The Art Of Agnes Martin And
Fig. 49Florence Miller Pierce, Untitled (Orange Pure), 1994Resin on Plexiglas mirror, 24 x 24 in. (61 x 61 cm)Fig. 50Florence Miller Pierce, Untitled #252 (Green Slot), 1998Resin on Plexiglas mirror, 16 x 16 in. (40.6 x 40.6 cm)Collection of Jayne D. Murrel, Newport Beach, CaliforniaCollection of Jayne D. Murrel, Newport Beach, California8687
Mapping an Internal World:The Art of Agnes Martin andFlorence Miller PierceTimothy Robert RodgersAgnes Martin and Florence Miller Pierce had dramatic life stories to tell.Born in Canada in 1912, Martin lost her father when she was two yearsold. At the age of nineteen she moved to the United States to attendcollege, first at Western Washington College of Education and then atTeachers College, Columbia University, New York. She moved to New Mexico in thelate 1940s to undertake graduate work and eventually to teach at the University ofNew Mexico, Albuquerque. During her graduate studies she visited Taos innorthern New Mexico, where she stayed and lived the life of an impoverishedartist. Although without a constant partner, Martin established close relationshipswith women. The New York gallerist Betty Parsons “discovered” her work in 1957and persuaded her to move to the city to advance her career. Martin settled intoCoenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, surrounded by fellow artists includingRobert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, and Ann Wilson. In 1967 sheexperienced a personal crisis, gave away her possessions, moved back to NewMexico, lived a very simple life, and stopped painting for almost seven years. Whenshe resumed making art, she created—almost without exception—square canvasesand works on paper covered with horizontal bands. She did this for her remainingthirty years.Pierce was born in 1918 to parents who owned and operated the CountrysideSchool in Washington, D.C. She studied art at the Phillips Collection and at the ageof seventeen traveled to Taos to study painting with Emil Bisttram. In 1938 shereturned to Taos and resumed her tutelage under Bisttram. She married fellowstudent Horace Towner Pierce the same year, and both became official membersof Bisttram’s Transcendental Painting Group. Their first child died shortly after beingborn in 1939. The couple moved to New York the following year, enjoyed the birthof another child, experienced the economic harshness of the city, and moved toFig. 51Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963Oil and graphite on canvas, 71 7/8 x 72 in. (182.6 x 182.9 cm)San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Moses Lasky8889
Fig. 52Florence Miller PierceUntitled Totem 4A, 1967Balsa wood, oil pigment251/8 x 8 3/4 x 71/2 in.(64 x 22.2 x 19.1 cm)Collection of Jayne D. Murrel,Newport Beach, CaliforniaWashington, D.C., to live with Florence’s parents. Two years later they moved toLos Angeles, where Pierce appeared in Maya Deren’s and Alexander Hammid’sexperimental film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) as a cloaked woman in a mirroredmask. The family returned to New Mexico in 1946. Occupied with raising a familyand lacking financial resources, Pierce produced little art during the 1950s. Then herhusband died in 1958. After his death, and continuing until the mid-1960s, Piercecreated art infrequently. When she resumed working, she started to make suchsculptures as Untitled Totem 4A (fig. 52). In 1969 she began to experiment withcolored resin poured on Plexiglas mirrors. Until her death in 2007 she continuedto refine the resin works.Thus, both Martin and Pierce had disjointed lives marked by poverty,ambition, death, and crisis. Both stopped producing art for a period of time andmade radical changes in their artistic style when they resumed, devoting the finalphase of their careers to reductive art that was repetitive, geometric, and luminous.Although Martin’s and Pierce’s art does not obviously connect to significant eventsin their external lives, both artists thought of their work as highly personal. Theyshared a belief in the power of art to link the external world with the world ofinternal experience. This internal reality of spirituality, emotion, memories, andimagination certainly made oblique reference to lived events, but the art theyproduced was a highly refined, abstract vision fueled largely by their innerworkings. The reasons why both women would be inspired by the internal ratherthan the external world have much to do with their training, their peers, and thepersonae they created for themselves as artists.Like most trained artists working in the twentieth century, Martin and Piercewere aware of the writings of Wassily Kandinsky. His book Über das Geistige inder Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art; 1911) called for artists to cull their innerspiritual world for artistic inspiration. Such advice encouraged many to exploreEastern religions and alternative religious practices advocated by theosophists andothers. Martin, for