on paper she showed in December 1959—​which were distinguished by geometric arrangements of larger circles, squares, and rectangles—​and a marked departure from the smaller scale, relatively hard-edged style, and graphic compositions of these works. For contemporary viewers, however, Martin’s shift—​from the concrete three-dimensionality of The Laws to the “evaporating,” “mov[ing]” forms of The Islands—​would have seemed dramatic, because Martin had not shown her work in New York since the 1959–​ 1960 exhibition at Section Eleven. (Fig. 90.) (The reasons behind Parsons’s decision not to show Martin’s work in New York for nineteen months remain unclear; however, she did send Martin’s work to a variety of loan exhibitions in the United States and Europe, most notably the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture [commonly called the Carnegie International] at the Carnegie Institute.)140 But just as Martin’s move from Taos to New York was marked by continuity rather than rupture in her artistic practice, the advent of her grid paintings is likewise characterized by the use of tools and strategies that Martin had honed over the previous two decades. Martin reinvigorates her use of line in works like The Islands, for example, recalling the tensile lines of her early paintings in Albuquerque, such as Untitled, circa 1953. Martin’s use of the grid can similarly be traced to the stacking of forms evident in her paintings from Taos in the early 1950s, such as The Bluebird, as can her concern with all-over compositions and borders, as in Mid-Winter. In addition, the increasingly geometric arrangement of discrete forms—​such as the dashes in White Flower and The Islands—​can be seen in works as early as Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), circa 1956, and in Martin’s 1958 wooden constructions. Likewise, Martin’s brushwork was developed after she tested a range of styles, from Rothko’s feathery strokes to Kelly’s hard-edged forms. Her encounters with artists on Coenties Slip such as Robert Indiana and Lenore Tawney served as catalytic moments of creative exchange, offering new creative possibilities for each artist. While Martin’s 1961 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery represented a definitive break in the public understanding of her work, her grids were the result of an evolution that spanned nearly two decades. The reviews of Martin’s 1961 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery demonstrate the increasing critical prominence of Martin’s grids. Despite Martin’s many years in the

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Figure 90 Agnes Martin, The Islands, ca. 1961, oil and graphite on canvas, 72 × 72 in., private collection, New York.

New York art world, she was still—​at nearly fifty years old—​considered a “new” artist to many critics. Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker, notes that Martin is a “relative newcomer” and links her work to that of Josef Albers.141 He notes that both artists see life “through a screen of rectangles,” and that he “especially liked one of Miss Martin’s works—​‘The White Flower,’ with its thin reticulations of white on gray,” concluding that “her approach is sensitive and ingenious throughout.” 142 Natalie Edgar, writing in ARTnews, observes that Martin’s compositions “resemble . . . graph paper dotted in some decorative repeat pattern.” 143 While Coates’s understanding of Martin’s use of the rectangle and the square as compositional devices was couched in his acknowledg-

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ment of Martin’s “sensitive and ingenious” approach, Edgar finds nothing more than overly designed diagrams.144 For Edgar, Martin’s paintings are not fully realized—​each is “a blueprint of a painting”—​and each suffers from being “a designed painting . . . designed to look designed.” 145 Edgar is not the first to denigrate Martin’s paintings by an association with the decorative—​Edith Burckhardt noted earlier that Martin’s 1958 paintings “verge[d] on the decorative”—​but Edgar’s criticism suggests that Martin’s paintings are incomplete or schematic, rather than complete and finished works in themselves.146 Graph paper and blueprints, after all, are tools used to create other designs and, subsequently, other objects. Such an analysis is at odds with Martin’s own understanding of her artistic development. Martin, though aware she was still considered a “newcomer” in critical circles, believed that she had finally reached her artistic maturity when she “found the grid, in New York in 1960.” 147 While critical taste could account for the disparity between Edgar’s analysis and Martin’s own interpretation of her paintings, a larger structural shift in the New York art world also played a part. Edgar’s criticism was intended to highlight deficiencies in Martin’s work, especially given Edgar’s feeling that Martin’s approach in her 1961 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery was “what is generally to be avoided.” 148 Much of what Edgar found objectionable, however, would come to form the basis of minimalism. Her reference to graph paper suggests the repetition, seriality, and reduced formats that characterize minimalist forms (also known at the time as “primary structures,” “systemic art,” and “ABC art”), and the mass-produced nature of graph paper further implies a movement away from the overt display of the artist’s hand. Edgar’s invocation of a blueprint hints at the increasing prominence of instructive documents—​Sol LeWitt’s instructions, for example, or Donald Judd’s drawings for fabricators—​in the realization of works of art. This emphasis on the importance of the ideas behind a work of art can be seen in Edgar’s opening sentence: “Agnes Martin . . . thinks that many things come out of an idea for a thing that is more than would come out of the thing itself.” 149 Read in a different context, this could be an apt description of the philosophies of many minimalist artists. While such observations are the product of art historical hindsight, Martin’s 1961 exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery was held amid a shifting artistic climate in New York. Many artists who would become leaders of minimalism were moving away from more traditional media and forms and embracing new models of artistic production and expression. In 1959, Carl Andre, for example, was creating wooden sculptures such as Last Ladder, a work that resembles The Laws in its materials, scale, and use of repetitive rectangular forms. By the middle of the decade, however, Andre was creating his wellknown configurations of metal plates placed in contiguous linear patterns on the floor. Donald Judd, likewise, shifted from his creation of painted reliefs in 1961 and 1962 to serial progressions of metal and wooden boxes over the course of the early 1960s. Frank Stella, who arrived in New York at the same moment as Martin, began his influential series of striped black paintings in 1959. At the same time that Martin was refining her

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paintings and moving closer to her realization of the grid, other artists in New York were simultaneously shedding the skin of older artistic models in their search for new forms. Edgar’s criticism is caught in this transitional moment; she instinctively recognizes the aspects of Martin’s forms that will come to be codified as minimalist, but lacks the critical framework in which to place them. By contrast, Ann Wilson includes what amounts to a disclaimer regarding processbased art in her essay on Martin’s 1961 exhibition. Martin’s paintings, she writes, “are the product of the painter’s activity and suppress or subdue the process of painting. The painter has disappeared; the act of painting is not to be thought of. Recent painting has made the process of painting itself part of the import of the picture.” 150 Wilson’s awareness of the increasing focus on “the process of painting itself” is a clear reference to minimalism, and she is at pains to distinguish Martin’s paintings from such process-oriented works. Martin’s technical decisions, Wilson contends, remain in the service of her aesthetic vision, rather than functioning as an end in themselves. Wilson’s own careful reading of Martin’s paintings argues, however, that it is the very “act of painting”—​Martin’s attention to the specific qualities of her materials, her technical sophistication, and her compositional acuity—​that allows viewers to experience “the product of the painter’s activity” as an all-encompassing totality, a revelatory aesthetic experience. If critics such as Edgar were beginning to define Martin’s art—​and, indeed, minimalism itself—​in terms that imply a lack of the artist’s hand, Wilson’s criticism suggests that the origins of minimalism are not entirely divorced from the type of insistently handmade materiality that Martin honed on Coenties Slip.

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CONCLUSION

The year 1961 marked a transitional moment in Martin’s development as an artist, because it was the last year in which she showed her work with Betty Parsons. Martin’s frustration with Parsons was due to her lack of exposure—​in 1960, Martin did not have a show at either of Parsons’s galleries—​and to Parsons’s notoriously unfavorable bookkeeping.1 A financial statement from Parsons to Martin, dated February 4, 1960, shows that Parsons sold five paintings from Martin’s December 1959 exhibition, totaling $1,725.00.2 After Parsons’s 33 percent commission was paid and expenses for advertising, catalog production, photographs, printing, mailing, and transport were subtracted from that amount, as well as a $400.00 advance disbursed to the artist on November 10, 1959, Martin was paid $175.79—​a small portion of the overall profits from the exhibition.3 Statements from 1959 reveal that Martin typically received no more than a third of the profits from her exhibitions at Section Eleven. Martin recalled even worse circumstances: “After expenses for moving, storage, publicity, et cetera, I owed her money. . . . I just couldn’t live on what I was getting from Betty.” 4 Martin contemplated moving to a new gallery as early as 1959, even though her 1958 contract with Parsons ran through September 30, 1960.5 “Every morning for two and a half years,” she explained, “I asked my mind if I could change galleries, and for two and a half years it said, ‘No, no, no.’ Finally, it said, ‘Yes.’ I leaped out of bed, went uptown, and told Betty I was leaving.” 6 Martin’s deliberate consideration also extended to her choice of a new gallery. Her first choice was Leo Castelli, who showed the work of Johns and Rauschenberg as well as Stella, demonstrating a stylistic range that likely appealed

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to Martin. Castelli had, at the very least, an awareness of the artists working on Coenties Slip.7 Reportedly citing a full stable of artists, Castelli declined to show Martin’s work, suggesting that she approach Robert Elkon instead.8 Elkon agreed to represent Martin, scheduling her first show from November 27 to December 15, 1962. As Martin recalled, with a mix of practicality and market savvy, “Elkon . . . had opened a gallery and it was brand new and he didn’t have any artists and so I thought I’d go someplace where there was no competition.” 9 Before Martin showed with Elkon in November, Lawrence Alloway included Islands, 1961, in Geometric Abstraction in America, an exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 20 through May 13, 1962. Alloway used the exhibition to codify the tendencies toward a more hard-edged, geometric form of abstraction that he saw emerging in American art, showing the work of artists as diverse as Chryssa, Arshile Gorky, Ellsworth Kelly and Ad Reinhardt.10 John Gordon, who wrote the text for the exhibition catalog, defines geometric abstraction as “purely abstract painting and sculpture which is chiefly concerned with the square, the rectangle, the triangle, the circle and geometric volumes such as the cube, cone, etc. They are often arranged architecturally and suggest geometry. Primary colors are frequently used. Aesthetic aims are often deeply involved with a search for ultimate reality, understanding of nature, psychic intuition, etc.” 11 Martin’s inclusion in the exhibition thus signals a shift in the critical interpretation of her painting toward a more resolutely formal approach. Gordon’s essay touches on many of the influences that contemporary critics cited in Martin’s work: the origin of geometric abstraction in the De Stijl movement; the relevance of Albers as filtered through Reinhardt; and the importance of the Museum of Modern Art’s Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America exhibition in 1951. Gordon observes at the end of the essay that while “work by the painters . . . Barnett Newman . . . and Mark Rothko seems to be closely allied to a geometric conception at first glance, . . . their approach is more intuitive, more automatic, more active. They mostly start to paint directly on the canvas without a careful plan or sketch, in contrast to the traditional approach of constructing a picture step by step as an architect might plan a building.” 12 Gordon’s observation regarding Newman and Rothko is misinformed—​scholarship attests to the deliberate planning and execution of their paintings—​but it serves, in this context, to define geometric abstraction against the popular understanding of abstract expressionism.13 Notably, his criticism echoes Natalie Edgar’s characterization of Martin’s work as “a blueprint of a painting . . . designed to look designed.” Edgar’s remarks established a critical lineage that gestures toward the advent of minimalism. Further, Gordon places Martin in an historical context that explicitly rejects the legacy of Rothko and Newman, in direct contrast to the line of criticism that Dore Ashton, among others, established in the late 1950s. Gordon’s understanding of Martin as an artist primarily interested in the use of geometric models of abstraction—​in contrast to the “intuitive . . . automatic . . . active” style of abstract expressionism he associates with Newman and Rothko—​is indicative

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of a palpable shift in the critical characterization of Martin’s artistic development in the early 1960s. Ashton’s criticism of the late 1950s, which foregrounds “the sands of the desert” while alluding to similarities between Martin’s and Rothko’s work, is replaced with criticism that, like Gordon’s, focuses on the geometric and procedural aspects of Martin’s paintings.14 A review written by the artist and critic Donald Judd, for example, highlights the austere geometry of Martin’s 1962 paintings: Outside of a couple of small ones, Agnes Martin’s paintings are not what is called “plastic.” The paintings are simply attractive, a word which is usually, and is here, used both as a derogation and a compliment. Most of the paintings are composed of a large square, within an empty border, of rows of small dashes. Generally the dashes, white on gray, just sit on the surfaces, which are umber or gray. A small painting that really works has horizontal rows of dash-dot-dashes (Every iconologist should know that this is “K” in Morse). The ground is dark gray. The horizontal spaces between the rows of dashes are rubbed to a medium gray, embedding the rows slightly, giving a tightly quilted surface.15

Judd describes paintings like White Flower and The Islands in terms that emphasize their geometric structure while suggesting that the paintings are “attractive”—​a compliment, as he says, but one that could also be read as another form of the derogatory observation that they are decorative. Judd would become a central figure in minimalist art, and it is not surprising that Judd would recognize the geometric, repetitive, and serial elements of Martin’s compositions, nor that his support of her work would give Martin’s grid paintings credibility among artists and critics interested in an increasingly spare, linear mode of abstraction. Further evidence of this trend toward geometric forms can be seen in the criticism of Martin’s 1963 show at Elkon, which was held from November 12 through the 30th. The critic Stuart Preston, writing for the New York Times, notes the “utterly dry intellectuality of Agnes Martin’s non-objective geometrical oils.” 16 Preston continues: “Everything is squared away here into minute rectangles, infinitely repeated—​and repetitious—​as if spewed out by a computer. It is possible, I suppose, to admire the rationalistic rigor of this fanatical work while still preferring something more rewarding.” 17 Preston’s ambivalent invocation of computers suggests that Martin’s grids are mechanical, repetitive, and easily reproducible, taking Edgar’s characterizations of Martin’s grid paintings as “graph paper dotted in some decorative repeat pattern” a step further.18 Importantly, any notion of the value of Martin’s hand is obliterated by the idea of the computer. While noting the “fanatical” rigor of Martin’s technique, Preston nonetheless concludes that Martin’s “dry” paintings do not offer viewers any rewards for their efforts. Preston’s comments are accurate—​Martin’s grids, after all, contain “minute rectangles, infinitely repeated”—​but there remains a fundamental asymmetry between Preston’s description of a painting like Islands and the experience of viewing the painting. And indeed, Islands appears out of place among the other works in Alloway’s Geometric

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Abstraction exhibition. For all of Martin’s meticulous craftsmanship, Islands lacks a certain precision, and her lines feel soft, without any hard edges. Her dots and dashes, slightly irregular in form and in placement, serve to subtly undermine the rigid format of the grid, setting her work apart from that of the other artists represented in the exhibition. While Alloway and Gordon were hoping to place Martin within the nexus of geometric abstraction, and Judd was defining the aspects of her grid paintings that are serial, repetitive, and geometric, the material facture of Martin’s paintings demonstrates that, once again, Martin assimilated certain aspects of contemporary artistic styles and rejected others, remaining rigorously focused on the execution of her personal vision. Similar interpretations of Martin’s art as minimalist dominated critical discourse through the late 1960s. This trend was solidified in 1966, when Virginia Dwan included Martin in her landmark exhibition 10, which, to a large extent, codified “the look,” as Dwan termed it, of minimalism.19 Dwan moved to New York in 1965, leaving John Weber to take care of her gallery in Los Angeles. She showed the work of Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Yves Klein, Joan Mitchell, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ad Reinhardt in Los Angeles, and she met Martin through her association with Reinhardt.20 (It is also possible that Dwan met Martin—​or heard about her work—​ when Dwan visited Robert Indiana’s Coenties Slip studio before Martin’s November 1962 group show My Country ’Tis of Thee.)21 Reinhardt, as Dwan recalled, “had talked to me about Agnes Martin’s work for a few years at that point. I hadn’t seen her work until then.” 22 Even though Dwan’s gallery was not the artists’ collective that Martin had experienced with galleries in Taos, 10 was developed through Dwan’s close working relationship with artists, as she recalled: It was kind of amusing with the 10 show, because the energy for that, the intention for that[,] came from several different sources. . . . I had formed a working relationship with Andre and LeWitt. Not Andre yet, but LeWitt, and Smithson was coming up. I spoke with Reinhardt about putting on a group show of people that he and I could agree to. He suggested that Bob Morris be called in as another person to form this group, and I suggested that Bob Smithson be brought in for the same purpose. And then we decided together on the other people that would be invited. So theoretically we had a rather cohesive group here; but I think it’s always true—​I have never seen it fail in art circles, or among artists—​t hat there is no real school or cohesive group. You put an uncomfortable relationship of individuals together.23

Dwan’s roster was developed through word of mouth among artists, and the exhibition thus reflects Dwan’s and Reinhardt’s estimations of interesting, upcoming artists rather than a cohesive, previously established group of artists. (In this regard, the artists are reminiscent of both the Taos Moderns and the artists on Coenties Slip.) In fact, Dwan recalled that the artists could not agree on a statement for the exhibition catalog: “[Since]

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Figure 91 John D. Schiff, installation view of the 10 exhibition in New York, October 1966, black-and-white photograph, 8 ½ x 9 ¾ in., Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles, and New York) records, 1959–​1971, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

there was no way that they could all agree on any statement[,] . . . we simply called the show 10, meaning ten works by ten artists, and made no statement whatsoever.” 24 Dwan showed the work of Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Smithson, and Mike Steiner. Surprisingly, given the fractious nature of the catalog negotiations, the exhibition served as a bellwether for the emerging minimalist movement. Dwan called it “a very definite look. That was what was later referred to as the minimal look or the ABC art or whatever.” 25 In a photograph of the installation, Martin’s painting Leaves, 1966, can be seen at the right rear of the gallery behind Robert Morris’s Untitled, 1966, and a LeWitt sculpture. A Donald Judd stack and Robert Smithson’s Alogon, 1966, hang on the walls. (Fig. 91.) The hard, clean edges, monochromatic palette, and geometric forms that characterize these works create a striking visual unity—​the “very definite look” that Dwan identified. The square format of Leaves aligns Martin’s work with the rectangles, squares, and triangles that define the other works in the gallery; and the seemingly blank surface of Martin’s painting, when seen from a distance, echoes the white surface of Morris’s sculpture. (Fig. 92.) Martin’s work, so long in gestation, suddenly appeared relevant for a new group of artists and critics championing minimalism. If her newfound relevance delighted curators and critics, Martin, while initially

Conclusion

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Figure 92 Agnes Martin, Leaves, 1966, acrylic and graphite on canvas, 72 × 72 in., location unknown.

pleased with the show, became less enthusiastic about her association with minimalism over time. In an interview with Irving Sandler, Martin elucidated her position: S andler: In the middle sixties you became identified with a group of artists who were later labelled ‘Minimalist’: Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin. Martin: They asked me to show with them, and I was flattered. They were all so young. I considered myself to be an Abstract Expressionist but they considered me to be a Minimalist. I couldn’t do anything about that.26

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Martin’s recollection suggests that she identified herself as an abstract expressionist well into the 1960s, and that she was thus aware of the misreading of her work as minimalist as it happened. Martin’s sense of helplessness at the time—​“I couldn’t do anything about that”—​was replaced, in later years, with a fervent campaign to realign herself with a form of artistic production that valued the hand of the artist. “I was much affected by my association with [the minimalists],” she said. “But, don’t you see, the minimalists are idealists. . . . They are non-subjective. They want to minimize themselves in favor of the ideal. Well, I just can’t. The minimalists clear their minds of their personal problems. . . . They don’t even leave themselves there!” 27 Martin later concluded, with regard to the lasting legacy of her inclusion in 10: “We all make mistakes.” 28 Although Martin was primarily concerned with the misreading of her work as purely minimalist, her association with minimalism also served to further obfuscate her early work. Martin, as we have seen, was complicit in the creation of a revisionary narrative that disclaimed her early work, preferring a narrative in which her grid paintings were the product of a momentary inspiration. “I had a vision of a grid,” she said, “and I painted it.” 29 The evidence of Martin’s early paintings belies this version of Martin’s artistic development, suggesting instead that Martin’s realization of the grid was the result of two decades of experimentation and aesthetic discernment. Although the advent of Martin’s grid paintings is often seen as the start of her career as an artist, it is more appropriately understood as a culmination rather than a beginning. While Martin’s revisionist narrative is resolutely antisocial, her creative process challenges the pervasive notion of Martin as a recluse.30 Martin consistently replicated the model of a small, intimate community of artists engaged in significant dialogue that she had found in the Mandelman-Ribak home, mostly notably in her Coenties Slip studio. Further, the implication that Martin’s periods in Albuquerque and Taos represented an exile from sophisticated discourse on contemporary art emerges as a false—​and notably provincial—​argument. Such notions of center and periphery do not correlate with the lived reality of Martin’s experience, in which artistic networks were active sources of current information and ideas. This is equally true of Martin’s time on Coenties Slip, when Martin drew upon her experience in Taos while testing the strategies she gleaned from assemblage and pop. Surprisingly catholic in her absorption of artistic approaches, Martin acquired ideas in unexpected locations, from the use of scavenged materials to objects of pop culture. At the same time, Martin continued to use a comparatively conservative means of expression—​oil on canvas—​and, by 1960, had developed a recognizable artistic style in her use of the grid. The success of Martin’s grid paintings lies not in their geometric format, the use of which was widespread, but in her sophisticated manipulation of materials and techniques to create paintings of rare sensitivity. Many of these techniques, such as the use of exposed canvas and gold leaf, can be seen in the paintings Martin created in Taos in the mid-1950s and in her grid paintings from 1963.31 When we consider the full sweep of Martin’s artistic development, the intellectual and material decisions that define

Conclusion

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Figure 93 Agnes Martin, Milk River, 1963, oil and colored pencil on linen, 72 × 72 in., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund, 64.10.

her grid paintings emerge not as momentary inspirations but as carefully considered, thoroughly tested aesthetic choices. Martin’s early work set the conditions that enabled her abstract, rigorous, and highly formal work to meet with acclaim amid contemporary artistic movements privileging formlessness, fabricated manufacture, unorthodox materials, and a return to figuration with the advent of minimalism and pop. Martin’s art, undergoing an evolution of its own, provides a compelling structure against which to measure the stakes of these nascent artistic practices. In a review of the 1963 Whitney Annual, John Canaday notes Martin’s anomalous

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position as a perennially emerging artist: “In any Whitney Annual the news lies in the first-timers. This year there are 29, not all of them fresh from kindergarten by any means. . . . Of the [new names], the four who stand out for this reporter are Lennart Anderson[;] . . . Agnes Martin with a large abstraction called ‘Milk River,’ for which ‘restful,’ meant as an accolade, is the best single adjective; Marcia Marcus[;] . . . and Morris Broderson.” 32 Martin, fifty-one years old in the fall of 1963, was not “fresh from kindergarten by any means,” but Canaday nonetheless grouped her among the “firsttimers” at the Whitney Annual, a show long associated with the debut of promising artists. In a sign of institutional support, the Whitney’s curators acquired Milk River directly from the exhibition. (Fig. 93.) The Whitney was among the first prominent museums to purchase a significant Martin painting and, as a museum of American art, was an apt repository for Martin’s work. In her letter to Helene Wurlitzer requesting “assistance as an artist,” Martin had written that her “efforts and interests are directed toward assisting in the establishment of American Art, distinct and authentic, that I feel that we, myself and other artists will very soon succeed in making not only a successful but an acceptable representation of the expression of the American people.” 33 Martin wrote these words in 1954, before she had been granted a solo exhibition at Betty Parsons’s Section Eleven, seen her art reviewed in the New York Times, or participated in the Carnegie International. Martin’s application to the Wurlitzer Foundation is remarkable for its ambition, but Martin’s continuing legacy demonstrates the prescience of her aims and intentions. Martin was a far more astute artist than is usually assumed, and her art, though often characterized as ethereal or timeless today, was fundamentally a product of her time. A thorough understanding of Martin’s celebrated grid paintings relies on knowledge of not only minimalism but also the dense networks of ideas and influences that Martin drew upon and then expanded, from her early conversations with Clay Spohn in Taos to her breakfasts with Ellsworth Kelly on Coenties Slip. If Martin’s art ultimately resides betwixt and between contemporaneous movements from abstract expressionism through minimalism, resisting any form of neat periodization, it is distinguished by Martin’s steadfast adherence to her aesthetic vision. Martin’s independence of mind—​first glimpsed on the mesa outside of Albuquerque in the 1940s, as she lugged buckets of paint across the desert and shouted to Stanley Landsman to “Paint! Paint big”—​never dimmed, allowing Martin to create a body of work that is as singular as it is accomplished.

