41 Facts About Agnes Martin

Agnes Bernice Martin was an American abstract painter known for her minimalist style and abstract expressionism.

Agnes Martin's works were predominantly monochromatic, employing colors like black, white, and brown with great subtlety.

Agnes Martin's career included numerous exhibitions, totaling over 85 solo shows, and participation in major events such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta.

Agnes Martin's work earned recognition for its unique contribution to contemporary art, and she received awards like the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998.

Agnes Martin was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004.

Agnes Bernice Martin was born in 1912 to Scottish Presbyterian farmers in Macklin, Saskatchewan, one of four children.

Agnes Martin moved to the United States in 1931 to help her pregnant sister, Maribel, in Bellingham, Washington.

Agnes Martin preferred American higher education and became an American citizen in 1950.

Agnes Martin took a multitude of studio classes at Teachers College and began to seriously consider a career as an artist.

Agnes Martin moved to New York City in 1957 and lived in a loft in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan.

Agnes Martin often employed a feminist lens when she critiqued fellow artists' work.

Agnes Martin was publicly known to have schizophrenia, although it was undocumented until 1962.

Agnes Martin did have the support of her friends from the Coenties Slip, who came together after one of her episodes to enlist the help of a respected psychiatrist, who as an art collector was a friend to the community.

Agnes Martin left New York City abruptly in 1967, disappearing from the art world to live alone.

Agnes Martin rented a 50-acre property and lived a simple life in an adobe home that she built for herself, adding four other buildings over the years.

Subsequently, Agnes Martin started to write and lecture at various universities about her work.

Agnes Martin built an adobe home there too, still choosing an austere lifestyle.

Agnes Martin's work is most closely associated with Taos, with some of her early work visibly inspired by the desert environment of New Mexico.

In 1961 Agnes 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, Agnes Martin famously abandoned her life in New York.

Agnes Martin 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.

Agnes Martin collaborated with architect Bill Katz in 1974 on a log cabin she would use as her studio.

Agnes Martin went on further to state that she could not conceive of working in any other space in New York.

Agnes Martin praised Mark Rothko for having "reached zero so that nothing could stand in the way of truth".

Agnes Martin worked in only black, white, and brown before moving to New Mexico.

Exhibitions continue to be mounted since her death in 2004, including Agnes Martin: Closing the Circle, Early and Late from February 10,2006 to March 04,2006 at Pace Gallery.

The exhibit focused on many, never seen before, works Agnes Martin created at Columbia, Coentis Slip and early years in New Mexico.

Agnes Martin was featured in White on the White: Color, Scene, and Space in Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.

From October 2015 through April 2016, Agnes Martin was exhibited in Opening the Box: Unpacking Minimalism at The George Economou Collection in Athens, Greece alongside Dan Flavin and Donald Judd.

Agnes Martin has featured in the ongoing exhibition Intuitive Progression at the Fisher Landau Center for Art in Long Island City, New York from February 2017 to August 2017.

Agnes Martin was featured in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at The Museum of Modern Art in Midtown, New York which shined a light on women artists who worked post World War II and before the start of the Feminist movement.

Agnes Martin's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

Agnes Martin's work is on "long-term view" and part of the permanent holdings of Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York.

International holdings of Agnes Martin's work include the Tate, London and Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden.

In 2007, Agnes Martin's Loving Love was sold for $2.95 million at Christie's, New York.

Agnes Martin became an inspiration to younger artists, from Eva Hesse to Ellen Gallagher.

Agnes Martin's image is included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson.

No-one who has seriously spent time before an Agnes Martin, letting its peace communicate itself, receiving its inexplicable and ineffable happiness, has ever been disappointed.

Poet Hugh Behm-Steinberg's poem "Gridding, after some sentences by Agnes Martin" discusses patterns in the natural world, makes a parallel between writing and painting, and ends with a line about the poet's admiration of Martin's work.

Agnes Martin's work inspired a Google doodle on the 102nd anniversary of her birth on March 22,2014.

The song "Agnes Martin" by American rock band Screaming Females, from their album All at Once, is an ode to the artist.