Review by New York Times Review
IN THE 1970s, a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate named Nancy Princenthal wrote to the artist Agnes Martin seeking information for an art history paper. Martin had spent the better part of the 1960s working in and around Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, inching out fine-gauge grids on paper or canvas. Up close, her work is all specificity: graphite and oil perhaps, line and rectangle, not quite perfect, again and again. Three steps back, it's a barely-there perceptual field, luminous, ascetic and devoid of the subjective "I." By 1967 Martin's art had won wide and deep admiration. Yet that same year she gave away her art supplies and yanked herself out of New York. Princenthal's letter reached Martin at the adobe house she had built with her own hands in a desolate patch of New Mexico. The artist's reply perplexed her young admirer. Turn your back on intellect and ideas, she was told. "Write your true response instead of stirring around in knowledge or quoting responses made by others." Princenthal's account of this episode and of her later understanding of Martin's generosity in writing a long, thoughtful letter to a student is a felt interlude in "Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art," her rewarding yet at times distractingly didactic biography. Its timing is perfect. A Martin retrospective, the first since the early 1990s, opened this month at the Tate Modern in London, later to travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Guggenheim. Rarely has Martin's work, which is virtually impossible to reproduce, been seen in such depth. The Tate Modern's timing is perfect too. The hermetic silence of Martin's non-objects is the antithesis of hyperconnectivity and distraction. Born in Saskatchewan in 1912, Martin had a hardscrabble childhood. The family hopscotched west. In Vancouver, they lived with her Calvinist grandfather; in Bellingham, Wash., she earned a teaching certificate. She began a long, spotty career as a schoolteacher, a year here, a year there. She was a loner. In Princenthal's account, Martin lurks at the edges of her own early story. That's not surprising. Evasive and self-contradictory when asked about herself, the artist late in life exacted pledges from friends that they would not discuss her after her death. Princenthal is frequently forced to resort to shrewd guesswork. It's not even known exactly when or why Martin decided to become an artist, only that in 1941, the 29-year-old schoolteacher embarked on the first of several stints at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York, where she studied art and art education. Compelling biographies have been written about people of whom little is known. Unfortunately, Princenthal overcompensates with irrelevant material. Martin's arrival at Teachers College, for instance, leads her to inject a long quotation about the painter Barnett Newman's inability to pass the 1930s Board of Education exam for high school art teachers. More to the point, Princenthal cites the artist Richard Tuttle, Martin's longtime friend, who eventually responded to her "shameless badgering for his insights": Everything about Agnes Martin is in the work. Once Martin settles in New York in 1957, Princenthal shifts from belabored biography to fluid and discursive analysis. She prizes out the mutual influences of the artists who inhabited the derelict industrial lofts on Coenties Slip. (Besides Martin, they included Ellsworth Kelly, Lenore Tawney, Jack Youngerman and Robert Indiana.) She also scrutinizes some two dozen works, tracks critical responses to Martin's art, and unpacks the artist's philosophical and religious sources. Most absorbing is her account of Martin's "cross-wiring" of image and text. "The closest analogy to silent reading," Princenthal writes, "is thought. Or spending time with one of Martin's paintings." Martin's negotiations between image and thought, the author believes, were central to both her art and her often troubled mental life. Not until after the artist's death in 2004 was her diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia publicly revealed. Martin heard voices. Occasionally she fell into catatonic states. Found wandering the streets during a psychotic episode in 1967, she was committed to Bellevue, where she underwent shock treatment. Fending off clichés about madness and creativity, Princenthal draws a careful distinction between the schizophrenic's aural hallucinations and the artist's visions. Each work, Martin insisted, began with "inspiration," by which she meant a precise mental picture of the painting-or drawing-to-be. Ideas are distractions, Martin wrote in a 1989 essay called "Beauty Is the Mystery of Life." The artist must take advantage of her inner mind's awareness of perfection. Happiness will result. Martin's essay, which is not to be missed, appears in "Agnes Martin," the Tate Modern's wide-ranging