Painter Agnes Martin

Painter Agnes Martin

This article relates to The Dry Season

In The Dry Season, Melissa Febos seeks out stories of creative women who might serve as models for the kind of artistic life she hopes to pursue following a period of self-enforced celibacy. One of these forebears is the abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. In Martin, Febos encounters a creative visionary whose own inspiration seemed almost mystically acquired, but who didn't believe in God; she also admires the value Martin placed on self-understanding above all. "The intellect has nothing to do with artwork," Febos quotes Martin as saying, "A lot of people will think that social understanding or something like that is going to lead us to the truth, but it isn't. It is understanding of yourself."

Martin didn't truly settle into her calling until midlife. Born in Saskatchewan in 1912, she immigrated to the United States in 1932 to complete training in art education. Settling in Taos, New Mexico, she eventually began to pursue her own artwork, which at the time consisted of abstract, organic forms. After being scouted by gallery owner Betty Parsons, she was convinced to move to New York City in the mid-1950s, where she befriended other artists such as Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly, who all lived and worked on a waterfront street called Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan.

Martin's early work in Manhattan is reminiscent of the paintings she did in Taos; in the 1960s, however, she landed on what would become her signature style and subsequently destroyed most of her earlier work that fell outside that mode. Her paintings were typically created on six-foot square canvases on which she drafted minimalist rectangular grids in pencil, drawn by hand and with subtle background variations in pattern or hue. This blend of symmetry and repetition, combined with the subtle imperfections created by her hand-drawn lines, induces a meditative quality that has been likened to viewing a Rothko painting. Martin sought to create art that was entirely outside subject or form, that evoked the same emotions as being immersed in the natural world: "There's nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It's a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, you wouldn't want anything else."

Martin's life was beset with personal loss and with mental illness; diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, dealing with the death of a close friend and the impending sale of her New York City studio, she returned to New Mexico in 1967 and stopped painting for several years. In her later work, Martin abandoned the strict grid format in favor of horizontal and vertical lines, and she introduced more colors. She continued working into her 80s and began to see significant artistic recognition and commercial success in later years, before her death in 2004 at the age of 92.

Appreciation of Martin's work has only increased since her death; she's one of only a handful of women artists whose work has sold at auction for upwards of $1 million. Her 1961 painting Grey Stone II was sold in 2023 for $16 million, twice its estimate. Only 60 of her iconic grid artworks have survived, so their rarity compounds their unique beauty.

In The Dry Season, Febos is inspired by Martin to channel her own fierceness and restlessness into art; "She had … chosen the life she wanted, a life that would structure and direct the insurmountable forces intrinsic in her," Febos writes. Febos isn't the only writer to find inspiration in Martin's art; no fewer than three recent collections of poetry—by Lauren Camp, Victoria Chang, and Brian Teare—are directly informed by Martin's life and work.

Agnes Martin in 1997, by Caroline Andrieu, CC BY-SA 4.0

Filed under Music and the Arts

This article relates to The Dry Season. It first ran in the June 4, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

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