Me on Agnes Martin

My appreciation piece:

Back in August, a friend of mine and I vacationed in Taos, N.M. We planned to enjoy the typical vacation activities -- like hiking through the nearby mountains -- but we had another idea too. Agnes Martin, one of America's greatest artists, lived in Taos. We wanted to take her out to lunch. 

Martin died today in Taos. She was 92. Martin was known for delicate, fragile, beautifully minimal paintings, often based on grids or other geometric constructs. She painted until the end of her life, showing new work at New York's Pace Wildenstein gallery as recently as June.

Normally I'd never consider cold-calling an artist and inviting them out. But a couple of years ago an artist friend of mine, John Dumbacher, visited Taos. John, who like me had never met Martin, figured he had nothing to lose by calling her to see if she'd like to join him and his brother for a meal.

He called her from his hotel and asked her out to breakfast the next day. Martin quickly agreed and suggested that the brothers pick her up outside her retirement home, Plaza de Retiro, at 8 am. John made sure he was on time.

At breakfast, they talked about art and art-making. John had seen photographs of Martin's apartment and noticed that she hadn't decorated it with any of her own paintings, so he asked her about it.

"Do you have any of your own paintings in the apartment?" he asked her.

Martin looked at him like he was stupid. "Well, no" she said. "They all sell."

That memory fresh in my mind, at about 11 o'clock of my first morning in Taos, I took a deep breath and called to ask the great artist out to lunch. Her caregiver answered the phone. I explained who I was and why I was calling, and she took down my phone number, where I was staying, and how long I'd be in Taos. (I later found out that Martin loved it when people called like this.) The caregiver explained that "Miss Martin" was still asleep and slept much of the day, but that if she was up to calling me back while I was in Taos, she certainly would.

After I finished talking with the caregiver, a friend and I walked from our hotel to The Harwood Museum of Art. In 1947, when Martin was a graduate student, Martin received her first museum exposure in a show at the Harwood. "Among the more advanced students, Agnes Martin and Earl Stroh have turned out some excellent work," the local media reported at the time.

For most of her life, Martin maintained a special connection with Taos and with the Harwood. With the exception of ten years spent in New York City, Martin lived in northern New Mexico from 1952 until she died. In 1994, Martin made a suite of seven paintings that received their debut at the Harwood. Hung in a temporarily constructed eight-sided gallery, the show was such a success that the museum built a permanent eight-sided gallery to house the paintings. After the paintings were installed in 1997, Martin herself visited the gallery frequently, even as recently as six months ago. Visiting this gallery was one of the reasons I'd traveled to Taos.

It is one of the most special galleries of art in America. The seven paintings are all five-feet square, and are built from horizontal lines and a pale blue wash. The room is gently lit: Natural light falls in from a conical skylight and the hardwood floor distributes the light throughout the space. A single bulb, about 40 watts worth, lights each canvas.

The paintings surrounded me; their delicateness intimidated me into silence. Even the sound of my pants rustling as I walked from painting to painting seemed intrusive. I quickly realized that the best way to experience Martin's paintings was to stand still in front of them and to allow myself to not just look at them, but to feel the experience of being in this place.

Ever since that visit, I've thought about how the key to enjoying Martin's paintings is less in looking at them and more in absorbing their presence. "This poem, like the paintings, is not really about nature," Martin once wrote. "It is not what is seen. It is what is known forever in the mind."

Despite spending four days in Taos, I never heard from Martin. That didn't surprise me – I'd heard rumors that her health was failing. As I drove out of town, I thought about the show of her work that I'd seen at Pace in June, the show that turned out to be her final exhibit. Those paintings had pale backgrounds. In the middle of several of the paintings were large, black geometric shapes. That day, I remembered those paintings with a great deal of discomfort. Abstract painters do not paint crows flying over wheat fields as Vincent Van Gogh did just before he died, I thought to myself, they tell us what they are feeling in different ways.