{"id":3354,"date":"2013-03-04T10:01:21","date_gmt":"2013-03-04T10:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=3354"},"modified":"2019-11-21T15:56:13","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T15:56:13","slug":"agnes-martin-under-new-auspices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=3354","title":{"rendered":"Agnes Martin, Under New Auspices"},"content":{"rendered":"\n


From <\/span>Art Journal<\/span><\/em> 71, no. 3 (Fall 2012)<\/span> <\/h4>\n\n\n\"\"\n

Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schr\u00f6der, editors. Agnes Martin<\/em><\/strong>. New York: Dia Art Foundation and New Haven\/London: Yale University Press, 2011. 268 pp., 78 color ills, 27 b\/w. $40<\/p>\n

Finally\u2014a book of criticism about Agnes Martin. No other book of writing about this singular, revered artist has been in print for many years. And though Martin (1912\u20132004) has been an esteemed presence in the art world since at least the early 1960s, there exists no monograph, no biography, no previous collection of criticism. <\/p>\n

Martin and her artwork have long had much to offer to artists; to those engaged with art history, intellectual history, and social culture; and to all curious about the rough business of being human. Agnes Martin<\/em> touches ably on all of these categories of inquiry. Ten essays, written by a variety of commentators in diverse rhetorical styles, will engage any admirer of Martin\u2019s work. They establish art-historical contexts for her painting, investigate her work process and her life, and connect her aesthetic project to social movements and theoretical frameworks. Articles have illustrations beyond the thirty color plates showing Martin\u2019s spare, luminous abstractions of elemental geometries, rendered in finely calibrated palettes and textures. While this volume surveys new directions in scholarship, it also opens the way for further publications that should not be so long in coming.<\/p>\n

Even a brief overview of Martin\u2019s career\u2014she painted from her late twenties until just before her death at the age of ninety-two\u2014suggests that the dearth of critical publications has been bizarre. Since her New York debut at the well-respected Betty Parsons Gallery in 1958 (when the artist was forty-six), Martin\u2019s reputation has remained stellar. The critical acclaim and economic success following her shows in New York <\/p>\n

in the 1960s were affirmed with decades of exhibitions and retrospectives at major museums worldwide. She also earned honors from venerable institutions in North America and Europe, starting in the late 1960s after she had developed her distinctive grid paintings, and including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 1997 Venice Biennale. (These benchmarks of recognition are listed in a chronology in Agnes Martin<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

The timing and provenance of this tastefully designed volume situate it within recent assessments of Martin\u2019s oeuvre. Yale University Press copublished the anthology with the Dia Art Foundation, the institution where Lynne Cooke, one of Agnes Martin\u2019s<\/em> three editors, curated a multipart Martin retrospective from 2004 through 2007. In 2006 Pace Gallery, Martin\u2019s longtime dealer in New York, held an exhibition of early and late works that showed Martin wrestling with forms beyond the grids and bands for which she is renowned. In fall 2011 Pace showed a series of gray paintings from the 1980s that had not been seen for twenty years. A back room featured paintings whose opacity contrasted forcefully with the airier, more familiar canvases in the main space: Martin could extract infinity from density. As I write, Martin\u2019s 1979 suite of glowing paintings The Islands<\/em> is showing in the Singular Visions<\/em> exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The University of New Mexico\u2019s Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, Martin\u2019s final home, is marking her centenary with Agnes Martin: Before the Grid<\/em>, a groundbreaking exhibition of rarely seen early works. In early 2013, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (where chief curator Douglas Dreishpoon is a longtime Martin devotee), is due to show Agnes Martin: The New York\u2013Taos Connection<\/em> (1947\u20131957), organized by the Harwood Museum\u2019s curator, Jina Brenneman. The Harwood, site of a Martin archive and a specially designed, permanent \u201cchapel\u201d housing a set of seven paintings, hosts annual events on the artist\u2019s birthday: this year\u2019s modest, spirited centenary symposium reinforced the anthology\u2019s achievement, dismantling myths and introducing new perspectives. <\/p>\n