Conclusion

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NOTES

INTRODUC TION

1. Dorothea McKenna Elkon, the wife of Martin’s dealer Robert Elkon, saw Martin burn her paintings. She noted that she did not see which paintings Martin burned and suspected that Martin did not burn everything. Jill Johnston argues that some of Martin’s paintings were elsewhere, and Samuel Adams Green recalls that Martin asked him to sell “ 20 or 30 paintings on rolls on the canvas. She hadn’t even bothered to stretch them. She said ‘sell these, all of these for me, I want $20,000 each for them and I want them in the best collections.’ Which is what I did. But Emily [Hall Tremaine] and I had to go to this warehouse and unroll the paintings on the floor.” Kathleen L. Housley, “Emily Hall Tremaine: Collector on the Cusp,” Woman’s Art Journal 21, no. 2 (Autumn 2000–​Winter 2001): 20; Dorothea McKenna Elkon, interview by the author, February 8, 2012, New York; and Jill Johnston, “Agnes Martin, 1912–​2004,” Art in America 93, no. 3 (March 2005): 41. 2. Lynne Cooke, “ . . . in the classic tradition . . . ” Agnes Martin, edited by Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder (New York: DIA Art Foundation; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011): 16; Arnold Glimcher, “About Agnes,” in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, ed. Arnold Glimcher (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 9; Barbara Haskell, “Agnes Martin: The Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1992): 111; Kate Horsfield, “On Art and Artists: Agnes Martin ’74,” in “Agnes Martin,” ed. Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, special issue, Profile 1, no. 2 (March 1981): 9; Johnston, “Agnes Martin, 1912–​2004,” 41.

17 1

3. Johnston, “Agnes Martin, 1912–​2004,” 41. 4. Ibid. 5. Douglas Davis, “A Quiet Heroine,” Newsweek, December 24, 1973, 74. 6. Ibid. 7. The presence of Glimcher at Martin’s compound in Cuba in 1974, as this photograph shows, demonstrates that it was not only young artists who flocked to Martin’s door but also dealers from New York. Further, Glimcher’s presence suggests that Martin’s exile from New York—​and the subsequent mythmaking that entailed—​was more complex than it appeared to be in the popular press. 8. Johnston, “Agnes Martin, 1912–​2004,” 41. Martin’s count of ten one-person exhibitions between 1958 and 1967 is correct, encompassing shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery, Parsons’s Section Eleven, the Robert Elkon Gallery, and the Nicholas Wilder Gallery. 9. In a forthcoming dissertation on twentieth-century writers colonies, including Taos, Kathryn Roberts argues for “geographical marginality as a deliberate strategy.” “Colony Writing: Creative Community in the Age of Revolt” (PhD diss., Harvard University, forthcoming 2016). 10. Glimcher, “About Agnes,” 64. 11. Terry Castle, “Travels with My Mom,” London Review of Books 29, no. 16 (August 16, 2007): 12–​16. Castle refers to Jill Johnston, “Agnes Martin: Surrender and Solitude,” Village Voice, September 13, 1973, 33. 12. Benita Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 70. 13. Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2015), 188. 14. Eisler, 70. 15. Stuart Preston, “Art: Assemblage, to Be More Precise,” New York Times, April 17, 1965, 16. 16. John Canaday, “Art: Drawings Touch with Mystery,” New York Times, May 10, 1969, 27. 17. Ibid.; and Michael Kimmelman, “Nature’s Mystical Poetry, Written in Paint,” New York Times, November 15, 1992, H35. 18. Francine Prose, “The Sound of Silence,” in Top Ten Living Artists, ARTnews 98, no. 11 (December 1999): 142. 19. Frances Morris notes that “many commentators have placed Martin’s historical context on one side and instead have dwelt on the ‘affect’ of looking at a Martin painting and the sensations arising therefrom . . . and, with a doubling of irony, displace[d] critical scrutiny from the object itself” (“Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell [London: Tate Publishing, 2015], 56, exhibition catalogue). 20. Holland Cotter, “Like Her Paintings, Quiet, Unchanging and Revered,” New York Times, January 19, 1997, H45. 21. The exception to this statement is the excellent essay by Lizzie Borden, “Agnes Martin: Early Work” which appeared in the April 1973 issue of Artforum (11, no. 8: 39–​44). The 2011 exhibition Agnes Martin: Before the Grid, which opened at the Harwood Museum in Taos and traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and to the University of New Mexico Art Museum, brought together much of Martin’s early artistic production and included an essay by Richard Tobin (“Agnes Martin: Before the Grid,” in Agnes Martin:

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TO PAGES 1–6

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

Before the Grid, ed. Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman [Taos: Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, 2012], 13–​37, exhibition catalogue). Tiffany Bell’s essay “Happiness Is the Goal,” published in the Tate’s 2015 Agnes Martin retrospective catalogue, seeks to redress this trend (in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell [London: Tate Publishing, 2015], 20–​31, exhibition catalogue). Peter Schjeldahl, “Martin’s Eyes,” Village Voice, November 24, 1994. Agnes Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Irving Sandler, Art Monthly 169 (September 1993), reprinted in Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, ed. Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson (London: Art Monthly / Ridinghouse, 2007), 426. Martin’s use of the term “non-objective” may have been borrowed, somewhat belatedly, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which opened in New York in 1939. Martin likely visited the museum during her first year at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1941–​1942. See, especially, Writings/Schriften, a collected volume of Martin’s writings first published by Hatje Cantz in 1992. The tendency to include facsimiles of Martin’s writings next to reproductions of her art, as in the catalog for the 1992–​1993 retrospective of Martin’s paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (2012), exacerbates this trend. This book does not address these issues in depth, which deserve their own substantial treatment in separate projects. For discussions of Martin’s sexuality, please see Jonathan Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,” in Cooke, Kelly, and Schröder, Agnes Martin, as well as Karen Schiff’s “Agnes Martin, under New Auspices,” review of Agnes Martin, by Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder, Art Journal 71, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 121–​25. See also Anna Chave, Agnes Martin on and off the Grid (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2004), exhibition catalogue. References are made to Martin’s mental health, including a diagnosis of schizophrenia, throughout the catalogue for the Tate’s 2015 retrospective, Agnes Martin. Arnold Glimcher touches on Martin’s mental health in his 2012 monograph on the artist, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances; and Eisler’s 1993 essay quotes Richard Tuttle on Martin’s paranoia. Agnes Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” by Joan Simon, Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996): 124. Ibid. As Lynne Cooke notes, Martin also said that her work “is really about the feeling of beauty and freedom you experience in landscape.” Martin makes a subtle but important distinction between a work of art derived from nature and a work of art that summons a feeling similar to one a person can feel in nature (“ . . . in the classic tradition . . .  ,” 11). However, Martin’s early work complicates her prior claim that her paintings are “not about the world, or nature or things like that,” because there are discernable links to earthly objects. It is important to keep in mind that Martin’s interpretation of her art changed over the course of her career. Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 111. Agnes Martin, “All My Paintings Are about Happiness and Innocence: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” by Sally Eauclaire, Southwest Profile 16, no. 2 (May–​July 1993): 14.

NOTES TO PAGES 6–8

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31. Ibid. 32. Mary Fuller McChesney, oral history interview conducted by Susan Landauer, September 28, 1994, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 33. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 86. 34. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 71.

C H A P T E R 1. “ I F I C O U L D M A K E A L I V I N G PA I N T I N G”

1. Stanley Landsman, oral history interview conducted by Paul Cummings, January 19–​ 22, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 2. Ibid. 3. Martin and Pollock were both born in the West and, to some extent, traded on their rural heritage once they arrived in New York. (Martin was born in Saskatchewan, moving to Vancouver as a toddler; Pollock was born in Cody, Wyoming; his family moved shortly thereafter to Arizona.) Characteristically, Martin’s art was promoted in the New York Times under the headline “Art: Drawn from Nature,” with a the subhead: “Agnes Martin’s Paintings at Section 11 Gallery Reflect Love of Prairies” (Dore Ashton, New York Times, December 29, 1959, 23). Like Martin, Pollock fostered his association with the wide-open spaces and the independent spirit of the West. The gallery material from Pollock’s first gallery exhibition in 1943 was titled “Young Man from Wyoming,” reflecting a fact that was mentioned in nearly all the early press on Pollock, despite the fact that the Pollock family moved from Wyoming to Arizona less than a year after his birth (“Young Man from Wyoming,” Art Digest 18, no. 3 [November 1, 1943]: 11, quoted in Kirk Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998], 20 and footnoted on p. 79, exhibition catalogue). The characterization of Martin’s art as “shar[ing] the frontier quality of, say, Jackson Pollock” remained a critical truism through her death (“Agnes Martin,” The Telegraph, December 18, 2004, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ obituaries/1479252/Agnes-Martin.html). 4. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” by Joan Simon, Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996): 82–​89, 124. Marcia Oliver recalled that she “met [Martin] at the Cedar Bar in New York. I spotted her. But we didn’t connect until we were out here [in Taos]. I moved in 1967” (Marcia Oliver, interview by the author, August 16, 2006, Taos, NM). 5. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 87. The name of the school changed from the Washington State Normal School at Bellingham to Western Washington College of Education in 1937 (author’s correspondence with Tamara Belts, special collections manager, Western Washington University Libraries, July 28, 2015). 6. Barbara Haskell, “Agnes Martin: The Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 97, exhibition catalogue; and author’s correspondence with Tamara Belts, special collections manager, Western Washington University Libraries, March 7, 2013; and author’s correspondence with Marcia Meth, program manager, Registrar’s Office, Western Washington University, March 8, 2013. 7. Clippings from the Northwest Viking (Washington State Normal School, Bellingham,

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TO PAGES 8–16

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

WA), Western Washington College of Education, November 28, 1934, through March 13, 1936, Heritage Resources, Special Collections Campus History Collection (LD5778 .W475), Western Washington University Libraries, http://content.wwu.edu/cdm/ search/collection/wfront/searchterm/Agnes%20Martin/field/all/mode/exact/conn/ and/order/date/ad/asc. The paper reported that Martin “will be given [a] degree in recreational programming” with two other students. It stated that their first decision was to “purchase 200 pairs of roller skates[,] and on Tuesdays and Thursdays the entire student body will be allowed to skate to their heart’s desire in the big gym” (Northwest Viking, May 10, 1935, 1). Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 97. Martin’s academic record was “uneven,” according to biographer Nancy Princenthal: “Some semesters she got mostly Bs and a few As, excelling in English and History. . . . Math seems to have been a source of consistent trouble. . . . She took four courses in teaching and its techniques, and received two Bs and two Ds. For her work in her single art class (Art I) she got an A” (Agnes Martin, 31). Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 97. Martin taught at “the Livingston School of Clark County (1937–​39), the Country School in Hanson Ferry (1937–​38), and the Burley School of Kitsap County (1939–​1941)” (Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art [New York: Thames and Hudson, 2015], 32). Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 97. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 87. Once in New York, Martin found jobs that fed her and allowed her to complete her schoolwork: “One of the [jobs] was riding the school buses as a disciplinarian. Number two was working as a disciplinarian for 45 waiters in a big dormitory. These boys were first-year law students. And the woman told me that they fought in the dining room and broke the furniture and everything. The first day I went to work, there was a boy in the dining room writing menus, and he told me there was nothing the matter with the boys, that the woman was cracked. So I never did anything. . . . I had three meals a day, got paid by the hour, and I never did anything. . . . [For the third job] I ran the elevator in the boys’ dormitory” (88). Tiffany Bell, “Happiness Is the Goal,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 21, exhibition catalogue. Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 97. “Dr. John Dewey Dead at 92; Philosopher a Noted Liberal,” New York Times, June 2, 1952, 1. John Dewey, The School and Society (1899; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 52, quoted in Suzanne Hudson, Robert Ryman: Used Paint (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 20. Hudson’s book Robert Ryman: Used Paint provides a sophisticated discussion of Dewey’s and D’Amico’s theories, as well as their influence on artists in New York during the middle of the twentieth century. For another perspective on the impact of Dewey’s philosophy on Martin, see Jacquelynn Baas, “Agnes Martin: Readings for Writings,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 230–​231. Lawrence A. Cremin, David A. Shannon, and Mary Evelyn Townsend, A History of Teachers College Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 68.

NOTES TO PAGES 16–17

   •   17 5

19. Ibid., 166. 20. Ibid., 174; and Foster Laurance Wygant, “A History of the Department of Fine and Industrial Arts of Teachers College, Columbia University” (PhD diss., Teachers College, Columbia University, 1959), 60–​62. 21. Wygant, “History of the Department,” 60–​62. 22. Cremin, Shannon, and Townsend, History of Teachers College, 175; and Wygant, “History of the Department,” 62. 23. Wygant, “History of the Department,” 61. 24. Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 39. 25. Wygant, “History of the Department,” 147. 26. Ibid., 178. 27. Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 40. 28. Wygant, “History of the Department,” 201–​202. 29. Ibid., 201–​202. This was a direct response to the war, because silkscreen was recognized as an ideal medium for creating posters. After the war, silkscreen would be recognized for its fine-art application rather than its commercial application. 30. Ibid., 241. 31. Ibid., 58, 49. 32. Ibid., 175. 33. Joan Miró was the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition number 157, running from November 19, 1941, through January 11, 1942 (“Exhibition History List,” Museum of Modern Art, n.d., accessed July 18, 2015, www.moma.org/learn/resources/archives/ archives_exhibition_history_list). 34. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 87. 35. Benita Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 73. 36. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88. 37. Ibid. 38. Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 46. 39. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88; Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 46. 40. Marsden Hartley, “America as Landscape,” El Palacio 5, no. 21 (December 1918): 340; Van Deren Coke, Taos and Santa Fe: The Artist’s Environment, 1882–​1942 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1963), 51. 41. Bert Phillips, “The Corn Maidens of Taos,” El Palacio 8, no. 7–​8 (July 1920): 235; Coke, Taos and Santa Fe, 15. 42. Coke, Taos and Santa Fe, 17. 43. Kathleen Howard, Inventing the Southwest: The Fred Harvey Company and Native American Art (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 1996), 132. 44. David Witt, Modernists in Taos: From Dasburg to Martin (Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 2002), 29. 45. Witt, preface to Modernists in Taos, xiii. 46. Dore Aston, “Agnes Martin and . . .  ,” in Agnes Martin Paintings and Drawings, 1957–​1975, ed. Joanna Drew (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1977), 13, exhibition catalogue. 47. Frank Waters, ”Indian Influence in Taos Art,” New Mexico Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Summer 1951): 178–​179, quoted in Coke, Taos and Santa Fe, 103.

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TO PAGES 17–20

48. MaLin Wilson, “Albuquerque ’50s: The Cold War Boom and Vanished Dreams,” in Voices in New Mexico Art, edited by David Turner and Susan Benforado Bakewell (Santa Fe: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, 1996), 55. 49. Joan Evans, “Albuquerque,” Art Digest 26 (May 15, 1952): 12–​13. Evans’s sense of an artistic renaissance in Albuquerque can also be seen in a small brochure produced by the First National Bank in 1950, which contained the observation that the city, “busy and booming as it is, has shown great progress in the development of the arts in the past twenty years” (First National Bank, Art and Artists of Albuquerque, [Albuquerque, NM: First National Bank, 1950], n.p.). 50. The Fred Harvey Company became a patron of the arts with the founding of its Indian Department in 1902. The trains of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway stopped for twenty-five minutes to an hour in Albuquerque, which was just enough time for passengers to pass through the Harvey Indian Building on their way to the Harvey Hotel for a meal. In the Indian Building, tourists were guided through rooms in which objects were shown in ethnographic displays; Native American artists were shown at work on similar objects; and, finally, a wide range of objects were offered for sale at a curio shop, along with ephemeral materials such as postcards, books, and pamphlets (Coke, Taos and Santa Fe, 59. Also see Leah Dilworth, Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 85). The Great Expositions of the late 1890s and early in the second decade of the twentieth century influenced this system of display (91; also see Christine Mather, Colonial Frontier: Art and Life in Spanish New Mexico: The Fred Harvey Collection (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1983), 95). 51. Wilson, “Albuquerque ’50s: The Cold War Boom and Vanished Dreams,” 55. 52. Elaine de Kooning, “New Mexico,” in Elaine de Kooning: The Spirit of Abstract Expressionism; Selected Writings (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 185. De Kooning’s essay was originally published in the “Regional Accent” section of Art in America (Elaine de Kooning, “New Mexico,” Art in America 49, no. 4 [1961]: 56). 53. Agnes Martin, oral history interview conducted by Suzan Campbell, May 15, 1989, p. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 54. Ibid., 7. 55. Martin’s desire to create an environment conducive to painting remained a priority throughout her career; as an established artist later in life, she moved into a retirement home when she was still capable of living independently, in order to minimize her daily responsibilities. “You see I have no domestic chores or anything,” Martin noted in 2000. “I haven’t been to the store for five and a half months. And then when I went I bought toothpaste and a Kleenex. Don’t have to go to the store anymore, no laundry, or anything, clean my house or anything. I think about nothing but painting. . . . And then in the last ten years I’ve really had a perfect environment for painting. Perfect.” Agnes Martin, oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, 2000, transcribed by Christina Rosenberger, July 24, 2006, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project, Taos, NM. 56. Martin, interview, Archives of American Art, 7. 57. University of New Mexico, “Biennial Report of the President, January 1, 1947–​January 1, 1948,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 62, no. 2 (May 1949): 89–​90.

NOTES TO PAGES 21–22

   •   17 7

58. The terms of the G.I. Bill stated that veterans must enroll within three to five years of discharge from the service and must not take longer than nine years to complete a degree—​which likely accounts for the high enrollment numbers as late as 1949 (University of New Mexico, “Information for Veterans: Questions and Answers about G.I. Bill 346,” University of New Mexico Bulletin 60, no. 1 [March 1947]: 216–​219). 59. Landsman, oral history interview. 60. MaLin Wilson, Albuquerque ’50s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 1989), 8. While Diebenkorn had worked with Clyfford Still in California, Rita Deanin Abbey studied at the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York (where Diebenkorn spent time in 1949); Herb Goldman came from the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts School, and Bill Howard had trained at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC (ibid.). 61. Wilson, “Albuquerque ’50s: The Cold War Boom and Vanished Dreams,” 53; and Wilson, Albuquerque ’50s, 10. 62. Tiffany Bell, observation to the author, March 2012. 63. Haas was just a year older than Martin and had received his BFA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. He was friends with Hans Hoffman in the 1930s and began teaching at the University of New Mexico in 1947. He was head of the art department until 1963, when he moved to Arizona (see “Lez Haas,” Art of Lez and Eleanor Haas, n.d., accessed May 5, 2012, http://haasart.webs.com/aboutlezhaas.htm). Martin’s participation in Tatschl’s 1947 course in sculpture demonstrates her early interest in the medium, which assumes increasing importance with regard to her constructions of found objects from the late 1950s. 64. New Mexico was a popular summer retreat and was historically the site of many such summer art programs. The Chappell School of Art and the Denver Art Museum opened the first summer art school in Santa Fe in 1925 (Sharyn Rohlfsen Udall, Santa Fe Art Colony, 1900–​1942 [Santa Fe, NM: Gerald Peters Gallery, 1987], 18, exhibition catalogue). The painter Raymond Jonson set up a rival school, the Atalaya Art School, in 1926; the Santa Fe Art School opened in 1927; and the Arsuna School of Art opened in 1937. 65. Martin, interview, Archives of American Art, 5. 66. Earl Stroh, oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project, Taos, NM; and Martin, interview, Archives of American Art, 5. 67. Stroh, oral history interview. Stroh notes that “walking into [Bisttram’s students’] show it looked like a one-man show by an artist who was in a rut. [Bisttram] taught them formulas, dynamic symmetry and all the others. But the paintings looked so constipated and unoriginal.” 68. Wilson, Albuquerque ’50s, 14. Both Mandelman and Ribak, for example, were well established in the New York scene when they abandoned it for Taos: Mandelman had known de Kooning and Gorky in New York, and had shown her work at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., while Ribak’s work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 1934 and in the Whitney Annuals from 1932 to 1944. They had also shared a house in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, with Jackson Pollock during the

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69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

76.

77.

78.

summer of 1943, adding further cachet to their solid East Coast credentials. Mildred Tolbert, a photographer and friend of Martin’s, also met Pollock—​along with Aaron Siskind, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Meyer Shapiro, and Theodore Stamos—​while working at Leco Photo Service in New York. Martin thus received formal instruction from an older generation of Taos artists while engaging with younger artists familiar with abstract expressionism. John Marin, Marin in New Mexico / 1929 and 1930 (Albuquerque: University Art Museum, 1968), 6, exhibition catalogue. Ruth Fine, ed., John Marin (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 220, exhibition catalogue. The Harwood Foundation is now known as the Harwood Museum of Art. Summer shows at the Harwood Foundation would often travel to Albuquerque and be shown again at the university’s gallery, but there is no record of whether the 1947 exhibition traveled (Raymond Jonson, “Exhibition Calendar / Fine Arts Building Gallery, U.N.M.,” Art League of New Mexico Records, MSS 856, Box 1, Folder 13, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research). See also “Harwood, Blue Door Exhibits Give Taosenos Double Feature in Art,” Taoseno and the Taos Review, August 7, 1947, 6, which is mentioned in David Witt, Taos Moderns: Art of the New (Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 1992), 15. Martin, interview, Archives of American Art, 5. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 82–​89 and 124. The New Mexico Lobo noted, “Included in the current show are oils, watercolors, mixed techniques and several sculpture pieces by such prominent artists and members of the faculty as . . . Agnes Martin” (New Mexico Lobo, January 9, 1948, exhibition clippings, Art League of New Mexico Records, MSS 856, Box 1, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research). In a subsequent article on January 13, Martin was one of three—​of the nine exhibiting artists—​whose work was not reviewed, along with Randall Davey and Ralph Douglass (Frances Reno, “Faculty Art Exhibit Shows Work with Trends to Today’s Form,” New Mexico Lobo, January 13, 1948, exhibition clippings, Art League of New Mexico Records, MSS 856, Box 1, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research). Martin’s work was also mentioned in the January 5, 1948, edition of the Albuquerque Tribune, and the January 9, 1948, edition of Albuquerque’s Hilltop News, copies of which are held in the same clippings file at the Center for Southwest Research. Raymond Jonson, “Jonson Gallery—​University of New Mexico / Catalogue of Works in the Collection of Student Work from Jonson’s U.N.M. Classes, April 15, 1955,” Art League of New Mexico Records, MSS 856, Box 1, Folder 13, University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research. The Martin watercolor currently in the Jonson Gallery’s collection at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, New Mexico Mountain Landscape Taos, circa 1947, was a gift from Mercedes Gugisberg in 1986 (86.208.1). Earl Stroh, “Notes on Watching Art in New Mexico, 1947–​1989,” in Voices in New Mexico Art, ed. David Turner and Susan Benforado Bakewell (Santa Fe: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, 1996), 33, exhibition catalogue. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 82–​89 and 124.

