LIFE WORK.(exhibits of paintings by Agnes Martin, at PaceWildenstein gallery, NYC, and at Dia Beacon Center)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 07-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Agnes Martin, who is now ninety-two years old, has a show of surprising new paintings at PaceWildenstein on East Fifty-seventh Street. Meanwhile, an exhibition of twenty-one paintings from the years when she was emerging as an important artist, 1957-64, has opened at Dia:Beacon, in Beacon, New York. This is a good time to take stock of Martin, the ascetic abstractionist, and of the dedicated idealism, an ever more troublesome characteristic of modern art, for which she stands. Her work is too often regarded as a sidelight to sculpture-intensive minimalism. She was, and remains, a contemporary of the Abstract Expressionists, affected (she rejects the notion of "influence") by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and, notably, her friend and fellow-admirer of Eastern art and mysticism Ad Reinhardt. In the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties, Reinhardt developed what he called the "last painting": velvety black cruciform compositions of barely perceptible squares. Martin's classic pencilled grids, washed with neutral or pale colors on square canvases, are similarly gaunt and meditative, while considerably less doomy. A few days after Reinhardt died, in 1967, Martin gave away her art supplies and abandoned New York, not to paint again for...

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