Books by and about Martin have been published, but all are rare. An elegant paperback of Martin\u2019s elliptical homilies and lectures, Writings\/Schriften<\/em>, appeared in conjunction with her 1992 retrospective at Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Authors in Agnes Martin quote liberally from these poetic pronouncements on persistent themes such as perfection, humility, inspiration, emotional response, and the artist\u2019s life and mind, all of which unfold from Martin\u2019s homespun mix of classicism, Zen, mysticism, Taoism, and love of nature. Old exhibition catalogues contain critical articles and facsimiles of original manuscripts; the closest kin to the current anthology is an expanded catalogue from another 1992 retrospective, at the Whitney Museum. That volume contained informative, rigorous essays by Anna C. Chave, Barbara Haskell, and Rosalind Krauss. Though only Krauss\u2019s \u201cAgnes Martin: The \/Cloud\/\u201d has been reprinted elsewhere, these essays\u2014and several others\u2014are shadows haunting many authors in Agnes Martin<\/em>.1<\/a><\/sup> A companion volume to this anthology would republish the catalogue essays by Chave, Haskell, and Krauss, along with articles by, at least, Lawrence Alloway, Dore Ashton, Lizzie Borden, Benita Eisler, Briony Fer, Thomas McEvilley, Annette Michelson, and Ann Wilson. Criticism cited less often in the current anthology would also belong: texts by Lynne Cooke, Holland Cotter, Hilton Kramer, Brendan Prendeville, Peter Schjeldahl, and probably others. <\/p>\n

The canonical essay by Krauss is also haunted: it is structured around a short Artforum<\/em> article by Kasha Linville from 1971.2<\/a><\/sup> Linville\u2019s \u201cAgnes Martin: An Appreciation<\/em>,\u201d an ur-text of Martin criticism, should definitely recirculate: over half of the writers in Agnes Martin<\/em> refer to it. Linville writes effusively and precisely about her phenomenological responses to Martin\u2019s paintings. As Rhea Anastas observes in this anthology, Linville\u2019s approach contrasted with other reviewers\u2019 mathematical and \u201cmaterialist description,\u201d and established a trend of impressionistic writings about Martin\u2019s paintings (133\u201334). Linville\u2019s vibrant, direct encounter with artworks is echoed in this volume by Christina Bryan Rosenberger\u2019s technical study of how Martin\u2019s works \u201cachieve maximum visual frisson through her subtle manipulation of materials\u201d (111). The most conscientious reassessment of Linville appears in Anne M. Wagner\u2019s essay: Wagner retraces Linville\u2019s steps, revisits her observations, and tests Krauss\u2019s analyses. Michael Newman performs an analogous reappraisal of Krauss\u2019s influential essay, dissecting each allusion and argument, and thereby revisiting Linville\u2019s work as well. <\/p>\n

Douglas Crimp also writes extensively about Linville: her review was occasioned by the 1971 labor-of-love exhibition he organized at the [School of] Visual Arts Gallery in New York. Crimp, fittingly, is the first essayist in Agnes Martin<\/em>, following Cooke\u2019s solid introductory overview of Martin\u2019s life, works, and art-historical setting. His position is appropriate not only because he embodies the ghosts of Linville and Krauss\u2014he was Krauss\u2019s graduate student in the 1970s\u2014but also because he frames a question that animates many of the essays that follow: what is the emotion that fuels Martin\u2019s abstractions? His essay\u2019s title, \u201cBack to the Turmoil,\u201d recalls Martin\u2019s unwavering claim that she worked, like the classical philosophers, with her \u201cback to the world.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> Crimp is astute in objecting that \u201csurely it is the turmoil away from which Martin turned<\/em> . . . that constitutes the tension so many of us see in her paintings\u201d (68\u201369, emphasis in original). He encourages critics to turn (back) toward whatever disturbances Martin was trying to avoid. <\/p>\n

In taking up this challenge, many of the anthology\u2019s writers bump up against the unremitting recalcitrance that Martin and her allies have maintained about her life: the biggest shadow haunting Agnes Martin<\/em> is the artist herself. The most ambitious attempt to break this silence is Jonathan D. Katz\u2019s essay, \u201cAgnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction.\u201d Katz\u2019s multilayered inquiry probes how Martin\u2019s sexuality played out in her artwork, writing, and life in the wake of McCarthyism\u2019s Lavender Scare. In a footnote, he also hints at the \u201cturmoil\u201d that occasioned Martin\u2019s adult dependence on psychiatric medications. <\/p>\n