NOTES TO PAGES 26–29

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79. Leslie Hall, “Notes on Nude by Agnes Martin,” n.d., n.p. Agnes Martin Artist File, Archives of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Similar information, which appears to be drawn from these “Notes,” can be found on Art Brokerage, last accessed July 18, 2015, www.artbrokerage.com/artist/Agnes-Bernice -Martin. Hall observes, “The oil on canvas nude measures 20 by 16 inches and was probably stretched by the artist herself using thumbtacks. It was not varnished but it has spent most of its life wrapped and stored in a box. The painting is overall in good condition but it would benefit from a professional cleaning. The paint is intact despite some cracking in the torso area” (“Notes on Nude,” n.p.). It’s unclear whether the proposed cleaning occurred, and the media description of “oil” rather than encaustic is a common mistake. One of the “two small abstract paintings” Hall mentions may have been this work, though it is unclear whether the work is on a paper or fabric support. A sales receipt from the Betty Parsons Gallery dates the portrait of Vaughn to 1947, though surviving documentation does not record whether Martin or Parsons dated the painting (Betty Parsons, “Sales Receipts,” Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). 80. Hall, “Notes on Nude,” n.p. Discussion of the identity of the sitter was addressed in the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, in 2010; see Holland Cotter, “Sexuality in Modernism: The (Partial) History,” New York Times, December 11, 2010; and Faye Hirsch, “Seeing Queerly,” Art in America 99, no. 2 (February 4, 2011): 76–​81. 81. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 74. 82. Agnes Martin, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, directed by Mary Lance (Corrales, NM: New Deal Films, 2003), DVD. 83. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 82–​89 and 124. 84. Landsman, oral history interview. According to Leslie Hall, “The small adobe house that Agnes Martin and Daphne Vaughn built on the west mesa in the 1940s is on Barcelona Place SW” (Hall quoted in Patti Gonzalez to Andrew Connors, email correspondence, February 24, 2014, Agnes Martin Artist File, Albuquerque Museum of Art and History). 85. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. 86. Martin’s building project in Cuba has been accorded heightened significance because it occurred after Martin abruptly gave up painting and left New York in 1967, driving through Canada and the American West in a pickup truck and camper. Critics such as Barbara Haskell have understood the process of building in Cuba to be cathartic, a reentry of sorts that preceded Martin’s return to drawing, painting, and printmaking. Other critics, such as Joanna Weber, have been more explicit, linking the repetitive process of laying adobe with the repetitive process of the creation of Martin’s banded paintings of the early 1970s—​an argument that Martin vehemently denied, despite making a direct connection between laying adobe and painting in an interview (“Making Space for the Sacred: The Agnes Martin Gallery at the Harwood Museum, Taos, New Mexico” [unpublished manuscript, last modified December 2000], held at the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, Taos; and Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation).

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87. Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 47. 88. Sean Ryan’s father knew Martin in New York in 1951–​1952 and acquired a number of works on paper by the artist. The works on paper were kept loose in a folio, not matted or framed, thus accounting for the relatively good condition of the works today. Ryan’s remembrances were told to Tiffany Bell, who related them to the author in person on June 13, 2012, in New York. 89. The first significant drop in enrollment occurred in 1950, when, as Cremin, Shannon, and Townsend note, the college was less of a “beehive” (History of Teachers College, 238–​241). The general entitlement of the G.I. Bill, as the act was commonly known, expired in June 1953, by which time students supported by the G.I. Bill made up only 26 percent of the student population at Teachers College (188–​189). 90. Ibid., 188–​189. For reference, the 1953–​1954 Announcement of Teachers College notes that “a student carrying a full program will spend an average of about $2,500 for tuition, room, and board for the academic year. Expenses for recreation, clothing, and travel are not included in this amount” (247–​248). 91. The 2014 exhibition From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, held at the Jewish Museum, explored the difficulties women and minorities faced in abstract expressionism, a movement that curator Norman Kleeblatt characterizes as “an artistic community dominated by white men” (From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis [New York: Jewish Museum, 2014], exhibition catalogue). 92. Wygant, “History of the Department,” 157. 93. Ibid., 197–​198. 94. Ibid., 156. This statement echoes Martin’s much later comment that “the intellect is a hazard in artwork. I mean, there are so many paintings that have gone down the drain because somebody got an idea in the middle” (Martin, “Thin Gray Line,” interview by Mark Stevens, Vanity Fair, March 1989, 56). 95. Wygant, “History of the Department,” 169. 96. Barnett Newman, “In Front of the Real Thing,” ARTnews 68, no. 9 (January 1970): 6. 97. Allison Langley and Suzanne Quillen Lomax, “Mark Rothko’s Multiforms, 1946–1950: Transforming the Painted Surface,” Facture: Conservation, Science, Art History: Art in Context 2 (July 2015): 132. 98. Ibid. As Allison Langley elucidated in a 2002 study of the multiform paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Rothko’s media for these works was “essentially . . . a type of modern tempera paint made by mixing egg with oil and resin components to make an emulsion.” Martin’s media was watercolor, which does not contain egg, but Langley notes David Anfam’s observation that Rothko used tempera as a bridge from watercolor to oil paint (ibid.). 99. Ibid., 2–​3; Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 232, exhibition catalogue. 100. Landauer, San Francisco School, 232. 101. Ibid. 102. Christian Klemm, in collaboration with Carolyn Lanchner, Tobia Bezzola, and Anne Umland, “Giacometti Chronology,” Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/interac​ tives/exhibitions/2001/giacometti/start/flash.html. The chronology is excerpted from

NOTES TO PAGES 32–37

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Christian Klemm, in collaboration with Carolyn Lanchner, Tobia Bezzola, and Anne Umland, Alberto Giacometti (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). Martin had returned to Taos when the Wittenborn Gallery’s exhibition of Giacometti’s lithographs went up in September 1952, but it’s possible that Martin read the advance previews of the exhibition and had heard about Giacometti’s prints. Giacometti, like Picasso, worked across painting, drawing, sculpture, and prints, and it is pertinent that Martin’s exposure to their work in the early 1950s may have been mediated through these prints, which privilege the use of bold, graphic lines. 103. Michael Brenson, “Gallery View: Giacometti: Portrait of a Haunted, Eloquent Sculptor,” New York Times, September 1, 1985, H21. Personages measures nine by twenty inches and is executed on thin cream paper without laid or chain lines. The work is signed “A. Martin ’52” in graphite at the lower right, and the title of the work is also indicated in Martin’s hand. 104. The 1951 Whitney Annual ran from December 8, 1950, through February 25, 1951, so Martin would most likely not have seen the exhibition. In a small but telling example of how intertwined the New York and Taos art scenes were in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Bourgeois invited the photographer Mildred Tolbert to the roof of her Fourteenth Street apartment in Manhattan to photograph her totems—​the same Mildred Tolbert who would photograph Martin’s paintings propped up outside her adobe studio in Taos in the mid-1950s (Mildred Tolbert, oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, June 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project, Taos). Tolbert notes that the photographs were used in a Serpentine Gallery book, but that she never got credit for the images. Tolbert’s memory appears to be faulty regarding the date of her photographs, however, because most sources cite Bourgeois starting her totems in 1947, not 1946. 105. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney gave Egg Beater No. 1, 1927, to the Whitney in 1931, and the Museum of Modern Art acquired Eggbeater V, 1930, in 1945. Davis also used an electrical lightbulb to potent effect in a 1923 work, created in New Mexico, meant to lampoon the vaunted light of the Southwest. 106. While silkscreen appears to be the most likely technique used to create this print—​and, indeed, curators at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University of New Mexico Art Museum cited silkscreen on their wall labels during the exhibition of this print in the Agnes Martin: Before the Grid show—some scholars have referred to the work as a lithograph. 107. See the following articles that mention Baziotes, which are in chronological order: John I. H. Baur, “American Art after 15 Years: Richer Diversity Than Ever Before,” Art Digest 26, no. 3 (November 1, 1951): 15–​19; H. W. Janson, “The Abstract and the Real,” Sunday Book Review, New York Times, January 6, 1952; Emily Genauer, “Art and Artists: Critics’ Art Confuses,” New York Herald Tribune, February 24, 1952; Stuart Preston, “By Groups and Singly: New Exhibitions Feature Contemporary Work,” New York Times, May 18, 1952, X8. 108. Lawrence Alloway, introduction to Baziotes (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1965), 13. 109. Baziotes was deeply influenced by the Miró retrospective at the Museum of Modern

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110. 111.

112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118. 119.

Art in 1941–​1942, and Lawrence Alloway observes that “impressions of Miró’s forms haunt his later paintings both in the flat curved creatures and radiating linear forms” (ibid.). Ibid. Whitney Museum of American Art, Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors, Drawings (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1951), exhibition catalogue. The exhibition took place from March 17 to May 6, 1951. Reviews: Henry McBride, “Not Bad for These Times,” ARTnews 50, no. 2 (April 1951): 38–​39; and Michel Seuphor, “Paris–​New York 1951,” Art d’aujourd’hui (Paris) 1–​2, no. 6 (June 1951): 4–​15, http://research.moma.org/jpbib/JPexhibitions.htm#1950. Martin’s active looking was mirrored, interestingly, by Edward Corbett, an artist whose time in Taos in the early 1950s overlapped with Martin’s. Between 1944 and 1946, “Corbett settled into a routine of painting by day, reading by night, and visiting the Museum of Modern Art on Sundays. Corbett’s wife remembers his interest in almost everything the museum offered: ‘He wanted to absorb it all—​all of the European movements.’ . . . Although he admired Arshile Gorky’s early work, which he thought ‘anguished, hard, labored but powerful,’ he found Stuart Davis ‘jazzy, noisy, and constrictive’ and Jackson Pollock ‘very rough.’ ” Susan Landauer, Edward Corbett: A Retrospective (Richmond, CA: Richmond Art Center, 1990), 15, exhibition catalogue. All of the extant works from Martin’s year at Teachers College, many of which have recently come to light, are works on paper. Martin may have planned to return to New Mexico after her year in New York, and thus her material choices may have been based on the increased convenience and portability of paper over stretched canvas. “Western Life Studied by Buddhist Heir,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1951, 47. Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York: Penguin, 2012), 165–​166. Christmas Humphries, editor’s foreword to the second edition of Manual of Zen Buddhism, by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (London: Rider and Co., 1935), iv. Holland Cotter, “Agnes Martin,” Art Journal 57, no. 3 (Autumn 1998): 78–​79; Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 104–​105. Baas, “Agnes Martin,” 231. Baas also suggests that Martin’s “strongest motivation . . . may well have been her own problematical mental condition—​Martin was afflicted with schizoaffective disorder, in which a person experiences a combination of schizophrenia symptoms such as visual and auditory hallucinations, and mood disorder symptoms like depression or mania. . . . Study and meditation finally helped” (231). Nancy Princenthal cautions, however, that “there is absolutely no reason to consider [Martin’s] work spontaneously cathartic or in any other way therapeutic. It was, instead, manifestly deliberate and meant to express universal rather than personal experience” (Agnes Martin, 172). Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 229. Author’s correspondence with Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, February 17, 2014; and Michael Auping, Philip Guston Retrospective (New York: Thames and Hudson; Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2003), 258; Baas, “Agnes Martin,” 233.

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120. Michael Auping, “Once Removed,” in Callum Innes—​From Memory (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 211, exhibition catalogue. 121. Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 170. 122. Ibid., 240. 123. Baas, “Agnes Martin,” 233; Princenthal, Agnes Martin, 56. 124. Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 240–​241. 125. John Cage, Cage/Cunningham, Elliot Caplan (West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 1991) VHS, quoted in Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 242. 126. John Cage, Silence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961–​1969), xi, quoted in Larson, Where the Heart Beats, xv. 127. This interest continued to develop throughout the 1950s. Bea Mandelman, for example, “similar to a number of artists in Taos,” was “intrigued with Zen. She read Alan Watts, Eugene Herrigel, and D. T. Suzuki (Robert Hobbs, Beatrice Mandelman: Taos Modernist [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995], 75–​79). Artists on Coenties Slip were also interested in Zen and discussed Suzuki’s writings; Ellsworth Kelly corresponded with John Cage as early as 1950 (Ellsworth Kelly speaking in John Cage: Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage, dir. Henning Lohner [New York: Mode, 1993], DVD, quoted in Larson, Where the Heart Beats, 405). 128. “Over the course of her life Martin explored and absorbed a range of life-views, including Old-Testament Calvinism, expressions of visionary Christianity, Platonism, transcendentalism, Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and, last but not least, Taoism” (Baas, “Agnes Martin,” 224). Holland Cotter observed the same sensibility in “Agnes Martin,” his 1998 article for Art Journal. 129. Martin is on record regarding her differences with Cage. “Well for one thing, he wrote a book called Silence and in the very first line he said ‘There is no such thing as silence.’ But I think there is. When you walk into a forest there are all kinds of sounds but you feel as though you have stepped into silence. I believe that is silence” (Agnes Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Irving Sandler, Art Monthly 169 (September 1993), reprinted in Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, ed. Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson [London: Art Monthly / Ridinghouse, 2007] 423). 130. Dore Ashton, “Premiere Exhibition for Agnes Martin,” New York Times, December 8, 1958, 26. In a review the next year, Ashton again emphasized Martin’s connection to the New Mexican desert, writing that her paintings “are related to nature—​the vast, maddening infinitude to which she is drawn.” The “vastness” of the New Mexican landscape, Ashton wrote, “brought out a deep and fundamental sentiment. . . . The sands of the desert seem to have impregnated her imagination” (Ashton, “Art: Drawn from Nature,” 23). 131. Stuart Preston [S. P], “Gallery Notes,” New York Times, January 3, 1960, X18. 132. Wilson, “Albuquerque ’50s: The Cold War Boom and Vanished Dreams,” 55.

C H A P T E R 2 . T OWA R D A M AT U R E E X P R E S S I O N

1. “Ninety-Five Artists Can’t Be Wrong,” El Crepusculo, June 21, 1951, 2. In You May Meet These Artists in Santa Fe and Taos, published in 1950, Catherine Kapp Wenzel profiles

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

local artists and provides instructions on how to meet them, underscoring the Taos art market’s reliance on tourism ([Santa Fe, NM: C. R. Ferguson Publications, 1950], 3–​47). Regina Cooke, “Taos Art Colony Vigorous at Fifty,” El Crepusculo, July 25, 1952, n.p. Taos Artists, letter to the editor, El Crepusculo, August 7, 1952. The opening date comes from a copy of the Ruins Gallery poster, ca. 1952, the Mandelman-­Ribak Foundation Archives, now held at the University of New Mexico. Regina Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, May 29, 1952. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, September 9, 1954. Calvin Trillin, “U.S. Journal: Santa Fe, N.M.,” New Yorker, March 29, 1982, 124, quoted in Lois P. Rudnick, “ ‘Under the Skin of New Mexico’: The Life, Times and Art of Cady Wells.” Cady Wells and Southwestern Modernism, ed. Lois P. Rudnick (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2009), 38. Rudnick, “Under the Skin of New Mexico,” 38. Ibid., 40. Ibid, 38. Ibid. Ibid., 39. Betty Parsons provides a useful comparison in this regard. In 1993, Benita Eisler notes that Betty Parsons and her lovers were still “unmentionable as such,” citing the “double standard that makes it acceptable to acknowledge only gay men in public discourse” (“Profile: Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 78). A year later, Ann Gibson argued that “in effect,” Parsons “ ‘passed’ as heterosexual” because she did not let her ­“sexuality . . . become part of her public persona.” (“Lesbian Identity and the Politics of Representation in Betty Parsons’ Gallery,” Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, ed. Whitney Davis [New York: Harrington Park Press, 1994], 256). Gibson, “Lesbian Identity,” 250. Ibid., 251. Gavin Butt, “How New York Queered the Idea of Modern Art,” in Varieties of Modernism, ed. Paul Wood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press and Open University, 2004), 320. Gibson, “Lesbian Identity,” 256. Butt, “How New York Queered the Idea,” 318. De Kooning, quoted in David Craven, “In N.M., Female Artists Are in a League of Their Own,” Albuquerque Tribune, November 1, 1996, B8. Cory Peeke, email communication with the author, February 28, 2013. Martin, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, directed by Mary Lance (Corrales, NM: New Deal Films, 2003), DVD. See also Martin, oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, 2000, transcribed by Christina Rosenberger, July 24, 2006, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project, Taos, NM. Martin was likely aware of Jackson Pollock’s use of fiberboard from the early 1930s through 1950, and this may have influenced her use of this material. The relatively slick, flat surface of this material (assuming the artist is using the flat side of Masonite) differentiated it from fabric supports, which are more absorbent and have substan-

NOTES TO PAGES 49–51

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23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

tially more give. Fabric responds more readily to the pressure of the artist’s touch, suggesting Martin’s interest in a moving, responsive support. See Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, “Jackson Pollock: Response as Dialogue,” in Jackson Pollock, New Approaches, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 146. Mildred Kane was an early girlfriend of Martin’s (Frances Morris, “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell [London: Tate Publishing, 2015], 247, exhibition catalogue). A wooden cradle has been placed on the verso of this work, giving it a sense of depth that is not in keeping with the relatively thin profile of the original paperboard. Parks Gallery; “Martin and Wagner, an Odd Couple,” blog entry by Stephen Parks, July 15, 2011, http://parksgallery.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/martin-and-wagner-an-odd -couple/#comments. Receipts from the Wurlitzer Foundation note that Martin used some of her Wurlitzer stipend to pay for the photographs in 1955, while Tolbert recalled, later in life, that she and Martin traded a painting for one or more photographs in 1953 (oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, June 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project, Taos). Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell date the photographs to circa 1954 or circa 1955 (Bell, “Happiness Is the Goal,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell [London: Tate Publishing, 2015], 208, exhibition catalogue; and Morris, Agnes Martin, 246). Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, March 1, 1956. James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 284 and 334–​335. Miró’s work was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art from November 1941 through January 1942, when Martin was at Teachers College. Adolph Gottlieb attended the retrospective and “realized at this moment that the path to a distinctly American avant-garde led through the great European masters, not around them” (Pepe Karmel, “Adolph Gottlieb: Self and Cosmos,” in Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, ed. Luca Massimo Barbero [Venice, Italy: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 2010], 31–​32, exhibition catalogue). Breslin, Mark Rothko, 284 and 334–​335. Thomas Crow, Seeing Rothko (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2005), 30–​31. William Rubin, “Surrealism in Exile and After,” Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 384, exhibition catalogue. Dore Ashton summarizes this part of her history: “Miss Martin came to the United States in 1933 after having explored Indian culture in Canada where she had worked with mining and logging companies. She received a master’s degree in fine arts from Columbia, became an American citizen around 1940, and headed for Indian country again, this time to New Mexico” (Ashton, “Art: Drawn from Nature: Agnes Martin’s Paintings at Section 11 Gallery Reflect Love of Prairies,” New York Times, December 29, 1959, 23). Ashton does not appear to distinguish between the native cultures of Canada and the American Southwest. Spud Johnson, The Horse Fly, section of El Crepusculo, June 17, 1954, 9. Hewett’s volume was published by the University of New Mexico Press. None of these symbols appear in The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of

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TO PAGES 52–59

34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

Eden, but the logic of a repeatable system of visual symbols or signs is evident in Martin’s emerging pictorial vocabulary. The star at the upper right of The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden appears in Untitled, circa 1953; the clover at the center of the painting can be seen in Night and Day, a small casein on paper; and the double horseshoe at Adam’s knees reappears in The Beach, a work on paper. Evan M. Maurer, “Adolph Gottlieb: Pictographs and Primitivism,” in The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, ed. Sanford Hirsh (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995), 36. A 1995 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, was devoted to the topic, and the New Britain Museum of Art held an exhibition titled The Beginning of Seeing: Tribal Art and the Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb in 2002. Maurer, “Adolph Gottlieb,” 38. Robert Ellis, interview by the author, August 2006, Taos, NM; Mildred Tolbert, interview by the author, July 2006, Albuquerque, NM; Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman, Agnes Martin: Before the Grid (Taos: Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, 2012), 4, exhibition catalogue. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. Martin refers to Untitled, circa 1954, a painting acquired by the Harwood from Mildred Tolbert. Martin’s friend Kristina Wilson “thought that it was terrible that Bob Ellis wouldn’t sell Agnes’s painting back to her to destroy” (interview by the author, September 2006, Taos, NM). Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. See Lizzie Borden, “Agnes Martin: Early Work,” Artforum 11, no. 8 (April 1973): 39–​44. David Witt, Taos Moderns: Art of the New (Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 1992), 9. Henri Matisse, interview by Jacques Guenne, 1925, reprinted in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (London: Phaidon, 1973), 54–​56, quoted in Gerald Nordland, Mark Lavatelli, and Charles Strong, Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2007), 20, exhibition catalogue. Peter Walch, email communication with the author, August 25, 2011. Witt, Taos Moderns, 9. There is an area at the bottom right that suggests the possible use of black crayon as well. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie, Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), 125, exhibition catalogue. Robert Ellis, “Bea Remembered,” in The Triumph of Beatrice Mandelman (Taos, NM: Harwood Museum of Art, 2000), n.p., exhibition catalogue. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. Robert Hobbs, Beatrice Mandelman: Taos Modernist (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 61. The Harwood, too, began collecting art books and magazines in the 1950s (Taos Art and Artists, El Crepusculo, January 10, 1957). Witt, Taos Moderns, 144. Mary Fuller McChesney recounted seeing Diebenkorn in both California and New Mexico during this period, suggesting the fluidity of movement between the two locations: “I remember going to the apartment in Sausalito. We saw them in New Mexico when he was living in Albuquerque. Dick was teaching there. And I remember going down there with Corbett; his friendship with Ed was quite strong, and Clay Spohn”

NOTES TO PAGES 59–66

   •   1 8 7

52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

(oral history interview conducted by Susan Landauer, September 28, 1994, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). David Beasley, Understanding Modern Art: The Boundless Spirit of Clay Edgar Spohn (Simcoe, ON: Davus, 1999), 76. David Witt, Modernists in Taos: From Dasburg to Martin (Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 2002), 142. There is question regarding whether the paint is casein or oil. Additionally, the color of the paperboard has darkened and discolored over time. The painting is dated 1954 in University of New Mexico Art Gallery, New Acquisitions, 1982–​1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Gallery, 1991), exhibition catalogue; and it is dated 1955 in Claudine Humblet, The New American Abstraction, 1950–​ 1970 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007). Tolbert, oral history interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project. Although Tolbert uses both the singular and the plural in this statement, it seems likely that she traded multiple photographs for Martin’s painting. Beatrice Mandelman, interview by David Witt, December 23, 1982, Harwood Foundation oral history interview, OH82.1, Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Martin’s extant paintings currently dated to 1954 share a common support (canvas) as well as a more stylized, all-over composition that utilizes a deft approach to line as well as opaque shapes arranged in geometric configurations. Martin’s dominant use of line in her earlier, figurative compositions and her reliance on alternate, less-expensive supports—​namely, Masonite and paperboard—​suggest that Untitled, circa 1953, may have been painted late in 1953, just before Martin returned to Teachers College, Columbia University, for a one-semester course between January and March 1954. The extant works dating from 1954, among them Autumn Watch, The Bluebird, Dream of Night Sailing, and Mid-Winter, would have been created after Martin’s return from New York, in late March 1954, and they form a far more cohesive group. Martin’s interest in Corbett may have extended beyond his art, as Mary Fuller McChesney recounted: “She was madly in love with Corbett. That was so obvious. And she was a very attractive woman. And she seemed—​although she was very rangy and big, she was really a beautiful person. And guys were attracted to her. She wasn’t at all a kind of, you know, unattractive, gay person. But I think she was already sort of ambivalent sexually” (McChesney, interview, Archives of American Art). Martin would use the same strategy—​of placing color underneath white—​in paintings in the 1970s (Witt, Modernists in Taos, 144). Of all of the technical aspects of Martin’s paintings, texture is the one element most consistently overlooked in the critical literature on the artist. Although the paperboard has a smooth surface, these marks prefigure Martin’s famously skipping graphite lines over the warp and weft of her canvas supports. In the stop-and-go viewing that these lines engender, Martin begins to experiment with models of perception. See Kasha Linville, “Agnes Martin: An Appreciation,” Artforum 9, no. 10 (June 1971): 72–​73. Eulalia Emetaz, owner of La Galeria Escondida, may have been instrumental in Mar-

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TO PAGES 66–70

64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78.

