Women in Art: Quiet Obliteration · Chapter 02 · Steady
Agnes Martin
Martin's canvases are almost exactly six feet square, which is to say: your size. Meeting one is a physical event before it is a visual one.
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The first fact about an Agnes Martin painting is a measurement. For most of her working life the canvas was six feet square — the span of a pair of outstretched arms, roughly the height of a standing person. You do not look down at it or up at it. You meet it at your own scale, which is a decision about manners as much as composition.
The second fact is the pencil. Martin drew her horizontals in graphite, freehand along a straightedge, across a ground of thin acrylic wash. Get close and the lines waver. They thicken where the pencil caught the weave and vanish where it skipped. A machine could have made this grid; a machine did not.
Where Kusama's arcs accumulate until the ground disappears, Martin's lines hold a space open. The grid does not fill the canvas — it measures it, and the pale wash goes on breathing underneath. Nothing is being covered. Something is being steadied.
She resisted being filed under minimalism and put herself closer to the abstract expressionists, on the grounds that the paintings were about feeling rather than about geometry. Her titles say so out loud: Happiness. Friendship. Gratitude. It is disarming to stand in front of an austere grey grid called Happiness and discover that the title is not ironic.
Nothing is being covered. Something is being steadied.
In 1967 Martin left New York, gave away her materials and stopped painting for around seven years. She travelled, then settled in New Mexico and built her own studio before she began again. It is one of the few cases in modern art where a long silence is documented as a choice rather than reconstructed as a collapse.
From music people expect pure emotion, but for art they demand explanation.
Stand at arm's length and find one line. Follow it all the way across. Somewhere in the six feet it will hesitate — a fractional drift, a place where the graphite goes pale. That hesitation is the difference between a grid and a ruled page, and it is why the painting reads as calm rather than as cold.
Martin is here to break the assumption Kusama sets up. The same procedure — a small mark, thousands of times, at the scale of a body — can dissolve a self or steady one. Which it does is a matter of what the maker was after, and you can see the difference in the marks.