example, studied Taoism and Zen at Columbia University, andPierce befriended the artist Auriel Bessimer, an advocate of theosophy, while livingin Washington, D.C. These ideas and practices became more codified in their artwhen they both linked themselves to artistic movements, Martin to AbstractExpressionism and Pierce to the Transcendental Painting Group.That Martin considered herself to be an Abstract Expressionist may seemodd. But the fact that her best-known works, composed of pale washes of coloroutlined with graphite lines to form horizontal bands, have little visual similarityto the work of Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, for example, caused herlittle concern. She thought of the phrase “abstract expressionism” quite literally.Martin believed that her nonobjective paintings—such as Love, Contentment,Happiness, and Innocent Living from the Innocent Love series (1999; fig. 53)—Fig. 53Agnes MartinInnocent Living (from Innocent Love series), 1999Acrylic and graphite on canvas, 60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm)Lannan Foundation; DIA Art Foundation, long-term loan9091
presented her personal visions and emotions, and so she regarded herself as anAbstract Expressionist.Less surprisingly, Pierce’s association with the Transcendental Painting Groupencouraged her pursuit of her inner consciousness. In a manifesto the members ofthe group declared that they wanted their art to be “vitally rooted in the spiritualneed of these times,” and hoped that it would encourage the “more intensiveparticipation in the life of the spirit.”1 The paintings from this early period arefew, but such works as Rising Red (1942; fig. 54) show a galaxy-like environmentin which brightly colored, superimposed shapes hover and orbit in a flattened,graduated space.From these backgrounds both Martin and Pierce adopted the habit of offeringvague answers to questions about the possible inspirations and interpretationsof their work. Statements about creativity and self-expression, general notions ofspirituality, and detailed descriptions of technique sufficed for explanation andinterpretation of the work. For example, Pierce remembered her early work as beinginspired by emotions that allowed her to delve “beyond the bonds of matter.”2 AndMartin contended that “in the way that you do your work and in the results of yourwork your self is expressed.”3 Such rhetoric and the artistic persona associated withit were fairly common throughout the twentieth century. Encouraged by fellowartists, patrons, and others, such creative people as Martin and Pierce were oftensubtly, and not so subtly, persuaded to remain abstruse. Their art spoke for itself.But what language did it speak?A recent conversation with Harmony Hammond reminded me that even themost reductive works of art can be connected to the life of the artist. I askedHammond how her large, primarily black paintings relate to her earlier feministpractice. The painter explained that she feels literally embodied in the blackpaintings and that the thick paint surfaces serve as a metaphor for human skin. Infact, Hammond is an avid student of martial arts, and the canvases used for thesepaintings are recycled mats that she and her fellow students have soiled with theirsweat, blood, and tears.Uncovering such connections in Minimalist art requires a viewer to besensitive to the smallest of gestures, the briefest of statements. Not all artists areas open and articulate as Hammond, and some of them attempt to undermine andcloak such interpretations. Martin and Pierce said little about how their art relatedto their lives, yet one can argue that they created art that embodied their personalexperiences and psychodynamics.Creating a psychological portrait of an artist based on her art, writing,friendships, interviews, and the things that remain after her death is fraught withdifficulties. Because Martin so often stated that her inspiration came from herdreamlike visions, writers have often interpreted her work as a reflection ofFig. 54Florence Miller Pierce, Rising Red, 1942Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. (91.4 x 91.4 cm)McNay Art Museum, Museum purchase with theRalph A. Anderson Jr. Memorial Fund and the Helen and Everett H. Jones Purchase Fund9293
