By ANN LANDIAgnes Martin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Taos, N.M.
The enigmatic Agnes Martin, who spent parts of her life in this small mountainous enclave and died here in 2004, gained international acclaim for her spare, luminous canvases, fields of washy color traversed by delicate hand-drawn lines, generally in the shape of a grid. These understated works can carry a big impact, producing a meditative response in viewers and inspiring reams of appreciative criticism. Like many of the Minimalist artists with whom she is often associated, Martin could extract infinite variations on a theme, producing both small drawings and huge paintings that use the grid as their underpinning.
Agnes Martin:
Before the Grid
The Harwood Museum of Art
Through June 17
Yet Martin—born in 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock—did not arrive at her winning strategy until she was in her late 50s, and her earlier work is not well known. Indeed, she did her best to seek out and destroy paintings from the years when she was taking her first steps into full-blown abstraction. In honor of her centenary, the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos has tracked down a generous selection of works the artist made in her 30s and 40s. In addition to a couple of self-portraits and a few watercolor landscapes, these include biomorphic paintings made when the artist had a grant to work in Taos in the mid-1950s. They are lyrical works in subdued colors, taking on motifs from nature, like "Mid-Winter" (1954) and "The Bluebird" (1954), or hinting at grander, curiously archaic subjects ("The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden," 1953). This last is an explosive semifigurative work, in which the doomed couple are broken into a frenzy of jagged shapes, but more typical are several untitled paintings that show hovering, vaguely geometric or oozy, lifelike forms (the "biomorphs" of biomorphism). The museum has also included three early grid paintings from 1959 and 1961 and a selection of later works on paper in the entry hall, a preamble to the Harwood's permanent gallery of seven large paintings from 1993-94.