Agnes Martin

At 92 years old, Agnes Martin physical status not available right now. We will update Agnes Martin's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Agnes Bernice Martin (March 22, 1912 – December 16, 2004) was a Canadian-born abstract painter.

"Ideation and silence" has been portrayed as a "essay in discretion on inwardness and silence."

Martin, who is often thought of or referred to as a minimalist, is actually an abstract expressionist.

In 1998, she received the National Endowment for the Arts' National Medal of Arts.

Personal life

Agnes Martin was born in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterian farmers in Macklin, Saskatchewan, where she was one of four children. She grew up in Vancouver, starting in 1919. 237 Mirabell, a pregnant woman, was taken to the United States in 1931 to help her baby sister Mirabell in Bellingham, Washington. 237 She wished to attend American higher education and became an American citizen in 1950. Before receiving her B.A., Martin attended Western Washington University College of Education in Bellingham, Washington. (1942) Teachers College, Columbia University. Martin became interested in contemporary art while living in New York, where he was introduced to artists such as Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), and Joan Miró (1893–1983). She took a slew of studio classes at Teachers College and started to consider a career as an artist.

In 1947, she attended the University of New Mexico's Summer Field School in Taos, New Mexico. 237 After attending lectures by Zen Buddhist scholar D. T. Suzuki at Columbia, she became interested in Asian thought, not as a religious discipline, but as a code of ethics, a practical guide to getting through life. Martin matriculated at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, Mexico, where she also taught art courses before returning to Columbia University to earn her M.A. In modern art (1952) In 1957, she moved to New York City and spent in a Coenties Slip apartment in lower Manhattan. 238 The Coenties Slip was also home to several other artists and their studios. Although there was a strong sense of community, each had their own traditions and artistic temperaments. In the 1960s, the Coenties Slip was also a haven for the queer community. Martin is said to have been romantically linked with Lenore Tawney (1907–2007) at the time. Agnes Martin, a pioneer of her time, never openly confessed her sexuality, but she has been described as a "closed homosexual" in her role. Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon describes several intimate friendships between Martin and other women, including Betty Parsons, in the 2018 book Agnes Martin. When she attacked fellow artists' work, she often used a feminist lens. Martin was "too committed in a feminist relation to practice, perhaps to objectify and categorize it as such," said art historian Jaleh Mansoor. It's worth noting that Martin herself did not identify as a feminist and told a New Yorker journalist that "the women's movement had failed" in an interview.

Martin was previously suspected of schizophrenia, but it wasn't until 1962 that it was undocumented. At Bellevue Hospital in New York, she had even considered elective shock therapy for therapy. Martin had the support of her coworkers from Coenties Slip, who came together after one of her episodes to enlist the services of a respected psychiatrist who was a friend of the neighborhood. However, her struggle was mainly private and individual, and the full effect of the mental illness on her life is uncertain.

Martin left New York City in 1967, moving from the art world to live alone. Martin settled in Mesa Portales, New Mexico, 1968-1977), after eighteen months on the road. She owned a 50-acre farm and lived in a simple life in an adobe house that she designed for herself, adding four other buildings over the years. She did not paint during those years, but she did not paint until 1971, when curator Douglas Crimp first approached her about her first solo non-commercial exhibition. Martin began to write and speak at various universities about her work later in life. Martin's interest in painting has slowly returned. She visited Pace Gallery to learn about her work and the gallery's founder, Arne Glimcher (b.1938) became a lifelong dealer. 240 She moved to Galisteo, New Mexico, where she lived until 1993, finally being able to own her own home. Though she still preferred solitude and was alone, Martin was more active in the art world, traveling extensively and showing in Canada, the United States, and internationally. She retired in 1993 to Taos, New Mexico, where she lived until her death in 2004. 242

Many of her paintings have positive names, such as Happy Holiday (1999) and I Love the Whole World (2000). "Beauty and perfection are the same," Agnes Martin said in an interview in 1989 about her life and painting. They never happen without joy.

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Career

Her work is most closely associated with Taos, with some of her early work visibly inspired by the desert environment of New Mexico. However, there is also a strong influence from her young upbringing in rural Canada, particularly the vast and quiet Saskatchewan prairies. While she described herself as an American painter, she never forgot her Canadian roots, returning thereafter she left New York in 1967, as well as during her extensive travels in the 1970s. Some of Martin's early works have been described as simplified farmer's fields, and Martin herself left her work open to interpretation encouraging comparisons of her unembellished, monochromatic canvases to landscapes.

She moved to New York City at the invitation of the artist/gallery owner Betty Parsons in 1957 (the women had met prior to 1954). That year, she settled in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where her friends and neighbors, several of whom were also affiliated with Parsons, included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Lenore Tawney. Barnett Newman actively promoted Martin's work, and helped install Martin's exhibitions at Betty Parsons Gallery beginning in the late 1950s. Another close friend and mentor was Ad Reinhardt. In 1961 Martin contributed a brief introduction to a brochure for her friend Lenore Tawney's first solo exhibition, the only occasion on which she wrote on the work of a fellow artist. In 1967, Martin famously abandoned her life in New York. Cited reasons include the death of her friend Ad Reinhardt, the demolition of many buildings on Coenties Slip, and a breakup with the artist Chryssa whom Martin had dated off and on throughout the 1960s. In her ten years living in New York Martin was frequently hospitalized to control symptoms of schizophrenia which manifested in the artist in a number of ways, including aural hallucinations and states of catatonia: on a number of occasions she received electroconvulsive therapy at Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital. After Martin left New York, she drove about the western US and Canada, deciding to settle in Cuba, New Mexico, for a few years (1968-1977), then settled in Galisteo, New Mexico, (1977-1993).: 240–242  In both New Mexico homes, she built adobe brick structures herself. She did not return to art until 1973 and consciously distanced herself from the social life and social events that brought other artists into the public eye. She collaborated with architect Bill Katz in 1974 on a log cabin she would use as her studio. That same year, she completed a group of new paintings and from 1975 they were exhibited regularly.

In 1976 she made her first film, Gabriel, a 78-minute landscape film which features a little boy going for a walk. A second movie, Captivity, was never completed after the artist threw the rough cut into the town dump.

According to a filmed interview with her that was released in 2003, she had moved from New York City only when she was told her rented loft/workspace/studio would be no longer available because of the building's imminent demolition. She went on further to state that she could not conceive of working in any other space in New York. When she died at age 92, she was said not to have read a newspaper for the last 50 years. Essays in the book dedicated to the exhibition of her work in New York at The Drawing Center (traveling to other museums as well) in 2005 – 3x abstraction – analyzed the spiritual dimension in Martin's work. The 2018 biography Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon was the first book to explore Martin's relationship with women and her early life in substantial detail and was written in collaboration with Martin's family and friends.

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