79.

tin’s visit to see Parsons. Emetaz wrote an introduction for Earl Stroh to Betty Parsons on May 7, 1951: “A young artist named Earl Stroh, who has shown with me for the past three years will soon be in New York, and I am certain he will be in to see you. If you will have the time to look at his paintings or help him in any way, I would be grateful to you. To date, I’ve not been successful with any sort of signed contract. You see, they all want to show in New York, or have their work handled by a New York Dealer. Enfan—​ Esta Es la vida! When are you coming to Taos. Best to you, Eulalia” (Eulalia Emetaz to Betty Parsons, May 7, 1951, Galeria Escondida Records, 1947–​1957, MSS 6578, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Martin’s name was handwritten on a list that Parsons used to organize her gallery shows in 1955–​1956. However, Parsons did not grant Martin a firm time slot for an exhibition until 1958 (Parsons, “Shows Season of 1955–​1956,” General Exhibition Files: Exhibition Schedules 1954–​1960, Box 20, Folder 7, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Agnes Martin to the Art Committee, November 8, 1954, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Archives, Taos, NM. Ibid. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, March 25, 1954. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, April 15, 1954. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. Ted Egri, oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, June 2000, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Archives, Taos, NM. Joseph Traugott, New Mexico Art through Time: Prehistory through the Present (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2012), 163, exhibition catalogue. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” by Joan Simon, Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996): 83. Martin, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World. McChesney, interview, Archives of American Art. See the series of incised Untitled, 1959, monochromes, one of which is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, as well as Night Sea, 1963. See Mary R. Davis, “The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb: A Synthesis of the Subjective and the Rational,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 3 (November 1977): 141–​147; and Sanford Hirsch, The Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb (New York: Hudson Hills Press / Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, 1994). Nordland, Lavatelli, and Strong, Richard Diebenkorn, 23 and 30. Although Diebenkorn finished his MFA at the University of New Mexico in May 1951, he convinced the University of New Mexico to allow him to stay on for an additional year as a special student so that he could utilize the full extent of his G.I. Bill benefits. It is possible that Martin saw Diebenkorn’s May 1951 MFA exhibition at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, since Martin was teaching in the Albuquerque public school system at the time (Phyllis F. Dorset, “La Galeria Escondida: A Taos Retrospective,” Artspace: Southwestern Contemporary Arts Quarterly (Fall 1987]: 48). Nordland, Lavatelli, and Strong, Richard Diebenkorn, 30.

NOTES TO PAGES 70–75

   •   1 8 9

80. Ibid., 29. 81. Mark Lavatelli, “Diebenkorn’s Albuquerque Years,” in Nordland, Lavatelli, and Strong, Richard Diebenkorn in New Mexico, 29–​34. 82. Nordland, Lavatelli, and Strong, Richard Diebenkorn, 31. 83. Ibid., 31, quoting Mark Lavatelli’s interview with Richard Diebenkorn, Santa Monica, CA, November 1978. 84. Ibid. Precedents for Martin’s inclination to have her forms exceed their expected boundaries can be seen in Untitled, an orange-and-black silkscreen that Martin created at Teachers College in 1951–​1952, in which the central, thin, black rectangle exceeds the edge of the larger orange rectangle ever so slightly. Martin’s forms began to continue off the picture plane with regularity in 1954. The question of boundaries and framing—​whether forms exceed the limits of the canvas or borders are used to contain them—​became exceedingly important in Martin’s work of the early 1960s, where borders of bare canvas often ring central grids. 85. Martin to the Art Committee, November 8, 1954. 86. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, September 9, 1954; and Agnes Martin to Helene Wurlitzer, January 3, 1956, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Archives, Taos, NM. Available records do not indicate which painting Martin showed at the Modern Art Museum in Albuquerque. 87. Traugott, New Mexico Art, 163. The museum is alternatively called the Albuquerque Modern Museum in some publications. 88. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, February 23, 1956. 89. “Wurlitzer Foundation Places Administrative Offices Here,” El Crepusculo, October 28, 1954, 1. 90. Ibid. 91. The daughter of a mining expert, Helene Wurlitzer was introduced to New Mexico as a child by visiting mines in Socorro, New Mexico. Educated in Germany and Ohio, Wurlitzer married Howard Wurlitzer, of Wurlitzer Organ fame, and became the first female trustee of the Cincinnati College of Music. After her husband’s death, Wurlitzer built a house in Taos in 1942 and spent summers there until 1955, when she became a full-time resident. In 1948, Wurlitzer became Earl Stroh’s patron, offering him a casita and studio on her property as well as financing trips to New York and to Europe. The residencies at the Wurlitzer Foundation were developed, in part, on this model (Helene Wurlitzer, www.wurlitzerfoundation.org/history; Dean Porter, Taos Artists and Their Patrons [Notre Dame, IN: Snite Museum of Art, 1999]). 92. Ibid. 93. “Wurlitzer Foundation Places Administrative Offices Here,” 1. 94. Martin to the Art Committee, November 8, 1954. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. Martin to the Art Committee, December 5, 1954. 98. Parsons did not keep detailed inventory records; but in an undated list titled “Paintings Sold,” Parsons includes a number of early Martin works, ranging in date from 1940 to 1958. It is possible that this list contains the work or works that Martin showed Parsons

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TO PAGES 75–78

99. 100.

101.

102. 103.

104. 105. 1 06. 107. 108. 109.

1 10. 111.

in 1954 (Betty Parsons, “Paintings Sold,” Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, March 10, 1955. Elaine de Kooning observed that Gottlieb, Rothko, and Newman “were all protégées of Milton Avery’s, the three of them. They all adored Milton Avery. Oh, I don’t know if they adored him, but they revered him” (oral history interview conducted by Phyllis Tuchman, August 27, 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). The date for Untitled, circa 1954, is a subject of debate. Betty Parsons dated two paintings belonging to Mildred Tolbert, as this painting did, to 1955 (Parsons, “Paintings Sold,” Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers). David Witt dated the painting to 1953 but did not record Martin’s exact signature or the date (Witt, “Harwood Foundation Catalog Worksheet,” April 14, 1993, Harwood Foundation Archive, the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico). Steven Prins notes that the work is “signed and dated, on canvas verso: martin 58.” (“Summary Treatment Report, Agnes Martin Untitled” and “Invoice for Services,” unpublished examination report and invoice, Steven Prins and Company, Santa Fe, Completed August 15, 1994). Martin uses the combination of exposed canvas and gold leaf again in Greystone II, 1961, among other paintings. Agnes Martin, quoted in Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, Agnes Martin (Chicago: School of the Art Institute of Chicago Video Data Bank, 1976), VHS. Also see John Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, Everything Is about Feeling . . . Feeling and Recognition,’ ” ARTnews 75, no. 7 (September 1976): 91. Agnes Martin to Henry Sauerwein, n.d., but included with bills dated April 18, 1955, and April 30, 1955, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Archives, Taos, NM. Martin would employ this method of storing paintings throughout her life, as Rodney Hamon recalled (interview with the author, August 5, 2005, Albuquerque, NM). Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, June 2, 1955. Reginald Fisher, 1954 Annual Exhibition for New Mexico Artists (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery, 1954), n.p., exhibition catalogue. Reginald Fisher, 1955 Annual Exhibition for New Mexico Artists (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery, 1955), n.p., exhibition catalogue. Suzanne Delehanty saw a work called Father and Son in a Santini Brothers warehouse in New York in the early 1970s. She notes that a thirty-six-by-forty-eight-inch Father and Son was “figurative,” “a[bstract] express[ionist] . . . de Kooning” and “biomorphic.” She also notes a forty-by-sixty-inch Father and Son with black figures on a white ground that was shown at the New Mexico State Fair. Martin also recalled that she “contributed to the State Fair” in a January 3, 1956, letter to Helene Wurlitzer (Delehanty, “Notes,” Agnes Martin Retrospective, 1973, ICA MSS 777, Box 12, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania; Martin to Helene Wurlitzer, January 3, 1956). Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, June 9, 1955. Martin gathered a group of paintings, including two of her own, to show at the Stein’s well-known La Galeria de los Artesanos. Parsons tried and failed to secure the return

NOTES TO PAGES 79–84

   •   191

112.

113. 114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 1 24.

125. 126. 1 27. 128. 129.

130. 131.

132.

of one of Martin’s paintings, Departure, from the Steins (R. A. Isbicki, “Letter to Mr. J. Stein,” December 31, 1958, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Diana Stein did not have any memory of the paintings when interviewed by the author by telephone in 2010. Paula Stewart and Karin Strobeck, “Biography of Eliot Porter,” Eliot Porter Collection Guide, last accessed March 29, 2013, www.cartermuseum.org/collections/porter/ about.php. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, November 10, 1955. Dave Weber, “Art and Artists,” Santa Fe New Mexican, November 6, 1955. Edith Burckhardt, writing in ARTnews in December 1958, similarly described Martin’s paintings as “playgrounds seen from above, or a layout of a modern nursery”—​gendered analogies that were not used to describe the work of Martin’s male counterparts, either in New Mexico or New York (“Exhibition at Section 11,” ARTnews 57, no. 8 (December 1958): 17). Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, November 10, 1955. Martin to Helene Wurlitzer, January 3, 1956. Ibid. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, February 23, 1956. Witt, Modernists in Taos, 135. Ibid., 22. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, October 25, 1956. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, May 31, 1956; and Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, July 12, 1956. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, August 23, 1956. Betty Parsons, “Agnes Martin” (undated inventory list), Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Ibid. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, May 2, 1957; and Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, August 8, 1957. Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, September 12, 1957. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. Barbara Haskell, “Agnes Martin: The Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 100, exhibition catalogue. Ibid. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. Martin’s work was included in the second Taos Moderns exhibition at the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, and the last reference to Martin’s presence in Taos came in the second week of October 1957, when Martin attended the opening of the exhibition (Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, October 10, 1957). Haskell dates this painting to 1956, but Parsons dates the painting to 1952–​1953 and 1958 in two separate documents (Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 102; and Parsons, Corre-

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TO PAGES 85–90

spondence and “Agnes Martin” (undated inventory list), Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). More recently, Tiffany Bell has suggested that the painting was created between 1956 and 1958 (“Happiness Is the Goal,” 25.) 133. The image that Parsons used of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) is cropped and rotated.

C H A P T E R 3. T H E P R O G R E S S I O N O F A PA I N T E R ’ S W O R K

The title of this chapter is drawn from Mark Rothko, “Statement on His Attitude in Painting,” Tiger’s Eye 9 (October 1949): 114, cited in David Anfam, “The Classic Years: 1951–​1970,” in Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1998), 75–​76, exhibition catalogue. 1. Agnes Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Irving Sandler, Art Monthly 169 (September 1993), reprinted in Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, ed. Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson (London: Art Monthly / Ridinghouse, 2007), 426. 2. Lizzie Borden, “Agnes Martin: Early Work,” Artforum 11, no. 8 (April 1973): 42. 3. Benita Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 75. 4. Agnes Martin, oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, 2000, transcribed by Christina Rosenberger, July 24, 2006, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project, Taos, NM. 5. Ibid. 6. Agnes Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” by Joan Simon, Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996): 88. 7. Jack Youngerman, telephone interview by the author, October 12, 2012. 8. “Well, I paid $45 dollars a month in that building. But the ceiling wasn’t high enough” (Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation). See also Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 75. 9. Jonathan Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder (New York: DIA Art Foundation; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 176. 10. Peter Schjeldahl, “Martin’s Eyes,” Village Voice, November 24, 1994. 11. Lee Hall, Betty Parsons: Artist, Dealer, Collector (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 107. 12. Youngerman, telephone interview. 13. Hall, Betty Parsons, 107. 14. Ibid., 113. 15. Ibid. 16. “Newman . . . was [Parsons’s] guru, her touchstone, her friend. She had discussed her own painting, her gallery, and the history and future of art with him for years” (Ann Gibson, “Lesbian Identity and the Politics of Representation in Betty Parsons’ Gallery,” Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, ed. Whitney Davis [New York: Harrington Park Press, 1994], 262). Allan Stone recalled that Newman’s advice was not limited to Parsons or her gallery: “Barney was determined to make me into an art dealer and to make my gallery into the right kind of place. His strongest advice to me was, ‘Look,

NOTES TO PAGES 90–94

   •   193

17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

kid, get together the old group. Get Phil [Philip Guston], get Adolph [Gottlieb], get [William] Baziotes, get the guys together. Get rid of the pie guy [Wayne Thiebaud].’ I said, ‘Barney, I like the pie guy.’ He said, ‘You are hopeless’ ” (Allan Stone, “Remembering Newman,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman: A Symposium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ed. Melissa Ho [Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005], 18). Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88. “I was a young artist working fairly privately for what seemed to me like forever—​I think it was three or four years [laughing],” Johns recalled, “but at any rate I had accumulated a certain amount of work and it seemed to me that I wanted to show it, so the next step was to find someone who would show it. I contacted a couple of people. Actually, I only contacted Betty Parsons, because I wanted Betty Parsons to show my work. Betty said she had too many artists, she couldn’t show them all, and she didn’t even come down to look at my work. So then I didn’t know what to do, because most of the galleries in New York—​there weren’t many—​but most of them were involved in second-generation Abstract Expressionist painting at that time, and it didn’t seem that my work would fit with that. But Betty Parsons had a gallery where I felt each artist was kind of on his own, with no particular tendency of the gallery. So that’s why I thought that she would be a place that might show my work” (interview by Sharon Zane, August 23, 1994, Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, New York, 11–​12. See also Jennifer Roberts, “Chronology,” in Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–​1965, ed. Jeffrey Weiss [Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007], 264, exhibition catalogue). Betty Parsons, “Section Eleven to Open,” Section Eleven Exhibitions, 1958–​1961: Various Exhibitions, 1958–​1961, Box 19, Folder 47, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Ibid. A list titled “Agnes Martin / Paintings—​Sold,” which dates to circa 1959, notes that Martin had sold work to Mrs. John Vaughn in Albuquerque; Mrs. Glen Sires (sister); Dr. Mildred Kane in Oregon and Mrs. William Stuart, also in Oregon, in addition to selling an “oil—​23–​36 1952” to Mr. Charles Brooks in New York City. The list also mentioned Mrs. Naomi Miller of New York; Miss Johann Bingham, address unknown; Mrs. Eliot Porter, New Mexico; Emma Lou Davis, care of Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art; Mrs. Arnold Deutsch Archimedes, Mexico City; Mrs. Judson Crews, New Mexico; Mr. Wolcot Ely, New Mexico; Mr. and Mrs. Sacks, New Mexico; and Mrs. Lenore Tawney, New York (ibid.). The existence of this list demonstrates that Parsons was aware of Martin’s sales—​and likely her exhibitions—​in New Mexico but chose not to publicize them in New York. Parsons, “Agnes Martin,” March 9, 1959, Artists Files: Martin, Agnes—​Biographical Material, circa 1958–​1983, Box 11, Folder 5, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers. For example, Eisler writes that Martin’s “art changed radically after she moved to New York” (“Profile: Life Lines,” 76). Similarly, Barbara Haskell notes, “It was not until she came to New York in 1957 that Martin began to consider geometry as an appropriate vehicle for spiritual content” (“Agnes Martin: The Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N.

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23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

Abrams, 1992], 102, exhibition catalogue). The exception is Dore Ashton, who flagged Martin’s time in New Mexico as a key period in her artistic development. The location of this painting is currently unknown, and the available sources do not record whether Martin signed or dated the work on the verso. The painting’s style, especially with regard to the four circles at the upper right corner, suggests it may have been completed in 1957, rather than 1956. The initials “L.T.” in the title lend support to this claim, since they likely refer to Lenore Tawney, a weaver whom Martin met upon her return to New York in 1957. Interestingly, correspondence from Betty Parsons and her assistant, Jack Tilton, refers to a painting Dancer No. 1, which they date to circa 1952–​1953—​about the same time Martin painted The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (Parsons, Correspondence, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers). While it is possible that Dancer No. 1, circa 1952–​1953, is an earlier painting that has since been lost, it’s also possible that it is an earlier version of Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), which was significantly reworked in 1956 or 1957. A third possibility is that the painting is incorrectly dated, as I hypothesized earlier. An illustrated checklist for the exhibition does not survive, and it is thus impossible to confirm whether L.T. is a later iteration of Dancer No. 1—​which became Dancer No. 1 (L.T.)—​or whether L.T. was a different painting entirely. Lucy Lippard, “Ad Reinhardt,” in Ad Reinhardt (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), 19, exhibition catalogue. In an essay published fourteen years later, Barbara Rose was more scathing in her critique: “What lay behind Abstract Expressionism was forgotten ancient history in the art schools, where recipes for instant styles (two tablespoons Reinhardt, one half-cup Newman, a dash of Rothko with Jasper Johns frosting was a favorite) pressed immature artists into claiming superficial trademarks. . . . Soon the minimal, monochromatic styles that imitated Newman, Rothko and Reinhardt in a way no less shameless than the manner de Kooning’s Tenth Street admirers copied the look of his works, gave a bad name to good painting on both sides of the Atlantic” (“Reducing Recipes,” in American Painting: The Eighties [New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 1980], exhibition catalogue, originally published in Arts Magazine, 1980, republished in Paul F. Fabozzi, Artists, Critics, Context: Readings in and around American Art since 1945 [Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2002], 392). Lippard, “Ad Reinhardt,” 201. Ibid. David Witt, Modernists in Taos: From Dasburg to Martin (Santa Fe, NM: Red Crane Books, 2002), 143. While Witt dates the photograph to circa 1952, I believe that 1951 is a more accurate date. Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Sandler, 428. Whitney Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957 Annual Exhibition: Sculpture, Paintings, Watercolors (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1957), n.p., exhibition catalogue. The exhibition was held between November 20, 1957 and January 12, 1958. Martin may also have seen mention of Reinhardt’s exhibition at Parsons, which was noted in ARTnews: “At the beginning of 1957, ARTnews selected the exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s uncompromisingly difficult and intellectual

NOTES TO PAGES 95–101

   •   19 5

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

paintings at the Betty Parsons Gallery as one of the ten best shows of the previous year” (Hall, Betty Parsons, 113). Lippard, “Ad Reinhardt,” 95 and 109. Ibid., 109. Thomas B. Hess, “Ad Reinhardt: Portraits of Ahab,” ARTnews 55, no. 7 (November 1956): 37, cited in Lippard, “Ad Reinhardt,” 109. Lippard, “Ad Reinhardt,” 114. Note that Desert Rain was lined in 1993, which altered the appearance of the painting from its original, unlined state. The painting has an uneven sheen on the surface that may be a spray-applied coating, possibly a varnish. Like a lining, a coating can change the appearance of a painting. Lippard, “Ad Reinhardt,” 120. Ibid., 127 and 203. Reinhardt showed his blue paintings at the Stable Gallery, his red paintings at Martha Graham, and his “black” paintings at Betty Parsons, all in New York City. Ibid., 116. Yve-Alain Bois, “The Limit of Almost,” Ad Reinhardt, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991), 13, exhibition catalogue. It is interesting to reflect on, in this context, Martin’s characterization as a “mystical” artist, which has similarly obscured a “genuine understanding of [her] art.” Ibid., 28. The interplay of duration and light is crucial to Martin’s paintings, and especially her grid paintings, which is one of the reasons that Bois’s analysis of Reinhardt is particularly applicable to Martin’s paintings. Briony Fer offers the most recent analysis of duration and light (or “paleness”), as well as of Martin’s relation to Reinhardt, in her essay “Who’s Afraid of Triangles?” (in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell [London: Tate Publishing, 2015], 179). See also Lawrence Alloway, “Formlessness Breaking Down Form: The Paintings of Agnes Martin,” Studio International 185, no. 952 (February 1973): 61; John Russell, “Where to Go from Art of the 1950’s,” New York Times, March 8, 1975, 16; John Russell, “American Artists Redefine America with Bold Strokes,” New York Times, November 7, 1976, D1; and Michael Kimmelman, “The Forgotten Godmother of Dia’s Artists,” New York Times, May 11, 2003, H35. Bois, “The Limit of Almost,” 25. Youngerman, telephone interview. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 76. Eisler notes, “Newman and his wife, Annalee, met Martin shortly after she arrived in New York” (ibid.). Newman suffered a heart attack two days after Thanksgiving in 1957 and spent six weeks in the hospital. Since Newman’s heart attack roughly coincided with Martin’s return to New York in 1957, it seems likely that his sustained efforts to help Martin began in 1958. Robert Murray, “Remembering Newman,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, ed. Melissa Ho (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 15. Ibid. “The canvas came from Boyle’s on White Street, the glue sizing from Behlen’s in the Village, and we went to Lenny Bocour’s factory over on the West Side and came back with boxes and boxes of paint,” Robert Murray recalled.