catalog, edited by the co-curators Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell. Also indispensable are essays by the art historian Richard Tobin (who considers Martin's painting "The Islands") and the conservator Rachel Barker (on "Morning"). Morris's own essay restores Martin's practice to the art historical context from which it has often slipped. Another curator, Lena Fritsch, examines six photographic portraits of Martin, including those by Diane Arbus and Annie Leibovitz. The art historian Jacquelynn Baas, meanwhile, untangles the belief systems that inform Martin's art, including Platonism, Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Not that all of this would have pleased Martin. In 1980, by which time she had resumed making art, the artist backed out of a planned retrospective because the Whitney Museum insisted on publishing a catalog. The real life of her art, Martin believed, takes place in the mind of the viewer. Read the books. Put them down. Find the nearest museum with a Martin on its walls. Slowly. Look. You will be happy you did. Evasive and self-contradictory in person, Agnes Martin put all of herself into her work. PATRICIA ALBERS is the author of "Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life." She is working on a biography of the photographer Andre Kertesz.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 28, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A master of subtlety, Agnes Martin (1912-2004) acquired the mantle of sage as an abstract painter who prized solitude and who wrote about art with wry wit and spiritual insight. In the first comprehensive Martin biography, art critic Princenthal combines facts with astute critical analysis to create a richly inquisitive, vividly written portrait in sync with Martin's rigorous yet magnificently nuanced grid and stripe paintings. Princenthal considers the influence of the landscapes Martin knew intimately in Saskatchewan (where she was born), the Pacific Northwest, New York City, and New Mexico, and chronicles her early experiences as a teacher, including a stint in a one-room schoolhouse in Idaho. Martin was in her forties when she devoted herself absolutely to art within an enclave of revolutionary New York waterfront artists that included Robert Indiana, Ad Reinhardt, and Lenore Tawney. Many were gay, and Martin's closest relationships were with women, though she flatly rejected the label, lesbian. Martin's prodigious discipline helped her cope with a formidable malady, paranoid schizophrenia, as she created her poetic, vital, exquisitely refined, and evocatively mysterious works. Princenthal sensitively brings Martin forward as a strong, independent, courageous, thorny, self-mythologizing, funny, private, and generous artist of conviction and vision, who lived simply, attained wealth and fame, and experienced, at times, an ecstatic radiance that will forever animate her paintings, including one titled I Love the Whole World.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Writing a biography of Agnes Martin (1912-2004) is a study in frustration, but former Art in America senior editor Princenthal (School of the Visual Arts; Hannah Wilke, 2010, etc.) manages to piece together a story while getting beyond her subject's well-guarded privacy. Martin was born in rural Saskatchewan and bounced between the coasts as student and teacher, building the disciplinarian aspect of her character. Eventually, she spent 40 years on and off in Taos, New Mexico, punctuated by forays to New York. Throughout her life, she sought time to be alone, whether traveling or living on a lonely mesa outside of Santa Fe. When she began giving talks about art, she refused to speak to or meet any of the audience members. However, she wasn't asocial; she had many artist friends when she lived in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan. Among her influences were Zen Buddhism and Rothko, Cage and Klee. A contemporary of the abstract expressionists, Martin's work was much more minimalist. When she finally stopped destroying her work, she settled on rectilinear grids on square canvases; she sought to upset the power of the square. She suffered a lifelong battle with schizophrenic paranoia, and she hoped to bring out what she felt were the only true feelings: happiness and helplessness. The author readily acknowledges that Martin is unknowable, citing contradictory biographical material from the artist. Martin prohibited catalogs for her exhibitions and swore her friends to secrecy regarding her life. She feared the deception of words. Princenthal carefully describes the artist's works, but there is no way to appreciate her without seeing the originals; illustrations don't fully convey the feeling in her work. The author's deep research and personal correspondence with the artist will be enlightening to fans of Martin and will encourage others to seek out her work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
