Homage To Life: Agnes Martin (1912-2004).

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(Charles R. Rushton/Whitney Museum of American Art)



Agnès Martin, the godmother of minimalism, passed away yesterday.


The seminal artist of canadian origin (she's from Saskatchewan), deceased at 92, which is about the age of Louise Bourgeois these days. The reason I bring this up is that two days ago I was thinking about Louise Bourgeois as I was sharing with someone the titles of works that brought me really strong emotional experiences (emotional as in: versus intellectual, versus sensual, etc..). I mentioned then that I hope Louise got still many years before her because I believe she's been reaching summums in her art recently.

Two days later, Agnes's death takes me by surprise. There's much less emotional urgency coming out of Agnes's work. On the contrary it's quiet and blissfully intemporal. I guess I always figured Agnes as some kind of immortal being from out of this world. Her death is not even shocking, like all her life's work prepared you for it. You know? Just in case it took you by surprise.


I often feel frustration for Agnes that she didn't receive as vast support as other artists from the Minimalist movement (which is a portion of american art history that all the artists themselves refute in partaking). Her early grid formats in the 50's so much announced Lewitt, that it's only an half-relief that she got a one year temporary exhibit going on at Dia Beacon, where all the big minimalist dudes all get their self-important works shown in permanence (thanks to some perticularly obsessive patrons), with only about half of them really deserving such imperialist devotion.


But this is no day to feel bitter. On the contrary, the death of Agnes Martin fills me with a serene calm. I think I owe her that: everything in her art was about dedramatization. Probably even therapeutic. She was the most optimist of artists you could imagine. I can only perceive her passing the threshold with a confident smile on her lips. She had done what she meant to do: her legacy is untouchable.

Recently, I had seen both the Dia Retrospective, which shows a good portion of her early works, and therefore circumbscribes at ease her basic theories and aesthetics (ones that she would follow religiously throughout her life), but I also visited last May what is considered to be the last pre-mortem exhibit by Agnes Martin, an exhibit of recent works that took place at Pace Wildenstein, her affiliated gallery on 54th street, New York.

I am reviewing this show as my hommage to her, my first art review on this new blog. I am not an official art reviewer, and please note (if you haven't already) that english is not my prime language.



I will not use the word "irony" to characterize the title of this show, which was called "Homage To Life": on the contrary I think the term genuinely can serve as the epitaph for her entire career. I wouldn't blush seeing it as the expression to front cover a catalogue raisonne. Not if it would be her's.

But what is this homage to life that she proposes, exactly? It's a meeting between two forces. It's a meeting between the eternally firm, rigid and the temporary hesitative, precarious. It's the most human of hands attempting to draw an impression of the scale of the universal and absolute. In painting, this transcribes as the tension between the polished monochromatic and the handput colour application. It's the tension between the mathematical grid and the act of drawing over it softly with one's hand. It's en encompassing of perfection and imperfection. It's a sacrifice of ego against the monumentality of existence.

Did that sound all discombobulated ?



Martin's work is actually very simple and accessible. Yards away from the mentions of "dryness", "austere" and "pretentiousness" that you may here from times to times about her works from those who never understood it.

Bluntly: Martin is a "philosophical" artist. She proposes through her art that she is engaged with the thinking precepts that guide her. In a sense she functions like a medieval painter that would have focussed all her life on perfecting the depiction of Christ. Instead, she chose to devote her life to the transcription of her own beliefs in zen and other oriental philosophies through her use of pure aesthetical forms (kind of obvious if you know the least you need to know about zen). She indeed provoked a little the art crowds when she employed terms as "classical" to describe her work, but she had a firm belief that through her interest in simple shapes, patterns, and colors, she was exploring a vision of beauty, and perfection (the essence of classicism).

The grids that Agnes Martin adds by hands with pencil on her quasi-monochromatic canvas are humane. They are at the opposite of say, computer "cgi" design. Her work seems to emphasize the fact that mathematical deconstruction is a human ability, an act of intellectualization that in fact originated in the sensual and emotional histories of our existence (remember how you counted candies on Halloween). Also, Martin's grids are imperfect and present no focal point: they enhance what the artist refers to as "formlessness". The grids interact with the gaze as you approach and distance yourself from the paintings, and this creates a sense of opacity, like the work is hanging out in the atmostphere, ethereally.

The use of overall chrome is more rigid. It's a void. It's both plain and empty, you're never too sure. But then Martin used a large palette of tones and colors that I will indulge in tagging "as many emotions". Like the cold grid that spouses the shapes of the human form by being drawn by hand, the peculiar choices and treatment of pure earthly chromas render Martin's work the most down-to-earth minimalist art that you can imagine. In a sense, yes, you could think it's a feminized version of minimalism , but I find that expression diminutive when all this art was consolidated pre-facto the history of american contemporary art. It's NOT feminine, it's rather the reaching point between those two poles, if you absolutely need to distance them.