The artist Zoe Leonard best explains why Katz\u2019s article is so important. Though she is fatigued with the subject of sexuality, and \u201ckeep[s] resisting talking about [Martin] as female or speculating about whether she was queer,\u201d Leonard realizes that she \u201ccan\u2019t help but wonder what role gender played in Martin\u2019s artmaking,\u201d and concludes, \u201cSomewhere in the work, informing the work, is a biography of a person. A person who lived, as we all do, with the specifics and complications of her own desire . . . a woman, in America, at a specific moment in history\u201d (98). To know Martin\u2019s personal history is to gain a perspective on how to juggle the contingencies of life and art.<\/p>\n

At his best, Katz weaves rich interpretations of Martin\u2019s artworks and writings, using pertinent quotations from Gertrude Stein, Zen, and classical philosophy. He locates the positive spin that Zen places on silence and shows how unspoken homosexuality could thereby figure not as repression but as liberation. He botches a distinction\u2014Buddhism\u2019s canniness about sensory perception is not equivalent to Platonism\u2019s flat-out rejection of the physical world\u2014and this seemingly minor glitch makes some key arguments unconvincing. Nonetheless, the scope of Katz\u2019s vision and the intricacy of the research he has done to inform it are courageous and laudable.<\/p>\n

Katz\u2019s treatment of Martin\u2019s sexuality, unfortunately, is not consistent with the complexity of his interpretation of her art. After remarking that \u201cthe New York art world has long recognized Martin as a lesbian\u201d (173), he insists that his approach \u201cis not an argument about the nature of Martin\u2019s sexual identity, for that is a teleological claim that presumes the existence of the very category it seeks to interrogate\u2014more precisely, it presumes that Martin is a lesbian without first asking how she understood herself\u201d (176). Yet the essay\u2019s language urges the reader to exactly these categorical presumptions: \u201cfor closeted homosexuals such as Martin\u201d (178), \u201cas a closeted lesbian\u201d (184), \u201cfor a largely closeted lesbian\u201d (190). While Martin did indeed have romantic relationships with women, she never spoke of herself publicly as a lesbian.4<\/a><\/sup> Do her actions require us to assign her the term \u201ccloseted lesbian\u201d? By what terminologies and concepts did she understand herself? This is an especially interesting question in light of testimony that appears in Crimp\u2019s essay, when he quotes from the critic Jill Johnston\u2019s account of her visit with Martin, in which Martin declares in no uncertain terms that she is \u201cnot a woman\u201d (71). If Martin was in any \u201ccloset,\u201d it was built according to her own paradigm: Katz must go beyond his own designs.5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Katz does not consider the significance of information that complicates a conventionally monolithic lesbianism. (He also seems reluctant to admit that women who inhabit many sexual identity categories can appreciate and quote from Stein\u2019s lesbian love poetry, or paint female nudes.) Though he reports that Mary Fuller McChesney remembers Martin as having \u201cmore than a whiff of calculation\u201d in her self-presentation, he does not analyze the inscrutability of that strategy. In the longer conversation that Katz quotes, Fuller McChesney recalls that Martin \u201cwas in love with Ed [Corbett], but she was kind of gay I think. I never knew where she was coming from or\u2014She was very ambivalent on lots of levels\u201d (180).6<\/a><\/sup> How does this characterization from the early 1950s figure into Martin\u2019s overall self-understanding during the period just following (which is Katz\u2019s focus), if indeed it reflects her concept of self at all? (And given Judith Butler\u2019s ideas about gender and sexuality as performance, how does it even matter whether Martin would concur with this perception, however partial, of her identity?)<\/p>\n

Expedient oversimplifications function like new mythologies, and should not replace the existing mythologies or silences about Martin. The artist herself insisted on leaving aside her personal history, demanding that public attention be focused instead on her artwork. What was her logic? Does it still pertain, or should we disprove it? Can we effectively weave detailed and probing biographical information into sustainable interpretations of artworks? Overall, Katz\u2019s article answers this question with a provisional yes. Still, if he were more careful in his treatment of Martin\u2019s sexuality\u2014facing squarely the complexities inherent in what is known about Martin\u2019s life and acknowledging what is unknown (and perhaps unknowable)\u2014his interpretations of her work in this context would be more reliable and useful for art history. As it is, his dogmatism threatens to overwhelm, and undermine, better parts of his essay.<\/p>\n

