Agnes Martin
Pioneer, Painter, Icon
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This is an intimate and revealing biography of Agnes Martin, renowned American painter, considered one of the great women artists of the 20th and 21st Century. A resident of both New Mexico and New York City, Martin has always remained an enigma due to her fiercely guarded private life. Henry Martin, award-winning writer, and art scholar, having access to those who were close to Agnes Martin—friends, family, former lovers—gives us a full portrait of this universally revered artist. Readers will learn of her bouts with mental illness, her several significant lesbian relationships, and her lifelong yearning for recognition despite her reclusive lifestyle and need for privacy. Arriving in the wake of major international retrospective exhibitions of her work from London's Tate Modern, LACMA in Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim in New York City, this book provides a perspective of Agnes Martin that has not been seen in earlier, more academic works or fine-art monographs. Certain to be a mainstay for readers of the arts, and admirers of the creative spirit, this book also includes rare photographs from Martin's family and friends, many of which have never appeared in a book before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this satisfactory biography, poet Martin (One Complete Person) traces the life of pioneering painter Agnes Martin (1912 2004, no relation to the author) from a tomboyish introvert growing up in rural Saskatchewan Canada in the 1920s to a world-renowned abstract expressionist. The author maps out the evolution of Martin's work as she moved away from her early narrative style to the meditative line drawings from the middle of her career, in which she began to embrace the freedom of abstraction that came to characterize her most well-known work. The author notes that Martin "offered her work as a kind of therapy to the onlooker" and that it also functioned as a form of healing for her schizophrenia, serving as both therapy and spiritual exercise in her search for inner peace. The scholarship is thin; most of the book's insights come from other sources, including numerous interviews with the artist's inner circle of friends and family, which author Martin conducted as researcher for the documentary film, Agnes Martin: Before the Grid. The book fitfully outlines the arc of Agnes Martin's career, but readers seeking more in-depth, critical analysis of Martin's creative process should look to Nancy Princenthal's 2015 book