Where was I?

Oh yeah, "the show".
That show at Pace Wildestein, which lasted from May 4 to June 30, 2004.

The press release mentions that "Homage to Life is the first body of work that basically defy her signature grid. Floating shapes, as well as new divisions of space, are now present in the new work."


See? Now, you can all forget whatever I have said about Agnes's work.
But no, seriously: the thing that this exhibition did was to show that Martin had found other means (if nothing too radically different) to express her beliefs, so hopefully that will evitate her in retrospect the accusation of being too systematic.

As you can notice by clicking on the pictures on the Pace Wildenstein site, she had made a long come back to 50's geometrical form (isn't it a spiritual bliss to be able to revisit your sources when you approach trespass), and started using vertical shapes and separating sections on canvas.

How does this translate with the whole formulaic pilgrimage that constitutes her oeuvre ? If you look at the title piece, "Homage to Life" (2003), you will
notice that the monolithic aspect of the black trapeze is apposed to a surface that seems etched by hands with graphite. Same goes with the two triangles of
"Untitled # 1" (2003), or in the opposite proposition of "Untitled # 17" (2002), where two graphite squares are undermined by solid black (and a high-level horizon above,
hanging like Prometheus` fire in a Rubens painting). The contrast between the sharp edged geometry and the soft aspect of the pencil drawing propose a similar tension than with past Martin's works. Similar? Maybe it is even more obvious now. Why the use of symmetry? My only guess is that they constitute clusters of repetition that help re-evaluate the idea of the grid as the pre-eminent choice to argue a same proposition.


Now let's come back to more comfortable terrain and judge this "Untitled # 6" (2003) which you will agree, with its overall washy-violet tone and the hand-slide pencil horizontals, that this is the most soft and humane form of minimalist art ever. Call it classical if you will, afterall her work does function like an aesthetical theorem (especially with quasi theoretical "Untitled 5" (2003) that looks like the same painting as before but cut out from the extraneous emotional (and personal) information of color).


"Untitled 8" (2003) looks genuinely like your good old
universal writting paper, and maybe I'm being too litteral by deciphering
a definite representation of Agne's method: isn't she more a writer than
an actual painter? Or rather, doesn't she paint as though she was writting,
and here I make no references to conceptualism but link more with the ancient craft of graphology, and the fact than with the earliest forms of writting, it was self-evident that the modes of communication inherited from drawing?.


Martin Creed would cringe at this:
"The Sea" (2003). It looks like a rain of neutrinos (before they fall vertically down on earth). You hate it? I think it's wonderful !!
Maybe it would be less sublime if there wasn't the whole history of Martin's work behind it, I'll grant you. I'll grant you that her work functions as a corpus with precise delimitations and focus, and that if she had been hypocritical but only once to her unequivocal aspirations, it would have been as critical as being an heretic in the 13th Century, France. What can I say: there's responsibilities with dealing with the sublime.


These pastoral ones, "Untitled # 4" (2003), "Untitled # 9" (2003) and "Untitled # 3" (2003) are, well, "pastorals", in the sense that they almost look like wallpapers (do I make sense, here?), quasi decorative, but they are probably as therapeutic as soft green tea (no cheap pun intended). Maybe this is why they seem so radical. Like a deconstruction of Matisse. I find them less appealing, but they're all very consistent with the rest of the show (and Martin's approach to art). I am more surprized by the shapes than the use of soft tones (evidently, or that would be like admitting I know nothing about her art).


I'm ending with my favorite piece of the show: "Untitled # 21" (2002) with its earthly colors, the graphite grey "path", and the two black voids. They seem to taunt us, invite us out of the precarity of existence. There is mystery. Feedback of the gaze (they're at eyes level)? Two extremities of one black hole ? There is something about the number two: It precedes the universal law that two elements must interact in order to create a third (1 + 1 = 3), as in art resulting from the meeting between an artist's proposition and its audience. I'm sure these squares signify something, as much of Martin's work is transcendental to her beliefs. Somehow Agnes is on the other side of them today.



It was overall an excellent last show for Agnes, if we only let ourselves envelopped by the concision of her entire work, forgetting a little the moment that had passed since her early experiments of the 50's.

I know what some of you are going to say.

I'll reply that: you can't really reproach an artist to be this autistically focussed when the matter of her art is wisdom itself.

Her work, which general schemes and colors share attributes with some schools of oriental art (I'll even venture into comparing it with some anti-decorative forms of islamist art), will last as long as it can reach people able to grasp the devotional and faithfull aspect of an artist who in all humility spent a lifetime communicating universal tensions engulfing the fate of existence.


It was a nice lesson,

Thank you, Agnes,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com