Agnes Martin and Me
Category: Kindle Store,Kindle eBooks,Arts & Photography
Agnes Martin and Me Details
Agnes Martin (1912-2004) is an artist shrouded in myth. Emotionally and artistically tortured, exquisitely sensitive yet socially inept, Martin has come to personify a contradictory genius and iconic figure in 20th-century art. The Canadian born artist started to make a name for herself in the New York art scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s after being discovered by legendary gallery owner Betty Parson. However, in 1967, she abandoned her career by leaving New York City to live a primarily reclusive life in the deserts of New Mexico and did not return to her work for nearly a decade. Several years after she began creating art again, photographer Donald Woodman met the artist in 1977 and remained a fixture in her life until 1984. While there have been books exploring Martin’s work never before has there been an honest, first-person narrative about a substantial portion of her life. Woodman achieves this in the bold and beautifully written new book AGNES MARTIN AND ME (Lyon Art Books; May 2016; Trade Paperback; $18.95). Woodman’s account is unique in that he was exposed to the raw, unveiled person throughout the seven rollercoaster years during which the two were in constant contact with each other. Throughout the book, a new portrait of Agnes Martin is painted – one very different from what has been written about her art and personal life. Woodman replaces the oracular metaphysics and Zen-inflected edicts with that of a maddening, self-centered, needy, and abusive, if brilliant, artist suffering from mental illness and in denial about her sexuality. From their first meeting where Martin admits that “the voices” told her that their lives were to intersect, he recounts what she did and what she said over their long, alternating cycles of dependence on one another. At the heart of AGNES MARTIN AND ME is the 1978 misguided and dangerous river excursion through the Northwest Territories of Canada that was a lifelong dream of Martin’s and on which Woodman embarked as her keeper, guide, and companion. Upon returning from this trip, the two co-existed on a plot of land owned by Woodman in Galisteo, New Mexico, where her cycles of depression, spitefulness, genius, and eventually incapacitation from schizophrenia were played out before Woodman’s eyes. Complemented by Woodman’s remarkable photographs and Martin’s handwritten notes to him, AGNES MARTIN AND ME reveals a missing chapter of the life of this long misunderstood and complicated figure in contemporary American art.
Reviews
I've always been able to separate out the person from the artist, but I have to admit, Agnes Martin, as depicted here, was a challenge. This is not the Agnes Martin one meets in "With My Back to the World," the lovable, self-reliant, wise old philosopher owl. Agnes is clearly mentally unstable, possibly bi-polar or worse, and treats her dedicated colleague with an indifference and a cruelty that borders on sadistic. That Woodman admits to his own emotional infirmities is in his favor. What his book drove home to me more than anything is how treacherous the pursuit of art can be, what a constant emotional, economic, psychological and physical strain the artist's life can be. It really is, for many, a vocation, bordering on the monastic. Anyone thinking of pursuing art professionally should probably read this. Martin's observations on her relationship with her NY art dealer, her contention that Mark Rothko was murdered by his own dealer, and watching Woodman barter, scrape and beg just to stay afloat, is at once revelatory and infuriating.