A potential site for mixing psychosexual biography with art criticism is suggested by a preoccupation of several essays: the physical qualities of Martin\u2019s paintings. How does Martin achieve such an extraordinary blend of the material and the immaterial? Some say that her handling of various mediums yields a mute, purely physical experience: Newman refers to Paul de Man\u2019s \u201cconception of radical, indifferent materiality\u201d (209). Katz is also useful here. Might such a materiality be informed by Martin\u2019s sense of her body\u2014by a disjuncture between mind and body, even by a sense of dismemberment? How does this relate to the \u201cpleasure\u201d that Leonard and Newman see in her works (95, 222)? Such lines of inquiry could delve into Martin\u2019s psychiatric history as well as into her sexuality, while invigorating formalist observation, plus inspiring new understandings of Martin\u2019s art and the materiality of painting. <\/p>\n

The anthology addresses many of Martin\u2019s seldom-seen bodies of work. Four articles deal with her only surviving film, Gabriel<\/em>, and many stills from that project are reproduced in Leonard\u2019s essay.7<\/a><\/sup> Suzanne Hudson builds her article around an anomalous group of prints, and Hudson and Rosenberger examine Martin\u2019s sculptural constructions of found objects. But the newest material in the anthology, in a sense, is the rewriting of art-historical narratives with respect to Martin, which is justified on the strength of her mature painting alone. Cooke places Martin firmly in league with artists whose work the painter admired deeply: Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Her clear-eyed exposition establishes that Martin was not just living near these artists: she was their peer.8<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Several essayists mention Stein, but others associate Martin with less predictable cultural figures and ideas. Hanne Darboven shares a practice of repeated inscription (in Newman, 214); the human scale of Martin\u2019s canvases echoes Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s Vitruvian Man <\/em>(in Hudson, 121); Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt use graphite and grids, following Martin\u2019s example (in Crimp, 65). Piet Mondrian appears too briefly and obliquely (in Newman, 203 and 224n9).9<\/a><\/sup> Wagner, Newman, and Jaleh Mansoor see textuality in Martin\u2019s grids, and their analyses are riveting.10<\/a><\/sup> Newman combines Christian theology with Lacanian linguistics in this pithy gloss on Martin\u2019s grids: \u201cRepetition, as emptying out, in prayer allows the saying to accord with the unsayable\u201d (218). Wagner introduces cybernetics and chaos theory to great effect and makes a strong case for newfangled parallels to define \u201cthe work\u2019s enduring contemporaneity\u201d (237).<\/p>\n

Some of the writers situate Martin\u2019s signature works in fascinating new social and theoretical contexts. Mansoor contrasts the procedural structures that generate Martin\u2019s paintings with the rigorous philosophies of chance that motivate John Cage\u2019s and Marcel Duchamp\u2019s distinctive production processes. In her exceedingly well-crafted essay, Mansoor writes that, in contrast to the conventional view of inscription as individualistic expression\u2014or even as the positivistic outcome of a chance operation\u2014Martin\u2019s \u201cnegation<\/em> of the [mark-making] gesture as an act of enunciation\u201d (158, emphasis in original) serves the artist\u2019s \u201cmodel of humility and subjectivity critical of the primacy of the self\u201d (157). Martin\u2019s implicit critique of her peers\u2019 \u201cego or virtuosic authorship\u201d (160) aligns her work with feminist and structuralist epistemologies. Given Martin\u2019s resolute abstraction, the feminist connection is not overt, yet Mansoor sees it as nonetheless pervasive. She determines that Martin is \u201ctoo engaged in a feminist relation to practice, perhaps, to objectify and label it as such\u201d (166). <\/p>\n

