NARRATOR:

Artist Agnes Martin wanted to make “a living painting.” Her rare titled works bear the names of natural phenomena, “wheat” or “night sea.” But even these are hardly traditional landscapes.

AGNES MARTIN:

The frailest stems, quivering in the light, bend and break, in silence. This poem, like the paintings, is not really about nature. It is not what is seen, it is what is known forever in the mind.

NARRATOR:

Her large square canvases immerse you in their world, sharing a simple and clear vision of what the artist called non-objective beauty, pure experience without an outside reference point. Agnes Martin, from a lecture in 1987.

MARTIN:

When I think of art, I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. In our minds, we have an awareness of perfection that leads us on.

An artist is fortunate in that his work is the inner contemplation of beauty— of perfection in life. We cannot make anything perfectly, but with inner contemplation of perfection we can suggest it.

NARRATOR:

These paintings are environments of purity and discipline, borne out in the calm repetition of line, the subtle variation within a muted color palette. When Martin settled on the grid, she destroyed every piece of her earlier work that she could get her hands on. She said she preferred the grid because it was ego-less, and later on refused to accept awards for her painting because she was quote “not responsible for the work.”