Agnes Martin
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Agnes Martin Details
From Publishers Weekly Painter Agnes Martin's quietly radiant geometric abstractions reflect her quest to capture moments of beauty or transcendence of ego and petty distractions. Her personal philosophy, as reflected in her semimystical writings, seems an amalgam of the Bible, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, William Blake and positive thinking. Featuring 60 color and 40 black-and-white plates, the volume profiles the Saskatchewan-born artist, now 80, who participated in the heyday of New York abstract expressionism and later settled in New Mexico. Whitney curator Haskell charts Martin's shifts from landscape to biomorphic abstractions to minimalism. Chave, a Hunter College art historian, looks at Martin's calm, grid-like compositions. Krauss, a professor at the City University of New York, endorses Martin's claim to be a classicist in the objective tradition of Egyptians, Greeks and Copts. This catalogue accompanies a traveling exhibition that opened at New York City's Whitney Museum. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more
Reviews
Lucky me, I found this in a local public library! But it is too bad I cannot buy this as it is out of print. Unlike other art books, this book is not limited to pictures but has lots of useful information to read.Agnes Martin died in December of 2004. I encountered her art in March of 2005. I have a lot of catching up to do, for she was in the art world for many many years until her death at age of 92. This book has certainly been helping me on the catching up.The best part of this book, to me, is the selected wrinting of Agnes Martin. Her writing, just like her art work, is characterized by contentment, conciseness, and beauty.This book is extremely informative for artists especially minimalist and abstract artists. Not only showing us her version of beauty, but also her version of the definition of good art and bad art are explained here in a very clear form. Agnes Martin was indeed an ORIGINAL being after all. This book comfirms it.