The Serenity of Agnes Martin

    Last weekend, I walked up to the newish Pace Gallery on West 25th Street in Chelsea housed in a big eight-story building that's as large as a museum you'd find in a mid-size American city. On the first floor, I found my destination - an exhibition of paintings by Agnes Martin called "Innocent Love." I motored into the gallery and was stopped in my tracks by how serene and quiet the paintings were. Shockingly, I was completely alone in the galleries. I was stunned by the stillness and moved by the peacefulness of the paintings. It was like being in a church. 

    I was not extremely familiar by the work of Agnes Martin, but my curiosity was piqued by an interesting article on Vogue.com by Grace Edquist. The paintings are very simple - horizontal bands of blue, pink and yellow rendered in a thin imperfect wash, but the effect was powerful, like standing in front of a Rothko, which similarly evokes an emotional response through its plain clouds of color.  

      Because the paintings are simple, they're hard to photograph. Pictures can't really convey their effect or impact. It reminded me of an observation by the fashion historian Caroline Milbanks when she was talking about the simplicity of American style and noted, "It's hard to look at something simple or plain and realize how radical it was at the time." 

 

     Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1912. She studied art and made her way to New York City in 1957 when she lived on the renowned Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan with other young unknowns including Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg who took up residence in abandoned lofts. Later, Martin left New York City for the solitude of New Mexico where she lived and worked until her death in 20024. At the Pace, there is a long video interview with Martin playing in which she explains her work. She notes that her emotions are recorded in the paintings.  "I use the horizontal line to get to meaning," she says. "A lot of painters paint about painting but I paint about meaning. It took me 20 years to paint what I wanted." 

     Martin offers some wisdom: "Worry about your own mistakes and not the mistakes of others," she advises. "Your own will be enough."  

    As for her work, she tries to illustrate the positive, not the negative. "Say, 'What can I do?' and then you wait for inspiration," she says. "Beauty is the mystery of life. Beauty illustrates happiness."