Agnes Martin: Before the Grid unveiled Abstract Expressionist icon’s early work
ART MATTERS | By Jan Ernst Adlmann
The prickly ethical question raised by the Harwood Museum of Art’s exhibition of Agnes Martin’s earliest works had some critics and viewers crying foul. If Martin were alive today, she would have been livid. Others, however, aligned themselves with the opinion of art historian and critic Richard Tobin, who also wrote the show’s catalog essay. In Ann Landi’s March 14, 2011, Wall Street Journal article, “Saved from the Artist’s Fire,” he flatly states, “The museum’s responsibility is not to the artist. The museum’s responsibility is to educate.”
Photograph of artist with work.
And quite an education this has been. No viewer with even a modicum of familiarity with the tropes and clichés of mid-20th-century Modernism, especially those of the halcyon era of Abstract Expressionism, could fail to come away from the experience without conflicted thoughts, not simply about the ethics of the whole affair but also about the phenomenon, not unheard of, in which an artist determines to destroy all traces of their pictorial evolution. If Martin had had her way, everything before her pristine grid paintings would be to us tabula rasa, for she famously sought to hunt down, retrieve, and torch all her early work.
Organized by curators Tiffany Bell and Jina Brenneman, the show brought together a mere handful of Martin’s earliest works, created mostly from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Seen together, they vividly illustrated the course of the artist’s apparently arduous experimentation with all genres. Both representational and abstract, these paintings comprised portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and a series of biomorphic and geometric abstractions that point toward the rarefied “grid works” of her maturity, which miraculously conflated Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism into what Bell and Brenneman call Martin’s “singular genre.”
“The exhibition shows that before Martin arrived at the simplicity and directness of her mature, non-objective work,” observes Bell, “she painted for many years in a range of styles and techniques, addressing content—the vast New Mexico landscape, primordial and biomorphic forms, and hovering, atmospheric geometric shapes—that suggests a search for a way to convey an essential or universal truth.”
It is not inconceivable that had Martin succeeded in her well-documented efforts to ferret out and destroy all traces of this revelatory body of work, today’s viewer would be much poorer when contemplating the radiant works for which she would subsequently become famous.
Certainly, several successful modern artists have gone to the trouble to scavenge and destroy all traces of their development, invariably with no real explanation for such immolation. In one notable instance and precisely in Martin’s milieu, the great Bay Area figurative abstractionist David Park legendarily torched a huge pile of his early works on a San Francisco hillside.
The will to be born anew, to be seen ab ovo, is understandable but ultimately lamentable, especially when it comes to artists of Martin’s repute. With the Harwood’s astonishing project, however, contemporary art lovers have the opportunity to contemplate Agnes Martin’s mature works through new and irrevocably altered lenses.
For the purposes of this brief review, one can pass over with little discussion the very earliest pieces in the show, such as a couple of totally competent, attractive, late 1940s New Mexico watercolor landscapes, which surely will strike most viewers as pure Taos Society of Artists productions. These works, and a few self-portraits, show the very young artist learning the ropes. They are so innocuous, one has to wonder why Martin would seek to destroy them.
When the artist took a brief respite from the New York art scene to visit Taos in the 1950s, the work she produced “raises some issues,” Ann Landi observes in “Saved from the Artist’s Fire.” These early works, Landi points out, are decidedly retardataire, and show Martin wrestling with imagery that had long since been left in the dust by her Abstract Expressionist compatriots: vaguely geometric forms and oozy (as Landi puts it) biomorphism, although it is possible that the artist was influenced by some of the Taos artists’ interest in Surrealism.
Works like The Bluebird from 1954 reveal Martin juggling free-floating geometric shapes that echo, for this viewer at least, nothing so much as the vaguely “moderne” ornament of countless Formica dinette sets.
More accomplished are the biomorphic works, many of which suggest earlier influences, like Kandinsky, Gorky, Miró, Arp, and, strikingly, William Baziotes, perhaps the foremost biomorphist among the Abstract Expressionists. The best of this lot are the ethereal 1954 Dream of Night Sailing and the masterful The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden from 1953, a tour de force in many respects and, at 48 x 72 inches, the largest painting by far that escaped the artist’s torch.
Left: The Islands (c. 1961), acrylic and graphite on linen; Right: The Spring (1957), oil on canvas
The pallid palette that characterizes many of these surviving works resonates as decidedly feminine, even delicate. The Expulsion, save for one startling slash of vermillion, is rendered in pale pinks, tans, and ambers, and feels like a commingling of the cavorting imagery of Gorky and Miró but with the reticent palette of Marie Laurencin. It is a compelling mixture. Depicted in semi-figurative fashion, The Expulsion impresses with its jangling, jagged drawing and the pell-mell motion of the ill-fated couple. There is about the entire affair a sense that Martin was kinetically invested in the theme, even empathizing with the protagonists. In no other work on view at the Harwood was there such a palpable feeling of the artist energized. Nor was there another example in which she seemed to have so fully absorbed the lessons of a handful of pivotal works, namely Picasso’s biomorphic Night Fishing at Antibes from his Cubist period, and Gorky’s turbulent geometric-cum-biomorphic abstraction Liver is the Cock’s Comb.
The Expulsion is a work of considerable panache, but it was a style she would not pursue in subsequent works, and one cannot help but wonder if the artist Agnes Martin eventually became was not in some way a reaction against this cacophony of gesture. Certainly, she could have gone the way of a Gorky, whose works were nothing if not vivid demonstrations of life’s endless travails—so much so that art critic John Russell suggested the artist “allowed art to eat him alive.”
Instead, it seems Agnes Martin forged a new path entirely, eventually retreating into the melancholy and the solace that would become her grid.
From the Summer 2012 issue