her inner world. Briony Fer, in her essay “Drawing Drawing: Agnes Martin’s Infinity,”concentrated on Martin’s grid drawings of the 1960s and her attempt to work withthe idea of infinity as seen in her painting Untitled (1964; fig. 55). Citing both herwritings and her drawings, Fer contended that “Martin’s project is a fierce andrelentless seeking out of a utopian vision beneath the threshold of the noticeable.”Earlier in the essay she also wrote that Martin “saw herself searching for an Ideal,which she understood as a memory of perfection—and yet she saw memory as moreintense than original experience.”4 Fer implied in her essay that Martin had a greatdeal of rational control over her art, thinking, and writing. In short, Martin had autopian vision based upon her memories of perfection that she tried to expressthrough her use of the infinity of the grid. And in her writings she explained andsubstantiated this project.Griselda Pollock, in “Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes,” attempted a muchmore complex, theory-driven explanation of Martin’s psychology and art.5 Usingan array of psychoanalytical writings, Pollock tried to show how Martin exploredher sense of self through the creation of her art. She then positioned Martin’s artin opposition to formalist-modernist works done largely by men who hoped toexplore the inhuman world of nature, buildings, and art itself to create their work.Martin’s exploration of the inner world, her inner world, allows viewers to hear andappreciate a female psychology, and thus Martin’s female psychology becomesinscribed into a male-dominated culture.Both these recent writings on Martin offer much to consider. I would, however,like to create a slightly different portrait of Agnes Martin, one based on ideas Iexplored in “Agnes Martin: Portrait of a Mind.”6 Whereas Pollock asserted that“Martin made extremely clear statements about her project, and the conceptionof art, beauty, and the mind that underpinned her practice,” and Fer has madesimilar arguments, I find Martin’s comments on her work to be vague, contradictory,and troubled.7 For example, when Joan Simon interviewed Martin and asked herabout the source of her inspirations, she said: “When I set out to do a painting,I ask for an inspiration. And I follow it.” Simon then asked, “Whom or what areyou asking for inspiration?” “My mind,” replied Martin. “Does it sometimes notanswer?” Simon responded.8Martin’s dissociation from her mind relates to her statements that she heardvoices and saw visions that ultimately guided her art. She liked to put forward thatshe was not doing the work but was instead acting as a medium who guidedthe production of the art. This allowed her to refer to her paintings as lacking theinvestment of ego. But the fact that she painted on a large scale, 5 x 5 or 6 x 6 feet(1.5 x 1.5 or 1.8 x 1.8 m); had yearly exhibitions in New York; presented talks aroundthe world; and compiled and published her writings certainly indicates a degree ofambition and some investment of ego.Fig. 55Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1964Gray wash and white ink on paper, 8 3/4 x 9 1/8 in. (22.2 x 23.2 cm)Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Barry Lowen Collection9495
I point out this contradiction because I do not find that Martin’s actions alwayscorrespond to her writings and spoken words. Her words and her art, in my opinion,often act as covers, as wish fulfillments, for a more complex and troubledpsychology. Martin occasionally hinted at what she struggled to overcome:“Moments of helplessness are moments of blindness. One feels as thoughsomething terrible has happened without knowing what it is. One feels asthough one is in the outer darkness or as though one has made some terribleerror—a fatal error. Our great help that we leaned on in the dark has deserted usand we are in complete panic and we feel that we have got to have help. The panicof complete helplessness drives us to fantastic extremes.”9At another point Martin indicated that the moments of perfection that shewrote about at great length and that were the inspiration for her art—times whenshe described herself as “suddenly becom[ing] very happy” and “wonder[ing] whylife ever seemed troublesome”—were in fact fleeting. In an instant the painter “seesthe road ahead free from difficulties and we think that we will never lose it again.All this and a great deal more in barely a moment, and then it is gone.”10 If we areto believe these passages, Martin’s artworks and writings that reflect moments ofperfection—happiness, if you will—really represent only brief periods in her life.What she dealt with most of her life was despair, panic, helplessness, and anxiety.Her art represented the struggle, the attempt to countervail the darkness thatthreatened to engulf her.Martin’s hospitalizations in New Mexico for psychological issues are commonknowledge. Given her descriptions of dissociation, variability of moods, antisocialepisodes, and narcissistic tendencies, one could speculate that she suffered fromborderline personality disorder. I mention this only because Martin paved the roadfor such considerations. She wanted viewers of her work to explore “the mind andthe adventures within the mind.”11 And because the works are directly linked to herinner world, a viewer must come to terms with the mind that created the art.As I have written, Martin’s work displays both the positive emotions—suchas happiness, joy, and love—that she experienced and/or wanted to experience andthe negative emotions that she hoped to stave off. Viewing the paintings from adistance, I am always struck by their ethereal presence: “Quiet, extraordinarilysensitive, fragile are my adjectives of choice. Rather