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TO PAGES 101–106

48. Ibid. 49. Phyllis Rosenzweig, The Fifties: Aspects of Painting in New York (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1980), 26, exhibition catalogue. Martin and Murray arrived in New York at different moments in Newman’s career—​Frank Getlein condemned Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis in a 1957 New Republic review of the American Painting, 1945–​1957 exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1957, while Newman’s work was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. But Martin’s paintings from 1957, Untitled, 1957, especially display knowledge of Newman’s work. The painting’s title has been published as Untitled, but variations abound, including Untitled (Two Black Triangles) and Dark Triangle. The latter title is close to Black Triangle, a work Martin showed at the 1957 Annual Summer Exhibition at the Harwood (Cooke, Taos Art and Artists [column], El Crepusculo, August 8, 1957). It is possible that this work developed out of an earlier series of works that Martin began in Taos, though Tiffany Bell notes that Untitled, 1957, was first recorded at Martin’s storage in New York (discussion with the author, June 13, 2012). 50. The work is signed on the verso—in the lower right corner, which is rare for Martin—​ and Martin records the orientation of the work by noting “TOP.” This is one of the first instances in which Martin indicates the orientation of a painting, suggesting that she understood the danger of her paintings being hung incorrectly. Newman’s Horizon Light, 1949, for example, was hung vertically at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1950 “seemingly against Newman’s better judgment, because of the insistence of Rothko, who arranged the installation,” and was later hung horizontally at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1955 (Richard Shiff, “To Create Oneself,” in Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Richard Shiff [New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: Barnett Newman Foundation, 2004], 13). 51. Ibid., 59. 52. Ibid., 59–​60. 53. Ibid., 63. 54. Barbara Haskell, ed., The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900–​1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 51–​55. 55. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 77. 56. Ibid. 57. Barnett Newman, “The Fourteen Stations of the Cross, 1958–​1966,” ARTnews 65, no. 3 (May 1966): 26–​28, cited in Shiff, Barnett Newman: A Catalog Raisonné, 189; and Shiff, “To Create Oneself,” 58. 58. Roni Feinstein, “Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art,” in Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art, ed. Roni Feinstein (Chapel Hill: Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008), 2, exhibition catalogue. At the time, Barr was the director of museum collections at the Museum of Modern Art. 59. Ibid. 60. Barr purchased one work for himself and one work for the Museum of Modern Art; and he asked Philip Johnson to purchase Flag, deeming it too controversial for the museum’s board to approve. Johnson subsequently donated the work to the museum, as Barr had planned (ibid.).

NOTES TO PAGES 106–109

   •   197

61. Ibid. 62. There is no documentation to identify which works Martin showed in Parsons’s Christmas exhibition. 63. George Stiles [G. S.], “Gallery Previews in New York,” Pictures on Exhibit 22, no. 1 (October 1958): 25. 64. According to a list created by Betty Parsons circa 1959, Lenore Tawney purchased “oil—​T he Field—​48"—​7—​% ’) 80"—​52" 1957.” This suggests that Tawney may have purchased “The Field” from Parsons’s September–​October 1958 group exhibition (Parsons, Artists Files: Martin, Agnes—​General, 1958–​1983, Box 11, Folder 6, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers). 65. Tiffany Bell identified this painting as Heather (discussion with the author, June 13, 2012). 66. Stiles, “Gallery Previews in New York,” 25. 67. Ellsworth Kelly, telephone interview by the author, August 9, 2012. 68. Fairfield Porter, ARTnews 57, no. 6 (October 1958): 17. Fairfield Porter was Aline Porter’s brother-in-law. 69. Dore Ashton, “Art: Welded from Metal; Richard Hunt Uses Pipes, Tubes and Rods as His Material for Sculpture,” New York Times, September 30, 1958. 70. Dore Ashton, “Art: Lecture by Rothko; Painter Dissociates Himself from the ‘Abstract Expressionist’ Movement,” New York Times, October 31, 1958, 26. See also Dore Ashton, About Rothko (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 71. Rothko Estate Archive, cited in David Anfam, “The Classic Years: 1951–​1970,” in Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1998), 86, exhibition catalogue. Anfam notes that “most of these terms appear in the handwritten lists that Rothko prepared in relation to his 1961 retrospective” (103–​104). 72. America has been published and shown in various orientations. Robert Elkon showed it with the light rectangle stacked on top of the darker rectangle, while Lizzie Borden published it in Artforum with the dark rectangle on the left and the light rectangle on the right. 73. Anfam, Mark Rothko, 316. 74. Ibid., 84. 75. Mark Rothko, “Statement on His Attitude in Painting,” Tiger’s Eye 9 (October 1949): 114, cited in Anfam, 75–​76.

CHAP TER 4. FINDING THE GRID

1. Parsons sold Black & White, 1958; David, 1958; Harbor No. 1, 1957; American, 1958; Rain, 1958; The House, 1958; White (Study), 1958; The Field, 1957; Study for Rain, 1958; Unbeckoning Grass, 1958; and Drift of Summer, 1957 (Betty Parsons, “Agnes Martin” [financial statement], February 6, 1959, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution); and Files (Betty Parsons, “Agnes Martin from Sec 11 file” [inventory cards], Artists Files: Martin, Agnes—​General, 1958–​1983, Box 11, Folder 6, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983,

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TO PAGES 109–116

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). The other works shown include Dancer No. 1 (later known as Dancer No. 1 [L.T.]), n.d.; This Rain, 1958; Prospect, 1958; Imprint, 1958; Monument to Mountains, 1954; Heather, 1958; Stones, 1958; The Spring No. 1, 1958; Beckoning Grass, 1958; In the Desert, 1957; Beach, n.d.; Water Sign, 1957; The Spring No. 2, n.d.; Wheat, 1958; Harbor No. 3, 1958; Mourning Dove, n.d.; Water Light, 1955; and Desert, 1958. Betty Parsons, “Agnes Martin” [price list], Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 2. Edith Burckhardt, “Exhibition at Section 11,” ARTnews 57, no. 8 (December 1958): 17. 3. Martin was not the only postwar artist whose paintings were characterized as decorative; James Breslin argues that Rothko went to great lengths to hinder such interpretations of his art. “Wilder Green, the designer who assisted Rothko in installing his Harvard Murals, remembered that ‘Rothko was almost obsessed with the idea that his work would be regarded as decorative’ and he sought a ‘very subdued lighting’ for his paintings because he felt it would convey a non-decorative and more spiritual mood” (James Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 447). 4. Dore Ashton, “Premiere Exhibition for Agnes Martin,” New York Times, December 6, 1958, 26. 5. In this light, it is interesting to note that Ashton also connects Edward Corbett’s abstract paintings of the early 1950s, in this case Number 18, June, 1952, to the landscape of New Mexico: “Corbett painted flat, shadowy landscapes seen as if from above, with atmospheric touches of light and a distinct reference to the expansive desert, infusing his canvases with a softened light and a deliberately stressed extension” (Dore Ashton, “The San Francisco School,” Evergreen Review, no. 2 [1957]: 148–​59, cited in Gerald Nordland, Edward Corbett: An Exhibition Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art, March 28–​May 4, 1969 [San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1969], n.p., exhibition catalogue). 6. George Stiles [G. S.], “Gallery Previews in New York,” Pictures on Exhibit 22, no. 1 (October 1958). 7. Anita Ventura, “Exhibition at Section 11,” Arts Magazine 33, no. 4 (January 1959): 59. Pacific was crossed out and renamed Marine #4 on Parsons’s list of paintings in her Section Eleven Files (Parsons, “Agnes Martin from Sec 11 file” [inventory cards]). Given Ventura’s description of L.P., it also seems likely that the title “L.P.” was a typographical error and should read “L.T.” 8. Ibid. 9. Agnes Martin, oral history interview conducted by Douglas Dreishpoon, 2000, transcribed by Christina Rosenberger, July 24, 2006, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Oral History Project, Taos, NM. 10. “I was brought up in the ocean,” Martin remarked, “and believe me I sure miss it. In the ocean, when you stand on [sic] the ocean you know that you’re not on a lakeshore, you can feel the strength of it” (ibid.). 11. Woody Gwynn, interview by the author, August 31, 2006, Galisteo, NM. 12. Faye Hammel, “Bohemia on the Waterfront: Serious Writers and Painters Are Creating

NOTES TO PAGES 117–120

   •   19 9

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

New Shangri-La at the East River’s Edge Near the Tip of Manhattan,” in Robert Indiana: New Perspectives, ed. Allison Unruh (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 44. The essay originally appeared in Cue magazine, March 22, 1958. James Rosenquist, with David Dalton, Painting below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 76. Ibid., 76. Jack Youngerman, telephone interview by the author, October 12, 2012. Ann Wilson, Agnes Martin: A Video Essay (Taos: Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, June 2002), DVD. Rosenquist, Painting below Zero, 84. Ibid. Michael Lobel, James Rosenquist: Pop Art, Politics, and History in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 49. Rosenquist, Painting below Zero, 84. Rosenquist cites Ellsworth Kelly as the exception. Rosenquist did not include Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg (who lived on Pearl Street by the late 1950s) in his analysis, nor Newman, who had a studio around the corner on Front Street, perhaps because all three had reputations that were no longer “underground” (Lobel, James Rosenquist, 49). Lobel, James Rosenquist, 49. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 2. The essay originally appeared in ARTnews 57, no. 6 (October 1958): 24–​26 and 55–​57. Ibid. Ibid., 8–​9. Alan Solomon, “The New Art,” in The Popular Image (Washington, DC: Gallery of Modern Art, 1963), exhibition catalogue, cited in Paul F. Fabozzi, Artists, Critics, Context: Readings in and around American Art since 1945 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2002), 81, exhibition catalogue. Barbara Haskell, ed., The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900–​1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 94. Kaprow created 18 Happenings in 6 Parts for the opening of the Ruben Gallery in 1959. Lobel, James Rosenquist, 49 and 54. Robert Indiana described the historical provenance of the beams he scavenged for use in his sculptures in an interview: “Steve: They were beams from the old buildings in the area? Robert: Yes, which themselves had been built with wood salvaged from the masts of sailing ships. Lower Manhattan was almost destroyed by the fire of 1835, at the same time that sailing ships were becoming obsolete. The masts became columns on the ground floors of the warehouses” (Robert Indiana, “Robert Indiana,” interview conducted by Steve Lafreniere, 2004, Index Magazine, www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/robert_indiana.shtml). Lobel, James Rosenquist, 53–​54. Jennifer Roberts, “Chronology,” in Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–​1965, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 264, exhibition catalogue. Carl J. Weinhardt Jr., Robert Indiana (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 57, cited in

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TO PAGES 120–122

33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

Barbara Haskell, “Robert Indiana: The American Dream,” in Robert Indiana beyond Love, ed. Barbara Haskell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 33. Indiana, “Robert Indiana.” Indiana repeated this story often, underscoring the role economics and efficiency played in the use of found objects. See Mildred Glimcher, Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Rosenquist, Youngerman at Coenties Slip (New York: Pace Gallery, 1993), 10, exhibition catalogue; and Robert Indiana, “Interview at Walker Art Center,” by Jan Van der Marck, tape recording, October 21, 1963, Walker Art Center Archives, Minneapolis, MN. Robert Indiana, journal entry, December 7, 1959, republished in Haskell, “Robert Indiana,” 33. With regard to the abstract expressionists, Martin said, “I consider myself one of them. They had a whole philosophy. They gave up positive and negative space, and, as a result, they got tremendous scale in their work, and they didn’t do it gradually. They moved in one step to complete non-objectivity.” In the same interview Martin also charts a slightly different lineage, noting, “If there is such a thing as influence, I’ve been terribly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists” (Benita Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 77). Robert Indiana, oral history interview conducted by Richard Brown Baker, September 12–​November 7, 1963, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 82. Youngerman, telephone interview. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, “A Sum of Corrections,” in Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–​1965, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 237, exhibition catalogue. Jeffrey Weiss notes that “the shifting identity of Target with Plaster Casts . . . is revealing: first taken for a late abstract expressionist painting, it was soon to be claimed, as an assemblage, for the emergence of ‘new forms.’ ” Weiss cites the fact that the work was “solicited” for the Jewish Museum’s 1957 exhibition, Artists of the New York School: Second Generation, but by 1960 was shown within the context of assemblage in Martha Jackson’s New Forms—​New Media exhibition (Jeffrey Weiss, “Painting Bitten by a Man,” in Weiss, Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 20). The “shifting identity” of Target with Plaster Casts functions as a model for the reception of Martin’s work of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ann Wilson, “Linear Webs: Agnes Martin,” Art and Artists 1, no. 7 (October 1966): 47; Frances Morris, “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 59–60, exhibition catalogue. The Garden has been published upside down often; for example, see Contemporary Art from the Estate of Betty Parsons, Sale 5436 (New York: Christie’s, November 9, 1983), 20. Barbara Haskell, “Agnes Martin: The Awareness of Perfection,” in Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 103, exhibition catalogue. Ibid. Martin would continue to use physical objects in the creation of her paintings—​in Blue Flower, 1962, and Little Sister, 1962—​through the early 1960s. She created Burning Tree, in 1961, suggesting that her sculptural practice continued to inform her painting. Martin’s tactile approach to painting is also apparent in The Wall #2, 1962. Wilson, “Linear Webs,” 47.

NOTES TO PAGES 122–130

   •   2 01

46. Ibid. 47. Martin’s reliance on the associative title The Book demonstrates that her move toward abstraction was still, at times, tethered to representational objects. Indeed, the rectangles in the bottom section of The Book invoke the format of an open book, though not as literally as in Jasper Johns’s 1957 Book, which was shown at his inaugural exhibition at Leo Castelli’s Gallery in 1958. As with Johns’s Book, which hung on the wall in Alfred Barr’s apartment after Barr purchased the work from the exhibition at Castelli, Martin’s The Book is intended to hang vertically (Katherine Hinds, email correspondence with the author, September 18, 2013). Martin thus gestures at the object-nature of her subject, but in a pictorial rather than sculptural format. 48. Brad Epley, “Technical Examination Report, 08–​097 DJD, Agnes Martin, The Book, 1959,” unpublished technical examination report completed June 27, 2012, Conservation Department, Menil Collection, Houston, TX. The “red form” that Epley refers to often appears brown in reproduction. 49. Martin, “All My Paintings Are about Happiness and Innocence: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” by Sally Eauclaire, Southwest Profile 16, no. 2 (May–​July 1993): 17. 50. Epley, “Technical Examination Report,” 2. 51. Ann Wilson, “Agnes Martin,” unpublished manuscript, n.d. [ca. 1961], p. 5, Microsoft Word file, Artists Files: Martin, Agnes—​Biographical Material, circa 1958–​1983, Box 11, Folder 5, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 52. Agnes Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind: An Interview with Agnes Martin,” by Joan Simon, Art in America 84, no. 5 (May 1996): 124. Martin was living at 3–​5 Coenties Slip by May 21, 1959; that is the address Parsons uses on her financial statement of that date. By that time, Martin had sold three works: Drift of Summer ($450), Seeds ($200), and Shade ($125); and she had received a check for $450.51 (Parsons, “Agnes Martin” [financial statement], May 21, 1959, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). 53. Wilson, “Agnes Martin,” 5. 54. Youngerman, telephone interview. 55. “Agnes had one floor at #3, that was Ellsworth’s building. And she had a floor at #27, which was my building. Later she had one floor on South Street right on the river. I was in an adjoining building. So we were together even after we were evicted from Coenties Slip” (ibid.). 56. Rosenquist, Painting below Zero, 84. 57. While Kelly’s estrangement was due to his time in Paris, Youngerman confirms that the artists on Coenties Slip were eager to distance themselves from the legacy of abstract expressionism. The Slip, Youngerman explains, “was completely apart from the New York art scene. Down there, one of the things we were very conscious of, without talking that much about it, was the fact that we all knew that we weren’t part of the de Kooning / Pollock legacy in art, which was centered around Tenth Street. You know, there’s a movie by Goddard called Band of Outsiders. . . . It was a bit like that” (Glimcher, Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Rosenquist, Youngerman, 7–​8).

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TO PAGES 130–133

58. Haskell, “Robert Indiana,” 19; Ellsworth Kelly quoted in Hélène Depotte, “Towards an Immobile Voyage: Robert Indiana, the Reality-Dreamer,” in Robert Indiana: Rétrospective 1958–​1998, ed. Joachim Pissarro and Hélène Depotte [in English and French] (Nice, France: Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, 1998), 38, exhibition catalogue. 59. Diane Waldman, “Ellsworth Kelly,” in Ellsworth Kelly (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1996), 28, exhibition catalogue; and Indiana, oral history interview, Archives of American Art, 74. Indiana is blunt about his debt to Kelly, saying that meeting Kelly was “the most significant thing that occurred to me in New York.” 60. Indiana, oral history interview, Archives of American Art, 75. “Following Kelly’s recommendation, Clark [Indiana’s given last name] moved into 31 Coenties Slip a couple of weeks later; Kelly soon followed, taking a larger space nearby. Not long after, the two became lovers, spending their afternoons painting together, sketching the views outside Clark’s window, and drawing one another. Watching Kelly paint and listening to his discourses on art changed Clark’s conception of his own work. ‘My painting life began with Ellsworth,’ he would later say. ‘Before Coenties Slip, I was aesthetically at sea. With Ellsworth, my whole life perspective changed. All of a sudden I was in the twentieth century’ ” (Haskell, “Robert Indiana,” 18). 61. Joachim Pissarro, Robert Indiana: Rare Works from 1959 on Coenties Slip (Zurich: Galerie Gmurzynska, 2011), 13, exhibition catalogue. 62. Martin, interview, Archives of American Art. 63. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88; Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 105. “I happened to be having breakfast with Agnes Martin in her studio. I made a model for the piece called Pony from the top of a coffee container we used at breakfast. . . . Another piece was a sketch from an envelope. It still has her name on it. It’s called Gate, 1959” (Stephanie Barron, “Giving Art History the Slip,” Art in America 62, no. 2 [March-April, 1974]: 84). Also see Brendan Prendeville, “The Meaning of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 1 (2008): 70. 64. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 75. 65. Kelly, telephone interview by the author, August 9, 2012. 66. Ibid. 67. Parsons, “Agnes Martin” [financial statement], February 4, 1960, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution) Martin received similar advances of $75 and $116.67 (her cut from a painting that sold for $175) three times during the fall of 1958 (Parsons, “Agnes Martin” [financial statement], February 6, 1959, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 68. Paintings are listed in the order they appear on Parsons’s price list: “Earth No. 2, 1959; Earth, n.d.; The Law, 1958; The Lamp, n.d.; Kali, 1958; Bones No. 2, 1959; Flowering, n.d.; Buds, n.d. / c. 1959; Terra Vita, n.d.; Bones, n.d.; The River, n.d.; Tideline, n.d.; Brooklyn Bridge, n.d.; The Pool, n.d.; Reflection, n.d.; Water, n.d.; The Road, n.d.; Alone, n.d.; Angels, n.d.; Night Harbor, n.d.; The Tower, n.d.; Seabirds, n.d.” (Parsons, undated price list, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​ 1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution).

NOTES TO PAGES 133–135

   •   2 03

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

Note that many of these works are no longer extant, and that The Law is also published as The Laws. Dore Ashton, “Art Drawn from Nature: Agnes Martin’s Paintings at Section 11 Gallery Reflect Love of Prairies,” New York Times, December 29, 1959, 23. Parsons, “Agnes Martin” (financial statement), February 4, 1960, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Robert Elkon purchased Prospect, signaling his interest in Martin’s work. This pattern prefigures Martin’s banded paintings of the 1970s to her death in 2004, which relied on subtle variations in the widths of the bands to achieve the scale that Martin desired and to create a sense of visual syncopation. Wilson, “Linear Webs,” 47. Interestingly, Martin later insisted that she did not show any works with circles. “I never showed those circles; I never sold them, because I was already started off on the right path with the lines of nails” (ibid.). Martin’s “lines of nails” refers to Homage to Greece, which she said led directly to her use of line on canvas. One wonders if Martin’s memory is revisionist, neglecting the important formal breakthroughs that came through her exploration of circles in favor of a more direct development toward her grid paintings. Lenore Tawney recalled the views of the East River from the windows of her studio: “That South Street loft was an island, really, with the water always there and those boats. At night the boats were like Venetian glass, you know they’d be all lighted up and going along on this water and they would be coming at different speeds, and going at different directions at different speeds and different sizes. And there was the Brooklyn Bridge. . . . So there I was right on the river, looking at the river and the boats and the lights of Brooklyn. Behind me there was only this wall and there were all these pigeons and birds with wings flapping and outside were the gulls on the river. . . . It was as if New York was at my back” (Lenore Tawney, oral history interview conducted by Paul Cummings, June 23, 1971, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Ashton, “Art: Drawn from Nature,” 23. Dorothy Miller, foreword and acknowledgments to Sixteen Americans, ed. Dorothy Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 6, exhibition catalogue. Ibid., 6. Robert Rosenblum, “Louise Nevelson,” in Miller, Sixteen Americans, 52–​53 and 58, republished from Arts Yearbook 3: Paris / New York (New York: Doubleday, 1959). Rosenblum equates Nevelson’s sculpture with the qualities of painting, an inversion of my argument with regard to Martin (52–​53). E. C. Goossen, “Ellsworth Kelly,” in Miller, Sixteen Americans, 28–​31, originally published as E. C. Goossen, “Ellsworth Kelly,” Derriere le Miroir no. 110, ed. Pierre a Feu (Paris: A. Maeght, 1958); Carl Andre, “Frank Stella,” in Miller, Sixteen Americans, 76. Ashton, “Art: Drawn from Nature,” 23. Interestingly, Jack Youngerman currently ascribes a similar importance to nature in Martin’s work. “Martin had—​we all had in common—​a feeling. Despite the grids and geometric nature of her work[,] . . . ­Ellsworth once said that Agnes was a nature painter, like him. I think it comes out in her titles. It’s inevitable, given where she grew up. There’s an element of the nonurban

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80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

in her work. Urban people—​Rosenquist or Lichtenstein—​they were keyed into urban images. Martin’s connection—​distilled in a way—​was with nature” (Youngerman, telephone interview). Ashton, “Art: Drawn from Nature,” 23. Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 100. Stuart Preston [S. P.], “Gallery Notes,” New York Times, January 3, 1960; and Barbara Butler [B. B.], “Exhibition at Section 11,” Arts Magazine 34, no. 4 (January 1960): 50–​51. Butler’s comments call to mind Stiles’s earlier contention that Martin’s “pale, horizontal patterns or rigidly austere vertical patterns . . . derive from . . . Mondrian” in his review of Martin’s 1958 exhibition (Stiles, “Gallery Previews in New York”). Oxford Art Online, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms, s.v., “De Stijl,” accessed July 15, 2013, www.oxfordartonline.com/public/book/oao_t4. Butler, “Exhibition at Section 11,” 50–​51. Ibid. Ibid. Lawrence Campbell, “Exhibition at Section 11,” ARTnews 58, no. 9, (January 1960): 16. Indiana “had begun experimenting with assemblage in late 1959 after demonstrating the technique to children in the weekly art class he taught in a private home in Scarsdale, a suburb of New York” (Haskell, “Robert Indiana,” 33). Campbell, “Exhibition at Section 11,” 16. Agnes Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Irving Sandler, Art Monthly 169 (September 1993), reprinted in Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, ed. Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson (London: Art Monthly / Ridinghouse, 2007), 426. Campbell’s recognition of the kinetic qualities of Martin’s forms—​they “swell, jump or skip”—​anticipates Martin’s 1963 work The Wave, a wood-and-Plexiglas construction that incorporates tiny balls that move across a wooden grid. This sense of movement was cited by Ashton as early as 1958 (Ashton, “Premiere Exhibition for Agnes Martin,” 26). Kasha Linville, “Agnes Martin: An Appreciation,” Artforum 9, no. 10 (June 1971): 72–​73. Ashton, “Art: Drawn from Nature,” 23; Butler, “Exhibition at Section 11,” 50–​51; Campbell, “Exhibition at Section 11,” 16. Haskell, “Robert Indiana,” 19. Charlene, Robert Rauschenberg’s 1954 combine, also uses Homasote. Dominoes looks like a one-one doublet domino and depicts a series of dominoes, in a rare instance of recognizable imagery appearing in Martin’s work from the early 1960s. (This is also the only instance, to my knowledge, in which Martin’s work assumes the form of the object she depicts.) The number of dominoes does not conform to a standard set; Martin does not represent every domino in the set; and Martin did not organize the dominoes according to the rules of the game. For Martin, the formal characteristics of her aesthetic vision trumped the logic of the game. Haskell, “Robert Indiana,” 23 (Haskell cites Indiana’s journal entry from February 12, 1959); and Pissarro, Robert Indiana: Rare Works, 13. Regarding The Source, Indiana wrote in his journal on December 31, 1960, “This is, I feel, a very seminal painting, and if it bears great debt to [Jack] Youngerman’s more tortured forms, it is possibly already repaid, or at least loses no great grace by that indebtedness; surely Jack is more graceful

NOTES TO PAGES 140–144

   •   2 0 5

96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

1 10. 111. 112.