In another agile essay, Hudson uses Martin\u2019s portfolio of sixteen prints, On A Clear Day<\/em>, to prompt an interrogation of Martin\u2019s relationship to nature, including human nature. How can we make sense of her many nature-based titles, given that \u201cMartin actively refuted claims that her paintings referred to nature\u201d (123)? Hudson notes that \u201ca clear day\u201d describes a mental state as well as a meteorological condition: Martin intertwines the corporeal and the incorporeal. Hudson then uses two popular books from Martin\u2019s New York decade\u2014Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring<\/em> and Abraham Maslow\u2019s Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences<\/em>\u2014to situate Martin\u2019s project between a disembodied environmentalism and a spiritualized psychology. Along the way, Hudson also offers the most witty remarks I have seen about Martin\u2019s writings and oratory, gently yet studiously calling into question \u201cthe coherence of her assertions, not to say their suitability relative to the paintings themselves\u201d (123). <\/p>\n

Not all of the writers\u2019 theoretical projects are so thoroughly successful. Ambitiousness is the downfall, yet also the best quality, of Anastas\u2019s essay, \u201cIndividual and Unreal: Agnes Martin\u2019s Writings in 1973.\u201d Anastas tries to compare Martin\u2019s ideas about the self with those of the modernist writer Laura Riding, despite the fact that \u201cneither an artistic or historical context nor any evidence of contact can be named to connect Riding with Martin\u201d (136). The pairing is indeed a serious stretch: Anastas suggests that the artist\u2019s \u201cself-reliance\u201d as formulated by Riding (139) can map onto Martin\u2019s rule that the artist remain separate from society, but the poetc solipsism implied in Riding\u2019s writings contrasts utterly with the self-effacement called for in Martin\u2019s.11<\/a><\/sup> Still, experimentation with unexpected\u2014even jarring\u2014juxtapositions has the potential to be fruitful for gaining an expanded sense of Martin\u2019s oeuvre, especially given that her work has too often been treated as insurmountably autonomous. <\/p>\n

Clearly, there is much yet to be said about Martin. The process of further excavating her work and philosophy is well under way: Arne Glimcher\u2019s compendium of archival documents, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances<\/em>, another landmark volume, has also been published in this centenary year. Glimcher\u2019s book presents many of Martin\u2019s previously unpublished manuscripts along with his own memoirs of years of interaction with the artist. Meanwhile, anthology contributors Hudson and Rosenberger are also writing books. Rosenberger\u2019s will deal with Martin\u2019s early work, building on her informative tour of the Harwood\u2019s Before the Grid<\/em> exhibition in which she compared Martin\u2019s early abstractions to those of Joan Mir\u00f3, Arshile Gorky, and Louise Bourgeois. The critic Nancy Princenthal and Martin\u2019s longtime friend Herta Wittgenstein are working on biographical monographs, and Becky Hunter is expanding her centenary symposium research on ambivalence and existential absurdity in Martin\u2019s early critical reception. Mona Schieren will publish on the influence of Asian and Native American philosophies in Martin\u2019s oeuvre and is planning a symposium in Germany. Taose\u00f1o Luis Jaramilla, who prepared Martin\u2019s canvases in her later years, also aims to publish a book . . . and these are only the projects I have heard about. It would be excellent to see an anthology of interviews, too\u2014with Martin and with others about Martin. These unscripted quotations would supplement the fragments that spice the anthology and would allow Martin to become better understood.<\/p>\n

My review would not be complete if I did not mention the most complete overview yet to come: Martin\u2019s digital catalogue raisonn\u00e9<\/em> from Artifex<\/em> Press. This innovative resource will make available online complete information about all Martin works that can be located. Ideally it will include a searchable bibliography\u2014the one in Agnes Martin is arranged by year, instead of author, so it is difficult to determine quickly who wrote about her most often. <\/p>\n

Agnes Martin<\/em> does not purport to be a complete resource. Nor does it aspire to quantify Martin\u2019s contribution; it qualifies it. At root, this requires the essayists to sum up Martin\u2019s visual art in the art of language. So I will quote two evocative descriptions: may they send you back to the book and to the paintings themselves. Cooke, the curator, describes the experience of moving in front of a 1960s canvas: \u201cThe image seems to coalesce into a velum, a haze, or a halation\u2014a visual tremolo or a blush of refulgent color\u201d (13). And Leonard, the artist, again: \u201cThere is always this hum, this thrum. This quiet, constant push, of light to dark, of beat to beat. Of rain soaking into soil\u201d (85). In addition to the excellent writings in Agnes Martin<\/em>, the immediate, visceral qualities of her work endure.<\/p>\n