quickly, however, their lessobvious qualities rise to the surface: obsessive, tense, and unsteady. The neverending horizontal lines, the tension between the canvas and the internal forms,the on-going strife between the graphic lines and washed colors, the quivering ofwords and art, however, should be considered suspect guides that both reflect anddeflect her psychological complexities. Martin’s willingness to examine her innerworld with such painful accuracy needs to be respected and acknowledged and notclouded by broad notions of spirituality and utopianism.Pierce’s inner world did not seem as chaotic as Martin’s. She did not battlewith darkness; rather she struggled to discover and maintain an artistic voice. Martinknew this challenge as well, but Pierce had longer fallow periods and shifted artisticdirection several times before coming to her signature pieces made from resin onmirrored Plexiglas, such as Untitled #604 (Royal Blue) (2002; fig. 56 ) and Untitled(Red Violet) (date unknown; fig. 57).One of the qualities most appreciated about these late works is the luminositythat results from light reflecting off the Plexiglas mirror. The wall sculptures literallychange in response to light conditions. As Joseph Traugott has written:The light bouncing off Pierce’s sculptures alludes to visualequivalents: the purity of white light, the serenity of the slightlyopaque, the passion of red light, and the icy cold of iridescent blues.These emotional correspondences in her work invariably lead manyto describe the mysterious light in Pierce’s sculptures as spiritual. Butthis interpretation is confining and oversimplifies her accomplishments.A broader view concludes that these are conceptual works thatreinforce a humanist notion of time and the permanence of change inour daily lives. Rather than being visually static objects, Pierce’s resinreliefs function as visual counterparts to the human cycles of joyand pain, life and death, death and rebirth.13This, I believe, is the case for the viewer of the work and certainly, to somedegree, the maker. But I would like to connect these resin reliefs to Pierce’s deeperpsychological need to establish her voice in the world and to maintain a healthysense of narcissism.In the essay “In Touch with Light,” Lucy Lippard reported that Pierce stated thatduring the periods in which she produced little art she enjoyed “peace and quiet,but [was] otherwise ‘fallow,’ a family woman.” And in an earlier statement Pierce saidthat she left Los Angeles suddenly because her husband abruptly wanted to leave.“Since he was the ‘boss,’ I acquiesced,” she recalled.14 After her marriage, Pierce, likemany women during the 1950s, followed her husband’s lead as he attempted tothe brush and pencil—all recall the difficult mental and emotional struggleundertaken to produce the work.”12establish himself as an artist and a provider for the family. As a result, what art shedid produce prior to and immediately following her husband’s death in 1958 lackedfocus and direction. The same could have been said of Pierce at this moment.If we are to appreciate Martin’s art for its subjective qualities, then we mustfollow her encouragement and explore her mind no matter which way it turned. HerLike Martin, Pierce found herself confronted by a major personal crisis—inher case, the early death of her husband—that caused her to turn inward for9697Quote now italic,larger and indentedas Karen Mossquotes in firstessay
Fig. 56Florence Miller Pierce, Untitled #604 (Royal Blue), 2002Resin relief, 24 x 24 in. (61 x 61 cm)Florence Miller Pierce Estate; courtesy Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe, New MexicoFig. 57Florence Miller Pierce, Untitled (Red Violet), n.d.Resin relief, 24 x 24 in. (61 x 61 cm)Collection of Jayne D. Murrel, Newport Beach, California9899
inspiration and resolve. Her art ultimately became the means by which shere-established her sense of self. Although she tried several different media for herart, in 1969 she began making what she called “lucamorphs” or “lucimorphs”—worksemploying dripped, colored resin on mirrored surfaces—which she continued toproduce in various shapes and sizes until her death. This type of art fulfilled herneed for affirmation and reassurance. Or, as Pierce contended, it expressed herdesire to create in her art “power and presence, the frank pursuit of beauty,”qualities she sought for herself as well.15For me the mirrored surface is the key to understanding how this type of artgenerated a strengthening of self for Pierce. When Pierce was a painter, she beganwith a blank canvas. At the moment she started a painting, she became aware thatthe canvas surface had a separate existence from that of her internal, imaginedimages. Many artists experience dread and anxiety when confronted by thisseparation. Moreover, this panic can be heightened by the expectations of suchserious painters as her former teacher Emil Bisttram, who would “cross you off thelist if you were not painting.”16 Pierce, who had been