113.

in his largesse than Ellsworth, who trembles lest anyone hard edge” (Indiana quoted in Daniel O’Leary, “The Journals of Robert Indiana,” in Love and the American Dream: The Art of Robert Indiana, ed. Daniel O’Leary, Aprile Gallant, and Susan Elizabeth Ryan [Portland, ME: Portland Museum of Art, 1999], 10, exhibition catalogue). Thomas Crow, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Art of Robert Indiana,” in Robert Indiana: New Perspectives, ed. Allison Unruh (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 43–​97. The Slips (1959–​1960), for example, “was originally unadorned circles painted on Homasote in oil, to which Indiana later added short words.” William Katz, introduction to Robert Indiana: Early Sculpture, 1960–​1962 (London: Salama-Caro Gallery, 1991), 13, exhibition catalogue. Thomas Crow, email correspondence with the author, April 27, 2012. Pissarro, Robert Indiana: Rare Works, 13. Martin, interview, Mandelman-Ribak Foundation. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50. Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 128, exhibition catalogue. Ibid., 128. Ibid. Johns and Indiana used different types of stencils for different pictorial ends, but the repetition of ready-made forms appealed to both artists. Branden Joseph, Random Order (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 142. Ibid., 142. Steinberg quoted in ibid., 84. Ibid., 75, 108. Ibid., 116, citing Robert Rauschenberg, “How Important Is Surface to Design?” Print 13, no. 1 (January–​February 1959): 31. Glimcher, Indiana, Kelly, Martin, Rosenquist, Youngerman, 8–​9. During this period, Chryssa’s success as an artist outstripped Martin’s. Chryssa, who has recently been described as “Martin’s sometime girlfriend,” had a solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1961, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963, and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1965. She also appeared in the Whitney Annual in 1960 and 1962, and in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960–​1961 (Frances Morris, “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell (London: Tate Publishing, 2015], 59, exhibition catalogue). Pierre Restany, “Chryssa,” in Chryssa (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 32. Natalie Edgar, “Exhibition at Betty Parsons,” ARTnews 60, no. 6 (October 1961): 11–​12. See Haskell, “Agnes Martin,” 105. Haskell writes that “the mutuality of influence between Tawney and Martin was proposed by Ann Wilson, conversation with the author, April 1992” (116). For a more recent discussion of Martin’s artistic relationship with Tawney, see Morris, “Agnes Martin.” Eleanor Munro, Originals 498, no. 1, cited in Judith Stein, “The Inventive Genius of Lenore Tawney: Reflections on a Lifetime of Art,” Fiberarts Magazine 24, no. 2 (September–​October 1997): 30. Holland Cotter observed a link between Martin’s grids and quilt patterns (“Art in Review: Agnes Martin at Pace Gallery,” New York Times, January 3, 1992, C28).

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114. Morris, “Agnes Martin,” 61. 115. Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88. By contrast, Tawney’s critics have been eager to establish a link between her work and painting (Sigrid Wortmann Weltge, “Lenore Tawney: Celebrating Five Decades of Work,” in Lenore Tawney: Celebrating Five Decades of Work [Wilton, CT: Browngrotta Arts, 2000], 8, exhibition catalogue). 116. Martin recalled her mother’s and sister’s handwork, observing that they worked on it “ ‘every time they sat down, all their lives, knitting, hooking rugs,’ Martin says proudly, ‘my sister was really marvelous. She could do anything, from buttonholes to tablecloths’ ” (Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 73). This suggests that Martin’s response to Tawney’s weaving was more complex than a simple dismissal based upon the distinctions between crafts and fine arts. 117. Kathleen Nugent Mangan, “Messages from a Journey,” in Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective (New York: American Craft Museum, 1990), 21, exhibition catalogue. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid. 120. Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen, Beyond Craft: The Art Fabric (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973), 267. 121. Ibid. 122. Stein, “Inventive Genius of Lenore Tawney,” 30. 123. Ibid., 34. 124. Lynne Cooke, “ . . . in the classic tradition . . .   ,” in Agnes Martin, ed. Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder (New York: DIA Art Foundation; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 13 (citing Martin, introduction to Lenore Tawney, additional text by James Coggin [New York: Staten Island Museum, 1961], n.p., exhibition catalogue); Martin, “Perfection Is in the Mind,” 88; Constantine and Larsen, Beyond Craft, 271. 125. Martin’s letter reads as follows: “Explanation of the Tapestry by Miss Tawney. Title: Nativity in Nature. This tapestry illustrates how Christ came into the World as Holy Spirit and light and love as by a miracle. Nature in its heavy dark mystery is penetrated from above by heavenly blessing accompanying the spirit of love. Mary is not a mortal only but a spiritual being already lifted out of nature. This tapestry emphasizes this miracle of the direct penetration of the spirit of God into the world. Religious art through the Renaissance (approximately 700 years) has accented the importance of human response to nature. This tapestry is to be considered as post-Renaissance, the content being nature illustrated by the Holy Spirit. That which is new, with the support of those who appreciate it, slowly gathers force” (unpublished letter to the Interchurch Center, ca. 1960, in support of Lenore Tawney’s tapestry, Nativity in Nature, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation Archives, New York). Martin’s views on religion were complex; her remark to Tawney that “the Old Testament and Judaism and Pauls Christianity are hard to take” in 1973 sits oddly with her earlier text for Nativity in Nature (unpublished letter to Lenore Tawney, undated but postmarked October 5, 1976, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation Archives, New York). 126. Youngerman, telephone interview. 127. Agnes Martin to Lenore Tawney, October 25, 1963, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

NOTES TO PAGES 152–153

   •   2 07

128. 129.

1 30. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

138.

139.

140.

Archives, New York. “October 25, 1963. Dear Lenore, I am not going to be able to tell you anything really. You have made this day the turning point in my life. It means an enormous opportunity for me. . . . Any expression of gratitude is like the soundless sound. It is . . . like the waves over and over again—​Forever is not too long. I think it is the ‘real thing.’ Agnes.” Ibid. Krauss, “Grids,” 142. Martin was well aware of the long art historical legacy of the grid. “I don’t claim to have invented the grid in the first place,” she told Kate Horsfield. “You can look back through the thousands of years in art, even in Tantric, it’s there. And I mean, that’s old stuff, that Tantric business. And then it’s in Coptic and everything, it’s everywhere, that grid thing” (“On Art and Artists: Agnes Martin ’74,” in “Agnes Martin,” ed. Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, special issue, Profile 1, no. 2 [March 1981], 6). Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Sandler, 426. Rosamond Bernier, “Drawing the Line,” Vogue, November 1992, 307. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 80. Martin, introduction to Lenore Tawney. Krauss, “Grids,” 55. Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Sandler, 426; Bernier, “Drawing the Line,” 307. Martin, unpublished text, ca. 1960–​1961. Agnes Martin to Betty Parsons, April 27, 1961, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69), Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Martin was an indifferent speller, as evidenced by her incorrect spelling of William Lieberman’s name, and her punctuation was often idiosyncratic. Words, executed in paper mounted on canvas, is variously defined as a painting—​as in the Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition Agnes Martin: Paintings, ­September–​October 1961—​and as a drawing, as in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition catalogue A Decade of American Drawings: 1955–​1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1965). Parsons’s records show that Martin owed the gallery $417.70 for advertisements in Arts, ARTnews, the New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune, as well as for announcements, photographs, and postage (Parsons, “Agnes Martin” [notes on expenditures], Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983, microfilm roll N68/69, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Parsons sold Contemplation to the Union Carbide Company at a 10 percent discount, in addition to selling Study for Islands to Chryssa; Words and the drawing for The Cry also sold (ibid.). Martin showed Wheat, 1957, in an exhibition titled Painters Who Search for New Forms: An Exhibition in Honor of Founders’ Week at the Morse Gallery of Art at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, from February 14 through March 6, 1960. She showed David, 1958, at the Helmhaus in Zurich from June 8 to August 14, 1960, in the exhibition Konkrete kunst: 50 Jahre Entwicklung. Parsons also sent Ages, 1961, to the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture at the Carnegie Institute, which ran from October 27, 1961, through January 7, 1962. The list of jurors for the Carnegie International included Kenzo Okada, who had accompanied Parsons to

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TO PAGES 154–156

141.

1 42. 143.

144.

1 45. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150.

New Mexico in 1957 and encouraged her to look at Martin’s art, as well as Lawrence Alloway, a British critic who would become one of Martin’s most ardent supporters in the 1960s and 1970s. This unlikely convergence sums up the ways that Martin’s networks continued to overlap and multiply, often in the most unlikely of circumstances. Robert M. Coates, “The Art Galleries: Variations on Themes,” New Yorker, October 14, 1961, 202–​204, 207. Coates was likely unaware of the lessons on Albers that filtered through Martin’s contact with Black Mountain alumni such as Oli Shivonen, both in Taos and New York (Allan Graham, “Allan Graham in Conversation with John Yau,” Brooklyn Rail, December 14, 2007). Coates, “Art Galleries,” 207. Edgar, “Exhibition at Betty Parsons,” 11–​12. This is the first published association between Martin’s grid paintings and graph paper, though certainly not the last. “There is a good painting by Agnes Martin,” Donald Judd wrote in 1964. “It is quiet and looks like graph paper” (“In the Galleries,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings, 1959–​1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 119), originally published in Arts Magazine 38, no. 4 (January 1964): 33–​34. See also John Canaday, “Art: Drawings Touch with Mystery,” New York Times, May 10, 1969, 27; and Hilton Kramer, “An Art That’s Almost Prayer,” New York Times, May 16, 1976, 91. Coates’s criticism echoes Barbara Butler’s criticism a year earlier, which noted that Martin’s paintings “are as simple, logical as a mathematical formula; their quiet beauty remains a mystery of the artist’s talent” (Butler, “Exhibition at Section 11,” 50–​51). Edgar, “Exhibition at Betty Parsons,” 11–​12. Burckhardt, “Exhibition at Section 11,” 17. Bernier, “Drawing the Line,” 307. Edgar, “Exhibition at Betty Parsons,” 11–​12. Ibid. Wilson, “Agnes Martin,” 5.

CONCLUSION

1. Benita Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” New Yorker, January 25, 1993, 77. 2. Betty Parsons, Statement to Agnes Martin, February 4, 1960, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–1991, bulk 1946–1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 3. Martin did a bit better after her 1959 show; she was paid $553.21 on roughly $1,800.00 worth of sales for seven works of art. Parsons subtracted funds for three advance payments to the artist (September, October, and December 1958), as well as for photographs, advertising, printing, stamps, and transport (Betty Parsons, Statement to Agnes Martin, February 6, 1959, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–1991, bulk 1946–1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). 4. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 77. 5. Betty Parsons, Contract with Agnes Martin, October 2, 1958, Artist Files: Martin, Agnes—General 1958–1983, Box 11, File 6, Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–1961, bulk 1946–1983, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian ­Institution.

NOTES TO PAGES 157–162

   •   2 0 9

6. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 77. 7. Marcia Tucker, James Rosenquist (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1972), 120, exhibition catalogue. 8. Dorothea McKenna Elkon, interview by the author, February 8, 2012. 9. Agnes Martin, oral history interview conducted by Suzan Campbell, May 15, 1989, p. 15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 10. The exhibition included the work of seventy other artists and functioned, for Martin, as a neat culmination of her evolving artistic networks. Oli Shivonen, for example, showed a 1960 painting called Symmetric Variance lent by the Stables Gallery in Taos, where Martin had also shown her work in the early 1950s. Ad Reinhardt showed Number 17, 1953, and Arshile Gorky was represented by Organization, 1933–​1936. Gorky, as Martin would have known, had previously shown his work at the Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico. Artists from Coenties Slip were also well represented: Alloway included two paintings and a sculpture by Kelly (Cite, 1951; Pony, 1959; GreenWhite, 1961), as well as an aluminum relief by Chryssa (Three Arrows, 1961). 11. John Gordon, Geometric Abstraction in America (New York: Published for the Whitney Museum of American Art by Praeger, 1962), 8, exhibition catalogue. 12. Ibid., 14. 13. Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, “Material and Immaterial Surface: The Paintings of Mark Rothko,” in Mark Rothko, ed. Jeffrey Weiss (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1998), 282–​300, exhibition catalogue; and Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, “The Paintings of Barnett Newman: ‘Involved Intuition on the Highest Level,’ ” in Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Ellyn Childs Allison (New Haven, CT: Barnett Newman Foundation / Yale University Press, 2004), 116–​141. 14. Dore Ashton, “Premiere Exhibition for Agnes Martin,” New York Times, December 6, 1958, 26; Dore Ashton, “Art: Drawn from Nature: Agnes Martin’s Paintings at Section 11 Gallery Reflect Love of Prairies,” New York Times, December 29, 1959, 23. 15. Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine 37, no. 5 (February 1963): 48. 16. Stuart Preston, “Ringing Changes on the Contemporary Scene,” New York Times, November 24, 1963, 47. 17. Ibid. 18. Natalie Edgar, “Exhibition at Betty Parsons,” ARTnews 60, no. 6 (October 1961): 11–​12. 19. Virginia Dwan, oral history interview conducted by Charles F. Stuckey, March 21–​June 7, 1984, Dwan Gallery Records, 1959–​ca. 1982, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 20. Dwan “had wanted to represent Agnes Martin. . . . ‘I showed her in my group show ‘10,’ and wanted her so much because, like Reinhardt and Yves Klein and Sol LeWitt, she had a huge impact on my view of art. All of them conveyed the maximum content with the minimum of art.’ ” Michael Kimmelman, “The Forgotten Godmother of Dia’s Artists,” New York Times, May 11, 2003, AR19. 21. Dwan, oral history interview. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.

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TO PAGES 162–166

26. Agnes Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Irving Sandler, Art Monthly 169 (September 1993), reprinted in Talking Art: Interviews with Artists since 1976, ed. Patricia Bickers and Andrew Wilson (London: Art Monthly / Ridinghouse, 2007), 428. 27. John Gruen, “Agnes Martin: ‘Everything, Everything Is about Feeling . . . Feeling and Recognition,’ ” ARTnews 75, no. 7 (September 1976): 94. Also see Martin, “Agnes Martin,” by Sandler, 428. 28. Gruen, “Agnes Martin,” 94. Martin’s assessment of her role in 10 is not entirely fair, since the exhibition gave her work a measure of critical and popular exposure that helped solidify her reputation as an important artist in New York during the 1960s. 29. Eisler, “Profile: Life Lines,” 80. 30. Nancy Princenthal similarly argues that Martin’s desire for isolation has been exaggerated by her critics: “If [Martin] is legendary for anything, on a personal level, it is her heroic solitude. By middle age, she was quite comfortable exploiting the legend. . . . Her quest for isolation has been greatly exaggerated” (“With Her Back to the World and Her Face to the Camera,” Brooklyn Rail, November 5, 2013). 31. See, for example, Untitled, ca. 1954, from the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico in Taos, New Mexico, and Night Sea, Falling Blue, and Friendship, all from 1963. 32. John Canaday, “Art: 145 Paintings in Whitney Contemporary Show; 29 Artists Represented for the First Time,” New York Times, December 11, 1963, 52. 33. Martin to the Art Committee, November 8, 1954, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Archives, Taos, NM.

NOTES TO PAGES 167–169

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WORKS CITED

A R C H I VA L S O U R C E S

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Dwan Gallery Records, 1959–​ca. 1982. Galeria Escondida Records, 1947–​1957. Oral History Interviews. Parsons, Betty, Gallery Records and Personal Papers, ca. 1920–​1991, bulk 1946–​1983. Archives of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, Albuquerque, NM. Art League of New Mexico Records, 1936–​1970. Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Delehanty, Suzanne. “Notes.” Agnes Martin Retrospective, 1973. ICA MSS. 777, Box 12. Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania. Epley, Brad. “Technical Examination Report, 08–​097 DJD, Agnes Martin, The Book, 1959.” Unpublished technical examination report completed June 27, 2012. Conservation Department, Menil Collection, Houston, TX. Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Harwood Foundation Oral History Interviews. Tolbert, Mildred, Photography Archive. Indiana, Robert. “Interview at Walker Art Center.” By Jan Van der Marck. Tape recording. October 21, 1963. Walker Art Center Archives, Minneapolis, MN. Johns, Jasper. Interview by Sharon Zane. August 23, 1994. Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, New York. Mandelman-Ribak Foundation Archives, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM.

213

Mandelman-Ribak Oral History Project. Marin, John. Letter to Alfred Stieglitz, August 1930. Object Files, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photocopy of a letter from the Alfred Steiglitz–​Georgia O’Keeffe Archives. (YCAL MSS85.) Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Martin, Agnes, File. Steven Prins and Company, Santa Fe, NM. Martin, Agnes, Papers. Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Archives, Taos, NM. Miller, Dorothy C., Papers. Museum of Modern Art Archives, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Northwest Viking (Washington State Normal School, Bellingham, WA), Western Washington College of Education. November 28, 1934, through March 13, 1936. Heritage Resources, Special Collections Campus History Collection (LD5778.W475), Western Washington University Libraries, Bellingham, WA. http://content.wwu.edu/cdm/search/collection/ wfront/searchterm/Agnes%20Martin/field/all/mode/exact/conn/and/order/date/ad/asc. Tawney, Lenore G., Foundation Archives, New York.

BOOKS AND ARTICLES

Alloway, Lawrence. Baziotes. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1965. ———. “Formlessness Breaking Down Form: The Paintings of Agnes Martin.” Studio International 185, no. 952 (February 1973): 61–​63. Andre, Carl. Interview. In Artists in Their Own Words: Interviews, by Paul Cummings, 173– 195. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. ———. “Frank Stella.” In Sixteen Americans, edited by Dorothy Miller, 76. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959. Exhibition catalogue. Anfam, David. Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1998. “Art and Cash.” Time Magazine. February 8, 1954. Ashton, Dore. About Rothko. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. ———. “Agnes Martin and . . . ” In Agnes Martin Paintings and Drawings, 1957–​1975, edited by Joanna Drew, 7–​14. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1977. Exhibition catalogue. ———. “Art: Drawn from Nature: Agnes Martin’s Paintings at Section 11 Gallery Reflect Love of Prairies.” New York Times, December 29, 1959. ———. “Art: Lecture by Rothko; Painter Dissociates Himself from the ‘Abstract Expressionist’ Movement.” New York Times, October 31, 1958. ———. “Art: Welded from Metal; Richard Hunt Uses Pipes, Tubes and Rods as His Material for Sculpture.” New York Times, September 30, 1958. ———. “Premiere Exhibition for Agnes Martin.” New York Times, December 6, 1958. Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. Roads to Yesterday: Motor Drives out from Old Santa Fe. Chicago: Hedstrom-Barry Printers, 1927. Auping, Michael. “Once Removed.” In Callum Innes—​from Memory, 211–​215. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2006. Exhibition catalogue. ———. Philip Guston Retrospective. New York: Thames and Hudson; Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2003.

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CITED

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Figure 1.  © Barbara Moore / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy of The Estate of Peter Moore. Figure 2.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 3.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 4.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 5.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. Figure 6.  Lake County (IL) Discovery Museum, Curt Teich Postcard Archives. Figure 7.  Courtesy of the Peyton Wright Gallery. Figure 8.  © 2016 The Estate of Bert Phillips. Photograph courtesy of the Harrison Eiteljorg Museum. Figure 9.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Scott. K. Stuart. Figure 10.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 11.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM. Figure 12.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image Geistlight Photography and courtesy of the University of New Mexico Art Museum.

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Figure 13.  © 2016 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX. Figure 14.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, NM. Figure 15.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Aaron Payne Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM. Figure 16.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 17.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Photograph courtesy of Art Resource, Inc. Figure 18.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 19.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © Estate of Mildred Tolbert. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 20.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 21.  Art © Alberto Giacometti Estate / Licensed by VAGA and ARS, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy of the Alberto Giacometti Estate. Figure 22.  © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy of the Easton Foundation. Figure 23.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 24.  Art © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Figure 25.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 26a.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 26b.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 26c.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 27.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 28.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Scott K. Stuart. Figure 29.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 30.  © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA /  Art Resource, NY. Figure 31.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner.

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Credits

Figure 32.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 33.  © Estate of Mildred Tolbert. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 34.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM. Figure 35.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Scott K. Stuart. Figure 36.  Art © Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy of the Arkansas Arts Center. Figure 37a.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY. Figure 37b.  © Photograph by Tom Loonan courtesy of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY. Figure 38.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © Estate of Mildred Tolbert. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 39.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 40.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Figure 41a.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the author. Figure 41b.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the author. Figure 41c.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the author. Figure 41d.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the author. Figure 42.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Dan Milburn and courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 43.  © 2016 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. Photograph courtesy of the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. Figure 44.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 45.  © Estate of Mildred Tolbert. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 46.  © Estate of Mildred Tolbert. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 47.  © Estate of Mildred Tolbert. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 48.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico.

Illustration Credits

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Figure 49.  © Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation. Photograph courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Foundation. Figure 50.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 51.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner and Helene Wasserman Fine Art, Inc., New York, NY. Figure 52a.  Courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 52b.  Courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 53.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 54.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s Images /  Bridgeman Images. Figure 55.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Figure 56.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph © Iam Reeves and courtesy of the owner. Figure 57.  © Estate of Mildred Tolbert. Photograph courtesy of the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico. Figure 58.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 59.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Gordon R. Christmas, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 60.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph Bill Jacobson Studio, New York, courtesy of the Dia Art Foundation, New York. Figure 61.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 62.  Courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 63.  Courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 64.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph Bill Jacobson Studio, New York, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 65.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 66.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Clare Britt and courtesy Tate. Figure 67.  © 2016 Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. Photograph courtesy of Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images. Figure 68.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Rich Sanders, Des Moines, courtesy of the Des Moines Art Center. Figure 69.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 70.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 71.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of Pace Gallery.

2 2 8   •   I l l u s t r a t i o n

Credits

Figure 72.  © 2016 Clayton J. Price. Photograph courtesy of Clayton J. Price. Figure 73.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Rick Gardner, courtesy of The Menil Collection. Figure 74.  © 2016 Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Robert Indiana. Figure 75.  Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © 1991 Hans Namuth Estate. Figure 76.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Gordon R. Christmas, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 77.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Gordon R. Christmas, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 78.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Gordon R. Christmas, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 79.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 80.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Gordon R. Christmas, courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 81.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of the Norton Museum of Art. Figure 82.  © 2016 Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Robert Indiana. Figure 83.  © 2016 Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photographer unknown. Figure 84.  © 2016 Morgan Art Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Robert Indiana. Figure 85.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 86.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 87.  Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy of the owner. Figure 88.  Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph by D. James Dee. Figure 89.  Digital Image © Whitney Museum of American Art. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Figure 90.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 91.  Courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Figure 92.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery. Figure 93.  © 2016 Agnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph courtesy of Pace Gallery.