<\/p>

<\/span>

<\/p>\n

Karen L. Schiff is a visual artist who lives and works in New York and has a studio in Brooklyn. www.karen-schiff.com. <\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
  1. Rosalind Krauss, \u201cAgnes Martin: The \/Cloud\/\u201d in Bachelors<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: October\/MIT Press, 1999), 75\u201390; a similar essay, \u201cThe Grid, The \/Cloud\/, and the Detail,\u201d appeared in The Presence of Mies<\/em>, ed. Detlef Mertins (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 132\u201347. Chave\u2019s essay is available on her website, annachave.com. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Linville contributed to Artforum<\/em> in 1970 and 1971. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. With My Back to the World<\/em> is the title of an hour-long documentary about Martin by Mary Lance (New Deal Films, 2002). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. A woman who was one of Martin\u2019s early lovers made a public statement at the Harwood\u2019s centenary symposium; to my knowledge, her brief yet affecting video is the first document to go beyond rumor. It also contains some bracing information about Martin\u2019s psychological struggles. The self-produced video is housed in the Agnes Martin archive at the museum. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. Katz reveals his interpretive bent in a discussion of Martin\u2019s 1947 Nude<\/strong>, which he repeated in a wall text for the same painting in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Hide\/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture<\/strong>, which he curated with David C. Ward. The wall text asserts only that it \u201cmay be a portrait of her then partner\u201d or a self-portrait (174). But the curators Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman note, in a preface to the catalogue accompanying their exhibition Agnes Martin: Before the Grid<\/em> at the Harwood Museum, that Martin was an art student at the University of New Mexico in 1947; she also \u201ctaught portrait painting at this time so perhaps the early portraits relate to her teaching in some way\u201d (5). By framing Nude<\/em> exclusively in contexts that support his arguments about Martin\u2019s sexuality, Katz deprives readers of more nuanced explications of Martin\u2019s work, as well as of her unique history and desires. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. Edward Corbett (1919\u20131971) was a painter who lived full-time in Taos for two years in the early 1950s and visited frequently in the years just before and after. Though his work has receded from view, his paintings were included in the 15 Americans<\/em> exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1952, and his aesthetics are echoed in works by his acquaintances Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt as well as Agnes Martin. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. Leonard and Newman claim that Gabriel<\/em> was her only film (79; 217); this is true in the sense that it is the only Martin film we can now see. But a few years after Gabriel, Martin again turned to filmmaking, this time aiming for a mythological, costumed war epic. According to the artist Donald Woodman, who helped her with this project, all of the footage is now buried in the municipal garbage dump in Galisteo, New Mexico (interview with the author, 2006). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. In light of this, it is stunning that Martin was omitted from MoMA\u2019s 2010\u201311 exhibition Abstract Expressionist New York<\/em>. How might the story of Abstract Expressionism\u2014in 1950s and 1960s New York, and as a movement altogether\u2014be rewritten if Martin\u2019s work were properly included? ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. Only Richard Tobin, in his catalogue essay for Agnes Martin: Before the Grid<\/em> (Taos: Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico, 2012), underscores the fact that both Mondrian and Martin arrived at their breakthrough grids through thinking about trees (16). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. Linville also mentions text, as does Max Kozloff, another critic whose essay is not included (but is quoted in Wagner, 235). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. The two authors even cite female classical figures with opposite valences: Anastas quotes from Riding\u2019s essay \u201cJocasta\u201d (136), while one of her quotations from Martin mentions the \u201cSylphides\u201d (143). The latter are young, graceful, elemental beings, female and without souls, who inhabit the air or are made of air. Their insubstantiality and lack of a fixed center confirms an incommensurability with Riding\u2019s idea of the \u201cunreal\u201d self, whose poetic unreality only signifies a distance from socially conventional, time-based paradigms; the figure of the self is still solid. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Karen L. Schiff<\/p>\n

    Finally\u2014a book of criticism about Agnes Martin. No other book of writing about this singular, revered artist has been in print for many years. And though Martin (1912\u20132004) has been an esteemed presence in the art world since at least the early 1960s, there exists no monograph, no biography, no previous collection of criticism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3355,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}