22 July 2026

Agnes Martin’s paintings can save you

The painter was a confusing character who once tried “not to talk for three years”

Painting by Agnes Martin/ Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images

Agnes Martin is the painter we need today. In 1991, she wrote that: “To a detached person the complication of the involved life is like chaos” – but an uninvolved life now seems an impossible dream. Her solution, rather than face that chaos, was to number herself among those “people that look out with their back to the world”. For 50 years she never read a newspaper and for large swathes of time she lived not just alone but in isolation. Her paintings – large, abstract grids in muted colours – are therefore, she said, “about freedom from the cares of this world, from worldliness”.

Nevertheless, Martin (1912-2004) came of age artistically at a time when New York had just superseded Paris as the centre of the modern art world. She moved there, at the behest of her high-profile dealer Betty Parsons, in 1957, and it was a febrile moment. The abstract expressionists had just transformed what art could be; the likes of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning were still experimenting and Jackson Pollock had died in a car accident only the previous year. Her peers belonged to the succeeding generation who built on the AbEx advances, among them Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist and Robert Indiana, who, like her, lived or painted in the refurbished industrial buildings of Coenties Slip. This was very much the involved life.

Although Martin spent ten years in New York, a period that cemented her name, it was not her natural home. Nor did she fully identify with any of the emerging schools of paintings there. Although she felt an affinity with the abstract expressionists, her carefully cerebral and geometric pictures didn’t really fit with any of the styles associated with the group. She was co-opted into the emerging minimalists alongside the likes of Donald Judd and Frank Stella, but never felt she belonged with them either. Rather, she thought of her work as being “in the classic tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind”. Then, after a decade in the city, and having destroyed much of the biomorphic art of her younger years, she abruptly sold her painting materials and left.

But then, Martin was not a straightforward character. She was born in Saskatchewan in Canada and moved to America in 1931, although she didn’t become a citizen until 1950. Her artistic training took place at Teachers College, Columbia University and, at an opposite pole, at Albuquerque in New Mexico. While she never spoke about her sexuality it seems clear that she was gay. She also suffered from paranoid schizophrenia: for much of her life she heard voices, and suffered hallucinations and catatonic episodes. She underwent electrocompulsive therapy and both pharmaceutical and talking treatments (after one bout her Coenties Slip friends clubbed together to pay for a psychiatrist).

When she left New York she spent 18 months roaming and camping across Canada and the US, a period during which she decided to try “not to talk for three years”, before settling in New Mexico and building herself an adobe house there, 20 miles from the nearest highway. What she didn’t do was make art.

Martin is a rare sighting in the UK, the only paintings of hers in public collections being five works belonging to the Tate. There is, however, an exceptionally choice selection of her work at Dia Beacon, an hour north of New York City on the Hudson River, running until April 2027. The museum occupies the huge former Nabisco biscuit company packaging factory and offers generous display spaces – white-walled and top-lit – for artists of the 1960s and 1970s, and is perfectly suited to Martin’s monastic aesthetic. The exhibition contains works from both her New York years and those she made when she resumed painting in 1974 after the unexplained hiatus.

Martin believed that the function of art is “the renewal of memories of moments of perfection”, and for her these memories took abstract rather than representational form. Hers are not landscape paintings but certainly carry recollections of the prairies of her homeland and the empty expanses of New Mexico, too: her horizontal grids offering versions of flat horizon lines. Her pictures, she said, are “really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape… my response to nature is really a response to beauty”. Living alone in the scrublands gave her plenty of time to think about that response.

She chose a format of 6ft-by-6ft canvases (in 1993, feeling less physically capable of working at such a scale, she reduced the canvases to 5ft by 5ft) and a taut formal vocabulary rendered by pencil, brushes and a tonal range from greys and off-whites to pale pinks and blues. Within these self-imposed confines, she experimented endlessly.

The 6ft by 6ft was, she said, related to the human body, “a size you can walk into”. What it allowed, when viewed from an appropriate distance, was both an immersive painted surface that filled the entire field of vision and a close focus on the surface itself – simultaneously open-ended and minutely detailed. The surfaces, usually with an opaque gesso base, were overpainted with thin washes to give translucency and incised or overlain by pencil grids and lines.

This could easily be arid, but Martin never aimed for mechanical faultlessness. Follow her lines and they often have a faint wobble or end in an accidental mis-stroke. And when using an aid she didn’t draw one long continuous line but criss-crossed the canvas with a small ruler, each intersection, as one 12-inch mark meets the next, being a small point of imperfection. It is in these surface details that the meditative nature of her pictures is best felt, both her own total concentration and the clear sense that every mark held meaning – part of the ongoing search for “the Ideal in one’s own mind” – and that of the viewer.

If a painting by Rothko works, through long looking, in the throb and hum of the colours, then Martin’s work achieves a similar effect with almost no colour at all: the former a filling of space and the latter its emptying, with just a residual structure left behind. Neither leaves any room for extraneous thought.

To make art like this she believed she needed to be solitary: “I suggest to artists that you take every opportunity of being alone, that you give up having pets and unnecessary companions.” It was a stricture she herself sometimes fought against: she travelled and exhibited widely and had assorted friends and acquaintances, including the artists Richard Tuttle and the grande dame of American painting, Georgia O’Keeffe, who, like Martin, had found her own form of New Mexican seclusion at nearby Abiquiú. Martin and O’Keeffe even once planned a round-the-world trip together by freighter, although Martin admitted that O’Keeffe’s energy merely depleted her own: “I don’t know how I ever would have sailed around the world with her. I would’ve been asleep.”

For all her urge to stand with her “back to the turmoil” she never quite managed it. But seeming contradictions have a place in her quiet and encompassing art, too. After all, she believed that “anything can be painted without representation”.

[Further reading: The shame of the Frida Kahlo industry]