Illustration Credits

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abbey, Rita Deanin, 22, 178n60 ABC art, 158, 165 “ABC Art” (Rose), 104 abstract expressionism, 6, 7, 42, 73, 179n68; alternatives to legacy of, 122; California artists and, 66; Coenties Slip artists distinguished from, 120; critiques of, 98, 195n26; geometric abstraction defined against, 162; immediacy of, 105; maledominated culture of, 33, 51; Martin’s identification with, 14, 46, 55, 60, 122, 166– 67, 201n36; rebellion against dominance of, 108–9; second-generation, 194n18; surrealism in relation to, 75 abstraction, 7, 32, 79; geometric, 162; of grid paintings, 146; Martin on progression toward, 92; Rothko’s move toward, 35; Whitney 1951 Annual and, 39 Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (MoMA exhibition, 1951), 162 Adams, Kenneth, 84 Agadir [The American Dream] (Indiana), 144, 145

Agnes Martin: Before the Grid (exhibition, 2011), 172n21, 182n106 “Agnes Martin: Early Work” (Borden), 172n21 Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances (Glimcher), 173nn24–25 Albers, Josef, 23, 109, 111, 118, 157, 208n141 Albright Knox Gallery (Buffalo), 63, 172n21, 182n106 Albuquerque, 5, 6, 21, 167, 169; artistic environment of, 14, 19; desert landscapes of, 21; John Marshall School, 32; Martin’s first house in, 32; Museum of Modern Art in, 77, 79, 190nn86–87; resurgence of visual arts in, 47; women artists in, 51 Aline Porter, Painter, Tesuque, New Mexico (McKenna, photograph), 85–86, 86 Alloway, Lawrence, 152, 183n109, 208n140; on biomorphic forms, 41–42; Geometric Abstraction in America exhibition and, 162, 163–64 Alogon (Smithson), 165 American (Martin, 1958), 111, 112, 116, 117, 198n72

231

Andre, Carl, 104, 140, 158, 164, 165, 166 Anfam, David, 181n97, 198n71 Annual Exhibition for New Mexico Artists (Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico, 1955), 84, 86–88 Arrow (Martin), 156 Art Digest, 21, 49 Artforum, 172n21, 198n72 Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico, 77, 84, 86, 192n131 Art in America, 51 Art Institute of Chicago, 37, 84 ARTnews, 3, 121, 141, 152, 192n114, 195n31; Edgar review of Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition (1961), 157–58; Johns’s Target with Four Faces on cover of, 109 Arts Magazine, 119 Ashton, Dore, 5, 20, 21, 111, 162, 195n22; on Martin and the New Mexico desert, 46–47, 163, 184n130; on Martin’s interest in Native culture, 186n31; on Martin’s solo shows at Section Eleven, 117–18, 134, 137–38, 141 assemblage, 7, 17, 141, 151, 201n39; as alternative to legacy of abstract expressionism, 122; Indiana and, 122–23, 141, 205n88 Atalaya Art School, 178n64 Autumn Watch (Martin, 1954), 70, 71, 74–77, 80, 99, 188n58; as anomaly in Martin’s oeuvre, 146; as Martin’s first photogrid painting, 69 Avery, Milton, 79, 191n100 Baas, Jacquelynn, 44, 45, 183n117 Baer, Jo, 165 Bandelier National Monument, 58 Barr, Alfred, 108–109, 113, 121, 197n58, 197n60, 202n47 Barrer, Gertrude, 50 Baziotes, William, 33, 41, 182n109 Beach (Martin, ca. 1954), 56–57, 56, 74, 80, 187n33 Beach (Martin, ca. 1957), 98–102, 99, 111, 116 Bed (Rauschenberg), 121 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 44 Bell, Tiffany, 173n21, 181n88, 186n25, 193n133 Bellingham, Washington, 15, 174n5, 174n7 Betty Parsons Gallery, 34, 70, 172n8,

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180n79; abstract expressionism and, 33; announcement of first solo exhibition by Martin, 90, 91; Kelly and, 132; Martin’s productive confrontations with other artists in, 108; Martin’s work shown at, 70, 78, 84, 156–59, 189n64; Youngerman’s first solo show at, 109 Bierstadt, Albert, 118 biomorphic forms, 41, 64, 76, 106, 191n109 Bischoff, Elmer, 35 Bisttram, Emil, 23, 178n67 Black & White (Martin, 1958), 116 Black Mountain College, 111, 208n141 Black Triangle (Martin), 89, 197n49 Bluebird, The (Martin, 1954), 59, 59, 71, 73–74, 76, 99, 188n58; geometric abstraction of, 103; grid in, 156; stacked forms in, 146 Blue Flower (Martin, 1962), 201n44 Blumenschein, Ernest, 27 Bois, Yve-Alain, 104–105, 196n42 Book (Johns), 202n47 Book, The (Martin, 1959), 130, 131, 132, 202n47 Borden, Lizzie, 61, 172n21, 198n72 Bourgeois, Louise, 33, 37, 39, 182n104 Broadway Boogie Woogie (Mondrian), 109, 111 Brooklyn Museum, 59, 187n35 Budd, David, 109 Buddhism, 5, 43–46, 183n114, 183n115, 184n128 Buds (Martin, ca. 1959), 135, 136, 137, 139 Burckhardt, Edith, 117, 158, 192n114 Burning Tree (Martin, 1961), 122, 126, 201n44 Butler, Barbara, 140–41, 205n82, 208n144 Butt, Gavin, 50 Bynner, Witter, 50 Cage, John, 44, 45–46, 121, 149, 154, 184n129 California School of Fine Arts, 34, 66, 100 Calvinism, 5, 184n128 Campbell, Lawrence, 140, 141, 145, 205n90 Canaday, John, 6, 168–69 Cantz, Hatje, 173n24 canvas, exposed, 76, 80, 167, 191n102 Carnegie International, 156, 169, 208n140. See also Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 179n68 Castelli, Leo, 161–62 Castle, Terry, 4

Charlene (Rauschenberg), 150 Chryssa, 150–51, 162, 206n109, 208n139, 210n10 Circus (Mandelman), 63, 63 Coates, Robert, 157–58, 208n144 Coenties Slip, 61, 95, 105, 114, 150, 156; apartness from New York art scene, 133, 202n52; assemblage and, 123; Castelli and artists of, 162; confrontations with other artists in Parsons gallery, 108; history and geography of Coenties Slip, 119, 122; Indiana’s studio in, 141, 143, 164; Martin’s residences, 93, 122, 132, 167, 202n55; networks of artists and, 119, 120–21; practical difficulties of life, 120; “queer social world” of, 93; Tawney’s studio in, 152 Coke, Van Deren, 19 Collection (Rauschenberg), 150 Columbia University, See Teachers College, at Columbia University Composition 1A (Mondrian), 147 Composition 2 (Mondrian), 147 Conceptual art, 104–105 Constantine, Mildred, 152 constructions, 122–128, 134, 140, 153, 156, 178n63 Contemplation (Martin), 156, 208n139 Cooke, Lynne, 173n28 Cooke, Regina, 70–71 Corbett, Edward, 7, 35, 65–66, 183n111, 187n51, 188n58; in front of La Galeria Escondida, 100; Martin in love with, 188n59; Martin works related to painterly surfaces of, 67, 68–69; New Mexico landscape and, 199n5; white paintings, 68; work exhibited on national scale, 78 Cornell, Joseph, 147 Cotter, Holland, 6, 44 Crane, Cornelius, 45 Cremin, Lawrence A., 17 Crews, Mildred. See Tolbert, Mildred critical reviews: Ashton on solo exhibition at Section Eleven, 46; of Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition (1961), 156–58; Burckhardt in ARTnews, 117, 192n114; Campbell in ARTnews, 141; Coates in the New Yorker, 157–58, 208n144; Edgar in ARTnews, 157– 58; gender bias in, 87–88, 192n114; in New

Mexico newspapers, 27, 28–29, 179n75; Porter in ARTnews, 111; Preston in New York Times, 5–6, 163; Schjeldahl in Village Voice, 6; Weber in Santa Fe New Mexican, 86–87 Crow, Thomas, 55, 144 cruciform structure, in Martin’s paintings, 111, 113, 116 Cry (drawing), The (Martin), 156, 208n139 Cuba, New Mexico, Martin’s compound in, 1, 5, 32, 172n7; critics’ pilgrimage to, 4; heightened significance accorded to, 180n86; map with directions drawn by Martin, 4, 4 cubism, 55, 146 D’Amico, Victor, 16, 175n17 Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) (Martin, ca. 1956), 90, 95–96, 192–93n132, 193n133; announcement of first solo exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery and, 90, 91; geometric composition in, 116–17, 136, 156; L.T. in Section Eleven show as possible alternate version, 96, 109, 110, 195n25; Martin’s assemblages and, 126–27 Dark River, The (Martin), 153 Dark River, The (Tawney), 153 Dasburg, Andrew, 27 Davey, Randall, 179n75 David (Martin, 1958), 111, 116, 117 Davies, Randall, 22 Davis, Douglas, 2–3 Davis, Emma Lou, 87, 194n20 Davis, Stuart, 39, 46, 183n111 DeFeo, Jay, 139, 140 Deines, Sari, 44 de Kooning, Elaine, 21, 51, 191n100 de Kooning, Willem, 21, 75, 98, 133, 178n68 Delehanty, Suzanne, 191n109 Desert, The (Martin), 156 Desert Rain (Martin, 1957), 102–103, 102, 111, 116, 196n36 De Stijl, 140–41, 162 Dewey, John, 16, 18, 175n17 Diebenkorn, Richard, 22–23, 32, 66, 178n60, 187n51, 189n77; abstract expressionism and, 73; Albuquerque paintings of, 75; in California, 35, 75; Miller 2, 75, 76; work exhibited on national scale, 78

Index

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Dominoes (Martin, 1960), 141, 142, 144, 145–46, 205n94 Douglass, Ralph, 179n75 Dream of Night Sailing (Martin, 1954), 59, 60, 72–73, 76, 80, 188n58 Drift of Summer (Martin, 1957), 97, 98, 116, 117, 126, 202n52; similarity to Dancer No. 1 (L.T.), 96; yellows in, 137 Dwan, Virginia, 164–65, 210n20 Earth (Martin, 1959), 134, 135, 136, 137 Earth II (Martin, 1959), 134, 136, 136, 137, 146 Eastern Oregon College, 51, 52 Eauclaire, Sally, 8 Edgar, Natalie, 152, 157–58, 159, 163 Egg Beater series (Davis), 39, 182n105 Egg Beater V (Davis), 41, 182n105 Egri, Ted, 71, 72, 88–89 Eisler, Benita, 5, 9, 18, 185n13, 194n22 El Crepusculo (newspaper), 48, 49, 58, 70, 77–78, 79, 88 Elkon, Dorothea McKenna, 171n1 Elkon, Robert, 162, 171n1, 198n72 Ellis, Bob, 187n38 Ely, Wolcott, 77, 88, 194n20 Emerich, Andre, 109 Emetaz, Eulalia, 75, 100, 189n63 emotion, 10, 14, 111, 146 Epley, Brad, 130 Essays in Buddhism (Suzuki), 43 Evans, Joan, 21, 47, 49, 177n49 Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (Martin, ca. 1953), 54, 56–57, 64, 80, 84–85, 186–87n33; Martin’s return to painting and, 53; quatrefoil abstract shape in, 86; surrealism and, 52, 54–55 Falkenstein, Claire, 35 Father and Son (Martin, lost work, n.d.), 84, 191n109 Feldman, Morton, 44 Fer, Briony, 196n42 Field, The (Martin, 1957), 109, 116, 117, 198n64 Fifty Drawings: Recent Acquisitions (Museum of Modern Art exhibition, 1961), 155 figuration, 52, 64, 168 Figuration (Two Pronged) (Gottlieb), 59–60 Flag (Johns), 148, 197n60

23 4   •   I n d e x

Flavin, Dan, 165, 166 Flesh Eaters, The (Baziotes), 41 Floating Shapes (Tawney), 152 formalism, 144 found objects, 122, 145, 152, 153, 178n63, 201n34 framing/boundaries, 72, 76, 165, 190n84 Frankenthaler, Helen, 139 Fred Harvey Company, Indian Department of, 21, 177n50 French & Company, 108 From the Margins: Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis (Jewish Museum exhibition, 2014), 181n91 La Galeria de los Artesanos, 191n111 La Galeria Escondida (Taos), 66, 69, 75, 100, 188–89n63 Galisteo, New Mexico, 32 Garden, The (Martin, 1958), 122, 124, 125, 126, 201n41 gay artists, 49–51 gender, 50, 87, 108, 117, 192n114 Geometric Abstraction in America exhibition (Whitney Museum exhibition, 1962), 162, 163–64, 210n10 geometric compositions, 5, 95, 103, 136, 188n58, 204n72, 204n79; gridded, 74; Martin’s move toward, 71, 89, 96; of Reinhardt, 101; Rothko’s influence and, 34, 111; semiabstract Taos paintings and, 98 German Expressionism, 29 Getlein, Frank, 197n49 Giacometti, Alberto, 33, 37, 182n102 Giacometti: Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings from 1956 to 1958 (Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1958), 39 G.I. Bill, 22, 23, 28, 32, 178n58, 181n89 Gibson, Ann, 50, 185n13 Glimcher, Arnold, 1, 3, 172n7, 173nn24–25 Godwin, Judith, 109 gold leaf, 9, 80, 83, 141, 167, 191n102 Goldman, Herb, 178n60 Goossen, E. C., 140 Gordon, John, 162–63, 164 Gorky, Arshile, 18, 42, 178n68, 183n111; in Geometric Abstraction in America exhibition, 162, 210n10; Miró and, 55

Gottlieb, Adolph, 18, 59–60, 74, 79, 109, 186n27, 191n100 Gray Numbers (Johns), 147, 148–49, 149 Great Depression, 16, 19 Green, Samuel Adams, 171n1 Greenberg, Clement, 93 Greystone II (Martin, 1961), 191n102 grid paintings, 5–6, 7, 130, 146–47, 163; art historical legacy of the grid, 208n129; in Betty Parsons Gallery exhibition (1961), 156; carefully considered aesthetic choices and, 167–68; duration and light in, 105; experience of viewing, 10–11; in history of Martin’s oeuvre, 146; Johns and, 147–49, 149; Newman’s influence on, 108; nonobjective mode of abstraction and, 146; Rauschenberg and, 149–150, 150; relation of “lines” to, 136; revisionist narrative about origins of, 167; Tawney’s influence and, 152–54 “Grids” (Krauss), 146–47 Guenne, Jacques, 62 Guggenheim Museum, 1 Guston, Philip, 44, 46, 164, 194n16 Gwynn, Woody, 119–120 Haas, Lez, 23, 78, 178n63 Hall, Leslie, 29, 180n79 Happenings, 109, 200n28 “Happiness Is the Goal” (Bell), 173n21 Harbor No. 1 (Martin), 117 Hartley, Marsden, 19 Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico [Harwood Foundation] (Taos), 27, 54, 61, 71, 79, 179nn71–72 Haskell, Barbara, 8, 89–90, 126–27, 144, 180n86, 194n22, 206n112 Heather (Martin, 1958), 109, 110, 112, 117, 198n65 Hendrick, Wally, 139 Hess, Thomas, 101 Hewett, Edgar L., 58 Hilles, Susan, 94 Hofmann, Hans, 109, 178n63 Homage to Greece (Martin, 1959), 10, 11, 128, 129, 130, 132, 204n72 homophobia, 50 homosexuality, 49–51, 93, 185n13, 188n59

Honey (Martin), 156 Horizon Light (Newman), 196n50 Horsfield, Kate, 208n129 Howard, Bill, 49, 77, 178n60 Humphries, Christmas, 43 Hunter, The (Catalan Landscape) (Miró), 55 Ichiyanagi, Toshi, 44 Indiana, Robert (Robert Clark), 93, 95, 121, 123, 152, 156, 200n29; Agadir (The American Dream), 144, 145; as art teacher to children, 141, 205n88; Coenties Slip studio of, 141, 143, 164; journal entry on Martin’s work, 144, 145, 205n95; on Kelly, 133, 203n59; Source I, 133 inspiration, 8, 13, 59, 71–72, 167, 168 Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), 2, 61 Interview (Rauschenberg), 150 Introduction to Zen Buddhism, An (Suzuki), 43 Islands, The (Martin, ca. 1961), 156, 157, 163–64 Jackson, Martha, 201n39 Janis, Sidney, 55, 100, 109, 121 Jarvaise, James, 139, 140 Jewish Museum, 105, 201n39 Johns, Jasper, 51, 94, 139, 194n18, 200n20; assemblages and, 122–23; Book, 202n47; Castelli and, 161; Flag, 148, 197n60; Gray Numbers, 147, 148–49, 149; Newspaper, 150; in Sixteen Americans exhibition, 139, 140; Target with Four Faces, 109, 121; Target with Plaster Casts, 124, 201n39; White Flag, 148; White Numbers, 149; works in Museum of Modern Art, 155 Johnson, Philip, 197n60 Johnson, Spud, 58, 85 Johnston, Jill, 3, 5, 171n1 Jonson, Raymond, 29, 88, 89 Joseph, Branden, 149 Judd, Donald, 158, 163, 165, 166, 208n143 Jung, C. G., 43 Kali (Martin, 1958), 122, 124, 126, 127–28, 129, 146, 153 Kane, Mildred, 52–53, 186n23, 194n20 Kaprow, Allan, 109, 121–22, 200n28 Katz, Jonathan, 93

Index

   •   23 5

Kelly, Ellsworth, 93, 95, 111, 117, 122–23, 134; in Coenties Slip, 132–33, 169; in Geometric Abstraction in America exhibition, 162, 210n10; Martin’s friendship with, 132–34; Pony, 133; in Sixteen Americans exhibition, 139, 140 Keys (drawing) (Martin), 156 Kirtland Army Air Field (Albuquerque), 177n50 Kleeblatt, Norman, 181n91 Klein, Yves, 164 Kline, Franz, 164 Kootz, Samuel, 109 Kosuth, Joseph, 104 Krauss, Rosalind, 6, 146–47 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 44 Lamp, The (Martin, 1959), 134, 136, 137, 138 Lance, Mary, 72 Landauer, Susan, 8 Landscape (Martin, 1948), 28 landscape, 5, 19, 21, 25–29, 47–48, 51, 92, 118– 119, 141, 173n28, 176n40, 184n130, 199n5 Landsman, Stanley, 13–14, 18, 22, 30, 32, 169 Langley, Allison, 34, 181n97 Larsen, Jack Lenor, 152 Last Ladder (Andre), 158 Lavatelli, Mark, 75 Laws, The (Martin, 1958), 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 146, 153; Andre’s Last Ladder compared with, 158; concrete three-dimensionality of, 156 Leaves (Martin, 1966), 165, 166 “Legacy of Jackson Pollock, The” (Kaprow), 121 Lenore Tawney in Her Spring Street Studio (Price, photograph), 127, 129 Leo Castelli Gallery, 109, 148–49, 202n47 lesbianism, 4, 49–51, 93 Leslie, Alfred, 139 Lewitin, Landes, 139 LeWitt, Sol, 158, 164, 165, 166, 210n20 Lieberman, William, 155, 208n137 “Limit of Almost, The” (Bois), 105 line, Martin’s use of, 34, 37, 204n72; calligraphic lines, 74; circular lines, 136; dotted lines, 79; graphite lines, 69, 83, 188n62; intersecting lines, 108; thicknesses of, 69 Linville, Kasha, 188n62, 205n91 Lippard, Lucy, 98, 101, 103–104, 195n26

23 6   •   I n d e x

Little Sister (Martin, 1962), 201n44 Lobel, Michael, 120, 121, 122 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 21 Love (Indiana), 121 L.T. (Martin). See Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 26 Lytle, Richard, 139 Mallary, Robert, 139 Mancusi-Ungaro, Carol, 123–24 Mandelman, Beatrice, 7, 20, 23, 25, 65, 178n68; on bartering practiced by artists, 67–68; Martin paintings painted over by, 63–64, 63; movement between Taos and New York, 119; work exhibited on national scale, 78 Mandelman-Ribak house, 65, 167 Manual of Zen Buddhism (Suzuki), 43 Marin, John, 26–27, 47 Martin, Agnes: aesthetic development of, 7, 33–35, 37, 80, 86, 91, 167; artistic process of, 71–72, 159; death of, 6; decision to stop painting, 1, 5; destruction of paintings, 1, 29, 171n1; early life and education, 15–16, 51, 174n5, 175nn7–8; earnings from sale of artworks, 161, 202n52, 203n67, 209n3; on feeling versus intellect in art, 181n94; legend of isolation and solitude, 4, 5, 32, 211n30; life-views explored by, 46, 184n128; mental health of, 8, 173n25, 183n117; myths surrounding, 2–3, 11, 172n7; Native American culture as interest of, 57–60, 186n31; networks of artists and, 119; Newman’s friendship with, 34, 105–7, 196n45; Newsweek profile on (1973), 1, 2, 3, 5; portraits by, 29–30, 30–31; resistance to traditional periodization of art, 11, 169; retrospectives, 2, 6, 62, 173nn24–25; sexuality of, 8, 50–51, 173n25, 186n23, 188n59, 206n109; shift in critical reception of, 162–63; in 10 exhibition (1966), 164–67, 211n28; at University of New Mexico, 21–23, 27–30, 32; writings and lectures of, 8, 173n24; Wurlitzer Foundation and, 78–79, 80, 88, 169. See also Betty Parsons Gallery; Coenties Slip; Teachers College Martin, Agnes, photographs of, 2, 15; with Glimcher, 3; with Kelly, 134; in Ledoux Street (Taos) studio, 57, 58, 80–84, 81–83

