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

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 four years. She settled on a mesa in New Mexico, where she still lives. She is something of a recluse, though garrulous in interviews.

"When I first made a grid," Martin said, in 1989, of her breakthrough, in 1960, "I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, This is my vision." In 1966, in an often quoted statement, she wrote, "My paintings have neither objects nor space nor time nor anything--no forms. They are light, lightness, about merging, about formlessness, breaking down form." Her rather blowsy theories, invoking nature in strictly heady ways and harping on "perfection," consort oddly with her pragmatic, unsentimental practice. Martin's art is flinty in its abnegations and materialist--resistant to metaphor--in its effects. As with Tantric diagrams, you see exactly what the work is, even as, with patient looking, you may undergo a gradual, and then sudden, soft detonation of beauty. Canadian-born, Martin calls to mind her countryman Glenn Gould, who proved at the piano that, contrary to conventional wisdom, perfection is not beyond human grasp. There are human costs to gaining it, of course. It tends to obliterate personality.

Geography matters. Martin is from Saskatchewan, up north on the tabletop of the Great Plains. Being from North Dakota myself, I feel a spark of identification with her art's dry, chilly lyricism. There is nothing cuddly about nature in that neck of the non-woods, where vicious cold and exhausting heat, ceaseless wind, and, alternating underfoot, snow, ice, sucking mud, and black dust try the soul. By way of compensation, there's sky. A tremendous inverted bowl bells down over every horizon--affording far-distant glimpses of other people's weather. The god of the plains is an orthodox minimalist, specializing in brute coups of uninflected space and light. Checkerboard roads and evenly distributed grainery towns--mapped in advance, at the time of settlement, by governmental and railroad bureaucrats--advertise humanity as a complementing force of sublime, heartless logic. A sense of existence as seamless and intractable--all one hard thing--crushes and exalts the plains dweller, inducing both humility and lofty thoughts.

Martin came to New York in 1957 at the insistence of her first dealer here--the prestigious Betty Parsons--and she lived and worked downtown, by the East River, on Coenties Slip. She shared the neighborhood with Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, and several other fomenters of tough-minded responses to the triumphs of Abstract Expressionism. All sought sturdy formats for painting that would face up to the masters while eschewing the he-man egomania that marred much of the "second generation" New ...