The Brooklyn Rail

In 1999, Agnes Martin (1912–2004) showed eight Innocent Love paintings at the Dia Art Foundation, which had commissioned them. They are late works, a kind of aesthetic culmination. The exhibition at Pace is an extrapolation of that series: thirteen paintings created between 1999 and 2002. To fathom them and the rest of Martin’s oeuvre, we should consider Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965) on the difference between abstraction and representation. Worringer makes a statement in his 1907 book Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style that leads directly to Martin’s paintings:

The simple line and its development in purely geometrical regularity was bound to offer the greatest possibility of happiness to the man disquieted by the obscurity and entanglement of phenomena. For here the last trace of connection with, and dependence on, life has been effaced, here the highest absolute form, the purest abstraction has been achieved; here is law, here is necessity, while everywhere else the caprice of the organic prevails. But such abstraction does not make use of any natural object as a model.

For Worringer, abstraction is a psychological stance, in contradistinction to what he calls “empathy,” the desire to create representational art. Agnes Martin embodied the abstract point of view, but that fact does not explain the affective aspect of her work.

Nancy Princenthal, in the epilogue to her 2015 biography of Martin, records her consternation on reencountering in MoMA Martin’s 1964 The Tree, a painting that enthralled her as an adolescent: “I found it static and coldly white. It was a dismaying moment; I sat on a bench with pad and pen in hand and saw nothing but pencil lines and paint.” This even though Princenthal, who corresponded with Martin as a student, knew the artist cherished the painting about which she said, “When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.”

Worringer and Martin describe a process, a transition, or a translation. He insists on escape from the “entanglement of phenomena,” while Martin associates a moral condition (innocence) with the organic (trees) and then extracts from that linkage a grid. She then paints the grid and is satisfied, like God in Genesis 1:31 after the creation. Worringer and Martin describe multiple steps: erasure in the case of Worringer, an effacement of life, and Martin an achieving of a vision of purity that expresses itself as a grid. Both practices defy rational analysis because they transcend rationality that take place in the subconscious, where memory, experience, and imagination mix freely.

And that leads us back to Princenthal’s disquiet and the effect of Agnes Martin’s work, enchanted as a teenager, left deflated as an adult, ultimately recovering her enthusiasm. Yet another process, but one we must consider whenever we deal with Agnes Martin. The graphite lines on a muted white surface make The Tree a forbidding work; we may surrender to it, adore it, or flee in fear. That would certainly cover possible reactions if we were seeing Martin’s work for the first time, but she was such a presence in the art world for such a long time that even if we hadn’t studied her work with the ardor of a scholar, we would certainly have some foreknowledge of it, some expectations.

Thanks to color, the Innocent Love paintings are Agnes Martin at her most humane and seeing so many of these wonderful canvases in one place enhances our understanding of her work. We are surrounded by Agnes Martin, while seeing a single Martin painting—like Princenthal at MoMA—can arouse repulsion. Being immersed in Martin is an immersion in the idea of abstraction. We focus on color, on intervals within each painting, on the rhythmic dots her pencil made as it jogged over the canvas surface.

Love (2000), a 60-by-60-inch work (the size of all the paintings in the show) may speak for all thirteen pieces. In a happy mood, Martin gave all but one of these paintings joyful titles (Gratitude [2001], Lovely Life [1999], Tranquility [2000]), perhaps to give viewers a positive feeling. No single painting dominates the others, but simultaneously, no canvas gets subsumed into another, something that can happen in shows where the works all resemble one another. To assume that the title somehow confers meaning on the work would be a mistake. There is, to echo Worringer, no dependence on life outside the canvas. The three broad bands of pale blue separated by white intervals are like an Alban Berg musical composition. The white spaces are not absences but significant markers, as if the blue were an affirmation of being while the white constitutes a recognition of nothingness, meaning there is no intimation of immortality (the painting) without an assent to mortality (the artist).