producing little art, and fewerpaintings particularly, for almost twenty years, needed considerable strength toreturn to her two-dimensional art. Rather than begin with a blank canvas, shetherefore started a work with a mirrored surface that offered her own reflection. Asshe poured resin over the mirror, she clouded but never entirely lost the reflectionof herself in the work of art. Thus, as the artist added layer after layer of resin ontop of her reflection, she embedded herself into the work and underscored her ownimportance, her own existence.The idea of employing a reflective surface to represent self is an old conceit.Renaissance and Baroque artists often used mirrors to present themselves: forexample, Jan van Eyck’s famous painting The Arnolfini Portrait (1434) includes areflection of the artist in a convex mirror on the rear wall. Or consider Parmigianino’sSelf-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524), which presents a distorted image of thepainter in a small convex mirror. The difference between these works and Pierce’sart is that the early artists painted their reflected images on canvas or panel.Pierce’s use of a mirrored surface connected her even more closely to the work.A more immediate source for Pierce’s use of the mirrored surface as both asymbol for herself and a means to address her psychological needs would be Deren’sand Hammid’s highly regarded avant-garde film Meshes of the Afternoon. Inthis work, Pierce played the pivotal role of the cloaked figure of Death whohaunts Deren’s visions. In the film Pierce eventually turns around and confrontsthe audience and Deren. But instead of finally showing her face, she wears amirrored mask.Critics consider this film to be a feminist classic that presents an empoweredwoman (Deren), in an attempt to counter the typical films of the period that100re-enacted female repression in terms of narrative melodrama. The moment thatPierce presents her mirrored visage has been analysed in terms of Deren’s need fornarcissistic fulfillment and self-affirmation.17 The term “narcissism” has negativeconnotations, but in Freudian terms it can also be viewed as a healthy componentof the psyche. It allows for the psychological substantiation and separation thatfoster the development of a mature voice, something sought by both Derenand Pierce. And the mirror became for both the crucial symbol of this momentof fulfillment.At the beginning of this essay I laid out the bare facts of Martin’s and Pierce’slives, which are difficult to discern in their work. The broad life patterns related toambition, death, and crisis that seeded their psychological terrains can, however, befound in their art. The traces may be faint, the words that the artists used to explaintheir work may be clouded and misleading, but their art, which responded to theirdeepest internal visions and needs, speaks a truth about their inner lives.Notes1. Ed Garman, “The Ideals and the Art ofthe Transcendental Painters,” in TiskaBlankenship, Vision and Spirit: TheTranscendental Painting Group, exhib. cat.(Albuquerque: Jonson Gallery, Universityof New Mexico Art Museum, 1997), 62.2. Ibid., 45.3. Agnes Martin, Writings/Schriften, ed. DieterSchwarz (Winterthur: KunstmuseumWinterthur; Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz,1991), 67.4. Briony Fer, “Drawing Drawing: AgnesMartin’s Infinity,” in 3 x Abstraction: NewMethods of Drawing: Hilma af Klint, EmmaKunz, Agnes Martin, ed. Catherine deZegher and Hendel Teicher, exhib. cat. (NewYork: The Drawing Center, 2005; New Havenct: Yale University Press, 2005), 191.5. Griselda Pollock, “Agnes Dreaming:Dreaming Agnes,” in ibid., 159–79.6. See Timothy Robert Rodgers, “AgnesMartin: Portrait of a Mind,” in TimothyRobert Rodgers, In Pursuit of Perfection:The Art of Agnes Martin, Maria Martinezand Florence Pierce, exhib. cat. (Santa Fenm: Museum of Fine Arts, 2004), 18–25.7. Pollock, “Agnes Dreaming,” 159. Fer wrote,“The work, and what she says about it, arereally strikingly consistent” (“DrawingDrawing,” 192).8. Joan Simon, “Perfection is in the Mind:An Interview with Agnes Martin,” Art inAmerica, 84 (May 1996), 88.9. Martin, Writings, 70.10. Ibid., 68.11. Ibid., 71.12. Rodgers, “Portrait of a Mind,” 25.13. Joseph Traugott, The Art of New Mexico:How the West Is One: The Collection of theMuseum of Fine Arts (Santa Fe nm:Museum of New Mexico Press, 2007), 199.14. Lucy Lippard, “In Touch with Light,” in LucyLippard, Florence Pierce: In Touch with Light(Santa Fe nm: Smith Book Fund, CharlotteJackson Fine Art, 1998), 9.15. Ibid., 1.16. Ibid., 10.17. See Martina Kudlácek’s documentary filmIn the Mirror of Maya Deren (ZeitgeistFilms, 2002).101
Both these recent writings on Martin offer much to consider. I would, however, like to create a slightly different portrait of Agnes Martin, one based on ideas I explored in “Agnes Martin: Portrait of a Mind.”6 Whereas Pollock asserted that “Martin made extremely clear statements about her
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