I included an Agnes Martin piece as part of my desktop portrait. Her paintings as seen on a computer screen do not do them justice. The scale and subtlety in her pieces cannot be conveyed unless you see them in person, so while I include some pictures here, it won’t be the same.
Martin said she was not trying to paint anything of or from the world, but instead was trying to paint inspiration and emotion itself.
The famous art dealer Arne Glimcher says this about Agnes Martin:
“Agnes was totally interested in the internal response not the external. She did a cycle of six paintings that MoMA owns, they’re called “With My Back To The World.” The title was the expression of the fact that her work does not refer to anything outside the mind – that it’s all internalised.”
There are a couple quotes from her that I really like.
From music people accept pure emotion but from art they demand explanation.
Even though the next couple of sentences are explanation of her art, I think they may add some useful background to her process. She abandoned the New York art world in 1967 and moved to New Mexico. She lived in adobe homes that she built herself. She was gay. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She was friends with artists like Ad Reinhardt and Bruce Nauman. She lived alone most of her life alone, and when she died in 2004, she hadn’t read a newspaper in over 50 years.
If you wake up in the morning and feel very happy, about nothing, no cause, that’s what I paint about, the subtle emotions that we feel without cause in this world.
As Martin’s paintings became popular with collectors, she became wealthy but never moved out of her homes in New Mexico. Instead, she donated millions of dollars to charity, especially organizations who helped marginalized groups and victims of domestic violence.
2020 Foundations 