Martin, Agnes, works of: American (1958), 112, 116, 117, 198n72; Arrow, 156; Autumn Watch (1954), 69, 70, 74–77, 80, 99, 146, 188n58; Beach (ca. 1954), 56–57, 56, 74, 80, 187n33; Beach (ca. 1957), 98–102, 99, 111, 116; Black & White (1958), 116; Black Triangle, 89, 197n49; Bluebird, The (1954), 59, 59, 71, 73–74, 76, 99, 103, 146, 156, 188n58; Blue Flower (1962), 201n44; The Book (1959), 130, 131, 132, 202n47; Buds (ca. 1959), 135, 136, 137, 139; Burning Tree (1961), 122, 126, 201n44; Contemplation, 156, 208n139; The Cry, 156; The Cry (drawing), 156, 208n139; Dancer No. 1 (L.T.) (ca. 1956), 90, 90, 91, 95–96, 109, 110, 116–17, 1267, 136, 156, 192–93n132, 193n133, 195n15; David (1958), 111, 116, 117; The Desert, 156; Desert Rain (1957), 102–103, 102, 111, 116, 196n36; Dominoes (1960), 141, 142, 144, 145–46, 205n94; Dream of Night Sailing (1954), 59, 60, 72–73, 76, 80, 188n58; Drift of Summer (1957), 96, 97, 98, 116, 117, 126, 137, 202n52; Earth (1959), 134, 135, 136, 137; Earth II (1959), 134, 136, 136, 137, 146; Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (ca. 1953), 52–57, 54, 64, 80, 84–85, 86, 186–87n33; Father and Son (lost work, n.d.), 84, 191n109; The Field (1957), 109, 116, 117, 198n64; The Garden (1958), 122, 124, 125, 126, 201n41; Greystone II (1961), 191n102; Harbor No. 1, 117; Heather (1958), 109, 110, 112, 117, 198n65; Homage to Greece (1959), 10, 11, 128, 129, 130, 132, 204n72; Honey, 156; The Islands (ca. 1961), 156, 157, 163–64; Kali (1958), 122, 124, 126, 127–28, 129, 146, 153; Keys (drawing), 156; The Lamp (1959), 136, 137, 138; Landscape (1948), 28; The Laws (1958), 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 146, 153, 156, 158; Leaves (1966), 165, 166; Little Sister (1962), 201n44; lost works (dates unknown), 37, 37, 64, 65; MidWinter (1954–1955), 64, 66, 71, 74–75, 79, 82, 87, 156, 188n58; Milk River (1963), 168, 169; Monument to Mountains (1954), 89, 109, 117; New Mexico Mountain Landscape, Taos (ca. 1947), 27; Night and Day (1958), 87, 187n33; Night Harbor (1960), 127, 128, 136, 137; Night Sea (1963), 9–10, 9; Nude

(1947), 31, 180n79; Number 5, 156; Number 6, 156; Pacific, 109; Personages (1952), 37, 38, 182n103; Portrait of Daphne Vaughn (ca. 1947), 30, 180n79; Prospect (1958), 135; Rain (1958), 116; Rain (ca. 1958–1959), 135; Reflection (1959), 134, 136, 137, 137, 146; Saturday Night (1948), 28; Self-Portrait (n.d.), 31; Singing, 156; The Spring (1958), 112–13, 112, 115, 117, 137; Study for Islands, 156, 208n139; Study for Rain (1958), 111, 117; This Rain (1958), 111, 112, 117; Tree, 156; The Tree (1964), 121, 146, 148; Unbeckoning Grass (1958), 111, 112, 117, 135–36; Untitled (1946), 25; Untitled (1948), 23, 24; Untitled (1951–1952), 74, 190n84; Untitled (1952, drawing), 64; Untitled (1952, monoprint), 44–45; Untitled (1952, watercolor and ink), 34, 35; Untitled (1957), 106–107, 107, 108, 111, 197nn49–50; Untitled (1965), 147; Untitled (ca. 1949), 51–52, 53; Untitled (ca. 1952–1954), 62, 64–65, 66–67, 69, 80; Untitled (ca. 1952, lithograph [Fig. 18]), 35, 36; Untitled (ca. 1952, lithograph [Fig. 23]), 39, 40; Untitled (ca. 1952, silkscreen), 41, 42; Untitled (ca. 1953), 67, 67, 68, 69, 73, 107, 156, 188n55, 188n58; Untitled (ca. 1954), 56, 57, 66–67, 74, 76, 79–80, 84, 187n38, 191n101; Untitled (ca. 1955 [Fig. 44]), 76, 77, 82, 84; Untitled (ca. 1955 [Fig. 48]), 85–86, 85, 86; Untitled (n.d. [Fig. 53]), 95, 96; Untitled (n.d. [Fig. 65]), 113, 114; Untitled [Landscape South of Santa Fe, NM] (1947), 26; View from the Porch (n.d.), 51, 52; The Wall #2 (1962), 201n44; Water (1958), 122, 123, 126–27, 146; Water Sign (1957), 96, 98, 117; The Wave (1963), 205n90; Wheat (1957), 116, 126, 135, 146, 208n140; White Flower (1960), 146, 147, 156, 157, 163; White Study (1958), 111, 112, 117; Window (1957), 111, 118, 127, 146; The Word, 135; Words, 156, 208n137 Matisse, Henri, 62–63 McChesney, Mary Fuller, 8, 72, 187n51, 188n59 McChesney, Robert, 66 Mead, Roderick, 84 Melville, Herman, 119 mental illness, 8, 183n117 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 48, 49

Index

   •   23 7

Mid-Winter (Martin, 1954–1955), 64, 66, 71, 74–75, 79, 82, 188n58; all-over compositions and borders in, 156; contiguous forms in, 87 Miles, Jeanne, 50 Milk River (Martin, 1963), 168, 169 Miller, Dorothy, 139, 140, 148 Miller 2 (Diebenkorn), 75, 76 minimalism, 6, 7, 14, 104–105, 108, 127, 169; critical lineage pointing to advent of, 162; Dwan’s 10 exhibition and, 165; Martin’s art identified with in critical discourse, 159, 164, 166–67; repetition, seriality, and reduced formats of, 158; return to figuration and, 168; Stella and, 140, 166 Miró, Joan, 18, 33, 42, 182–83n109; Diebenkorn’s study of, 75; The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), 55; influence on Martin, 55; retrospective at Museum of Modern Art, 54, 186n27 Mitchell, Joan, 139, 164 modernism, 11 Mondrian, Piet, 75, 109, 111, 118, 147 Monument to Mountains (Martin, 1954), 89, 109, 117 Morris, Frances, 152, 172n19, 186n25 Morris, Robert, 104, 164, 165, 166 Motherwell, Robert, 42 Munro, Eleanor, 152 Murray, Robert, 106, 196n46 Museum of Modern Art (Albuquerque), 77, 79, 190nn86–87 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 1, 16, 34, 37, 42, 53–54; Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America (1951), 162; Fifty Drawings: Recent Acquisitions (1961), 155; Indiana’s Love print on Christmas card, 121; Sixteen Americans exhibition (1959–1960), 139–140 Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 173n23 My Country Tis of Thee exhibition (1962), 164 Native Americans, 21, 57–58, 60, 177n50, 186n31 Nativity in Nature (Tawney), 153, 155, 207n125 nature, 8, 140, 173n28, 184n30, 204–5n79 Near Taos, No. 6, New Mexico (Marin, 1930),

New Forms—New Media exhibition (Jackson), 201n39 Newman, Annalee, 106, 196n45 Newman, Barnett, 33, 39, 43, 109; in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America exhibition, 162; as friend and mentor to Martin, 34, 105–7, 115, 196n45; Horizon Light, 196n50; Martin’s study of, 122, 141; Onement series, 106; Parsons and, 93, 94, 193–94n16; surrealism and, 55; Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 197n49; works in Museum of Modern Art, 155; “zips” of, 106, 107, 108, 111 New Mexico, 5, 118, 178n64; California artists in, 35; Chaco Canyon, 57–58; commercialization of, 21; desert landscapes of, 5, 13, 14; flow of information and ideas with New York, 7; Martin’s connection to desert of, 46, 184n130; Martin’s return to (1952), 48; networks of artists in, 119 New Mexico Mountain Landscape, Taos (Martin, ca. 1947), 27 Newspaper (Johns), 150 Newspaper Page, Sock Advertisement (Chryssa), 151, 151 New York City, 19, 21, 32–33, 42, 69, 92, 164; art world of, 4, 5; Cedar Tavern, 14, 33, 174n4; dealers from, 6, 172n7; flow of information and ideas with New Mexico, 7; gay artists in, 51; mythology of American West in, 118; networks of artists in, 119; Zen Buddhist influence among artists in, 44–45. See also Coenties Slip; Museum of Modern Art (New York); Teachers College, at Columbia University Nicholas Wilder Gallery, 172n8 Night and Day (Martin, 1958), 87, 187n33 Night Harbor (Martin, 1960), 127, 128, 136, 137 Nightingale Gallery, 51 Night Sea (Martin, 1963), 9–10, 9 “Ninety-Five Artists Can’t Be Wrong” (El Crepusculo article), 48 No. 7/No. 11 (Untitled) (Rothko), 113 No. 9 (Rothko, 1948), 34 non-objective painting, 7, 8, 92, 117, 173n23, 199n3 Nouveaux Contes de Fées (Poison Box) (Cornell),

26, 28 Nevelson, Louise, 139, 140, 204n77

147 Nude (Martin, 1947), 31, 180n79

23 8   •   I n d e x

Nukariya, Kaiten, 43 Number 1 (Reinhardt), 101 Number 1, 1951 (Pollock), 42 Number 5 (Martin), 156 Number 6 (Martin), 156 Number 17 (Reinhardt), 210n10 Odalisk (Rauschenberg), 150 O’Hara, Frederick, 23 Okada, Kenzo, 90, 208n140 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 4, 7, 85, 118 Oldenburg, Claes, 164 Oliver, Marcia, 174n4 Onement I (Newman), 106 Onement IV (Newman), 106 Ono, Yoko, 44 Organization (Gorky), 210n10 Owh! Sao Pao (Davis), 39, 42 Pacific (Martin), 109 Pagan Void (Newman), 106 Pajarito Plateau and Its Ancient People, The (Hewett), 58 Park, David, 35 Parsons, Betty, 50–51, 70, 72, 80, 81, 88, 133, 156, 194n18; advances paid to Martin, 5, 134; discovery of new artists, 93–94; Martin living in studio of, 92–93; Martin’s career in New York and, 105–106; Martin’s frustration with, 161; paintings bought from Martin by, 89; public relations strategy of, 95; Reinhardt’s work shown by, 103, 196n36; sexuality of, 185n13 Peeke, Cory, 51 Peridot Gallery, 37 Personages (Martin, 1952), 37, 38, 182n103 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 37 Phillips, Bert, 19, 20, 47 Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.), 23, 42 Picasso, Pablo, 33, 35, 37, 134, 182n102 Picasso: His Graphic Work (Museum of Modern Art exhibition, 1952), 35, 37 Pictograph (Gottlieb), 61 Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb, The (Brooklyn Museum exhibition, 1995), 187n35 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, 156. See also Carnegie International

Pollock, Jackson, 14, 21, 39, 174n3, 178n68, 183n111; all-over canvases of, 98; Coenties Slip artists and legacy of, 132–33, 202n57; drip paintings, 33; fiberboard as material used by, 185n22; Miró’s influence on, 42; Number 1, 1951, 42; Parsons and, 93, 94; shown at Betty Parsons Gallery, 70; surrealism and, 55; works in Museum of Modern Art, 155 Pony (Kelly), 133 pop art, 7, 144–46, 151, 168 Porter, Aline, 85 Porter, Fairfield, 111 Portrait of Daphne Vaughn (Martin, ca. 1947), 30, 180n79 post-impressionism, 29 Preston, Stuart, 5–6, 140, 163 Prince, A.M., 116 Princenthal, Nancy, 44, 183n117, 211n30 Prospect (Martin, 1958), 135 Pullens, Barbara, 29 Rain (Martin, 1958), 116 Rain (Martin, ca. 1958–1959), 135 Rauschenberg, Robert, 51, 108, 109, 139, 151, 200n20; assemblages and, 122–23; Bed, 121; Castelli and, 161; Charlene, 150; Collection, 150; Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery and, 164; Interview, 150; Odalisk, 150; Red Interior, 150; Untitled (1957), 149; Untitled (ca. 1954), 149–150 Read, Sir Herbert, 54 Red Interior (Rauschenberg), 150 Reflection (Martin, 1959), 134, 136, 137, 137, 146 Reinhardt, Ad, 7, 44, 100, 108, 144, 195n26; Albers filtered through, 162; death of, 1; duration and light in, 105, 196n42; in Dwan’s galleries, 164, 165; in front of La Galeria Escondida, 100; in Geometric Abstraction in America exhibition, 162, 210n10; Martin’s investigations of, 101–105, 102–104, 108, 109, 113, 115, 122, 196n42; in Taos, 100–101; ultimate paintings of, 7 Religion of the Samurai (Nukariya), 43 Restany, Pierre, 150–51 Ribak, Louis, 23, 25, 65, 144, 178n68; movement between Taos and New York, 119; work exhibited on national scale, 78

Index

   •   23 9

Ribak Gallery (Taos), 84 Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff, 64 Rivers, Larry, 139 Robert Elkon Gallery, 51, 172n8 Roberts, Kathryn, 172n9 Rogoway, Alfred, 77, 88 Rose, Barbara, 104, 195n26 Rosenquist, James, 93, 95, 120, 132 Rothko, Mark, 33, 34–35, 37, 39, 46, 109, 181n97, 198n71; in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America exhibition, 162; Avery as influence on, 79, 191n100; Betty Parsons Gallery and, 196n50; at California School of Fine Arts, 66; Martin’s study of, 112–14, 115, 122, 141, 144; Martin’s use of geometric forms and, 34, 111; No. 7/ No. 11 (Untitled), 113; Parsons and, 94; Seagram paintings, 113; sensitivity to “decorative” label, 199n3; shown at Betty Parsons Gallery, 70; Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, 55, 55; spaces between floating rectangles of, 80; White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), 113; works in Museum of Modern Art, 155 Rouault, Georges, 29 Rudnick, Lois, 50 Ruffini, Elise, 17 Ruins Gallery, in Ranchos de Taos, 49, 77 Ruscha, Ed, 21 Russell, Dean, 18 Ruthling, Ford, 50 Ryan, Anne, 153 Ryan, Sean, 181n88 Ryman, Robert, 147 Samuel Kootz Gallery (New York), 60 Sandler, Irving, 92, 166 San Francisco, 66, 69 Santa Fe, 19, 50, 118 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 44 Saturday Night (Martin, 1948), 28 Sauerwein, Henry, 78, 80 Schiff, Karen, 173n25 Schjeldahl, Peter, 6, 93 Schmindt, Julius, 139 School and Society, The (Dewey), 16

Second World War, 16–17, 20, 32, 44, 176n29 Section Eleven, Betty Parsons, 46, 47, 95, 155, 169, 172n8; as brainchild of Hilles, 94; “Christmas Show” (1958), 109, 198n62; Martin’s first group exhibition at (1958), 96, 109, 110, 113; Martin’s first solo show at (1958), 115, 116–19; Martin’s second solo show at (1959–1960), 134–141, 161 Self-Portrait (Martin, n.d.), 31 seriality, 98, 158, 163–164 Shannon, David A., 17 Shapiro, Meyer, 179n68 Shiff, Richard, 106 Shivonen, Oli, 89, 208n141, 210n10 silkscreen, 17–18, 39, 41, 176n29, 182n106, 190n84 Simon, Joan, 8, 15, 71–72, 152 Singing (Martin), 156 Siskind, Aaron, 179n68 Sixteen Americans exhibition (Museum of Modern Art exhibition, 1959–1960), 139–140 Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (Rothko), 55, 55 Smith, Hassel, 75 Smithson, Robert, 104, 164, 165 Song of the Aspen (Phillips), 19, 20 Source I (Indiana), 133, 133 spirituality, 21, 111, 153, 207n125; geometry as vehicle for, 194; lighting for Rothko paintings and, 199n3; polymorphous, 5 Spohn, Clay, 7, 65–66, 100, 144, 169, 187n51; abstract expressionism and, 73; work exhibited on national scale, 78; Yellow Shapes, 89 Spring, The (Martin, 1958), 112–13, 112, 115, 117, 137 Stables Gallery, 67, 68, 89, 139 Stamos, Theodore, 94, 179n68 Stankiewicz, Richard, 139–140 Stein, Diana, 84, 192n111 Stein, Joe, 84 Steinberg, Leo, 150 Steiner, Mike, 165 Stella, Frank, 104, 109, 140, 158, 166 Stiles, George, 118, 205n82 Still, Clyfford, 35, 66, 93, 94

School of New York: Some Younger Artists (Stables Gallery exhibition, 1959–1960), 139

Still Life with Saw (Davis), 42 Stone, Allan, 193n16

2 4 0   •   I n d e x

Strand, Paul, 26 Stroh, Earl, 23, 27, 29, 178n67, 189n63, 190n91 Study for Islands (Martin), 156, 208n139 Study for Rain (Martin, 1958), 111, 117 surrealism, 33, 35, 52; abstract expressionists’ reception of, 75; Bourgeois and, 39; Martin’s interest in, 54–56, 64, 74, 76; Miró and, 42; panel at Harwood Museum of Art on, 54; Picasso and, 37 Suzuki, D. T., 43–46 Swanson, V. L., 116 Sweet, Frederick A., 84 Symmetric Variance (Shivonen), 210n10 Taos, 5, 6, 20, 167, 169; artistic environment of, 14, 48–49; artists from New York in, 23, 25, 178n68; cosmopolitan networks in, 114; history as artists’ colony, 19; Ledoux Street studio in, 30, 57, 58, 77, 80–84, 81–83; lesbian culture in, 93; Martin’s return to (1950s), 25; Ribak Gallery, 84; West Coast art scene and, 35 “Taos Art Colony Vigorous at Fifty” (El Crepusculo article), 49 Taos Art School, 23, 27 Taoseno and the Taos Review (newspaper), review in, 27 “Taos Moderns” exhibition (Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico), 77, 88–89, 164, 192n131 Target with Four Faces (Johns), 109, 121 Target with Plaster Casts (Johns), 124, 201n39 Tatschl, John, 23, 178n63 Tawney, Lenore, 93, 95, 154, 194n20, 198n64, 204n73; Martin paintings bought by, 116, 127; mutuality of influence with Martin, 152, 206n112; Nativity in Nature, 153, 155, 207n125; in Spring Street studio, 127–28, 129; 20½, 153 Teachers College, at Columbia University, 14, 16–18, 21, 60, 173n23, 181n88; Department of Fine Arts, 78; end of G.I. Bill and, 32–33; first period of study at, 42; graduation with master’s degree, 48; influence of abstract expressionism at, 33–34; Martin’s engagement with abstract expressionism and, 115; Martin’s first period of study at, 183n112; Martin’s return to (1954), 32–33, 35,

69–70, 188n58; printmaking techniques at, 52; “Seminar in Social Living” (1954), 45, 64; tuition at, 33, 181n90 teaching, 15–18, 28–30, 32, 51, 70, 77, 141, 175n8, 178n63, 189n78 10 exhibition (1966), 164–67, 165, 211n28 Thiebaud, Wayne, 194n16 This Rain (Martin, 1958), 111, 112, 117 Tobin, Richard, 172n21 Tolbert, Mildred, 54, 57, 67, 179n68, 182n104; photos of Martin in her studio, 80–84, 81–83; Untitled (ca. 1953), 89 Townsend, May Evelyn, 17 Traugott, Joseph, 71 Tree (Martin), 156 Tree, The (Martin, 1964), 121, 146, 148 Tremaine, Emily Hall, 171n1 Trillin, Calvin, 49–50 20½ (Tawney), 153 Twentysix Gasoline Stations (Ruscha), 21 Unbeckoning Grass (Martin, 1958), 111, 112, 117, 135–36 University of New Mexico, 21–23, 25, 84, 178n63; Annual Exhibition of Student Work, 23; Annual Faculty Exhibition, 28; Art Museum, 67, 182n106; returning veterans on G.I. Bill at, 22, 178n58; Summer Field School of Art, 23, 48 Untitled (Diebenkorn, 1951), 69 Untitled (Martin, 1946), 25 Untitled (Martin, 1948), 23, 24 Untitled (Martin, 1951–1952), 74, 190n84 Untitled (Martin, 1952, drawing), 64 Untitled (Martin, 1952, monoprint), 44–45 Untitled (Martin, 1952, watercolor and ink), 34, 35 Untitled (Martin, 1957), 106–107, 107, 108, 111, 197nn49–50 Untitled (Martin, 1965), 147 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1949), 51–52, 53 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1952–1954), 62, 64–65, 66–67, 69, 80 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1952, lithograph [Fig. 18]), 35, 36 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1952, lithograph [Fig. 23]), 39, 40 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1952, silkscreen), 41, 42

Index

   •   2 41

Untitled (Martin, ca. 1953), 67, 67, 73, 107, 156, 188n55; details from, 68; line used in, 69, 188n58; textures and viscosities of paint in, 68, 69 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1954), 57, 74, 76, 79–80, 84, 187n38; Corbett’s paintings in relation to, 66–67; debate over date of, 191n101; as fully abstract painting, 56 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1955 [Fig. 44]), 76, 77, 82, 84 Untitled (Martin, ca. 1955 [Fig. 48]), 85–86, 85, 86 Untitled (Martin, n.d. [Fig. 53]), 95, 96 Untitled (Martin, n.d. [Fig. 65]), 113, 114 Untitled (Morris, 1966), 165 Untitled (Rauschenberg, 1957), 149, 150 Untitled (Rauschenberg, ca. 1954), 149–150 Untitled (Rothko, 1948), 34 Untitled (Tolbert, ca. 1953), 89 Untitled [Landscape South of Santa Fe, NM] (Martin, 1947), 26 Urban, Albert, 140 Vancouver, 15, 44, 51, 119, 174n3 Vaughn, Daphne Sheridan, 29, 30, 32, 180n84 Ventura, Anita, 119 View from the Porch (Martin, n.d.), 51, 52 Vir Heroicus Sublimis (Newman), 196n49 Wagner, Jim, 52–53 Walch, Peter, 63 Wall #2, The (Martin, 1962), 201n44 Ward, Eleanor, 139 Warhol, Andy, 34, 145 Washington State Normal School, See Western Washington College of Education Water (Martin, 1958), 122, 123, 126–27, 146 Waters, Frank, 20–21 Water Sign (Martin, 1957), 96, 98, 117 Watts, Alan, 44, 46 Wave, The (Martin, 1963), 205n90 Weber, Dave, 87–88 Weber, Joanna, 180n86 Weber, John, 164 Weiss, Jeffrey, 201n39 Wells, Cady, 50, 85

2 4 2    •   I n d e x

West, American, mythology of, 3, 19, 118, 141 Western Washington College of Education, 15, 51, 174nn5–6 Wheat (Martin, 1957), 102–103, 103, 116, 126, 135, 146, 208n140 White, Minor, 35 White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) (Rothko), 113 White Flag (Johns), 148 White Flower (Martin, 1960), 146, 147, 156, 157, 163 White Numbers (Johns), 149 White Study (Martin, 1958), 111, 112, 117 Whitney Museum of American Art, 1, 6, 61, 173n24; Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, 100, 101, 168–69; Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Drawings, 37, 39, 42, 182n104, 183n111; Geometric Abstraction in America exhibition (1962), 162, 210n10 Williams, Hope, 94 Wilson, Ann, 93, 130, 159 Wilson, Kristina, 187n38 Wilson, MaLin, 21, 23 Window (Martin, 1957), 102, 104, 111, 118, 126, 146 Witt, David, 62, 89 Witzel, Annie Laurie, 94, 116 Wolfson, Sidney, 109 Word, The (Martin), 135 Words (Martin), 156, 208n137 Wurlitzer, Helene, 78, 88, 153, 169, 190n91 Wurlitzer Foundation, 77–79, 80, 88, 169, 186n25 Wygant, Foster, 33–34 Yellow Drawing #5 (Ryman), 147 Yellow Shapes (Spohn), 89 Young, Arthur, 17, 78 Youngerman, Jack, 93, 94, 108, 123, 132, 140; on importance of nature in Martin’s work, 204–205n79; in Sixteen Americans exhibition, 140 Yunkers, Adja, 7, 22, 71 Zen Buddhism, 5, 43, 44–46