Review: AGNES MARTIN, Subtlety on a Grand Scale at the Guggenheim

It feels a bit odd-a bit crass, in fact-to play favorites in a show as totalizing as Agnes Martin at the Guggenheim Museum. Yet I'm going to do so anyway. Of all the works in this rotunda-filling, career-spanning retrospective, the ones that have most settled into my biases are a few acrylic-and-graphite canvases from the late 1980s. They shouldn't be endearing works, and in the most obvious ways they aren't: where many of Martin's signature paintings are creatures of soft whites and softer pastels, these ones place lines of dark industrial gray against bands of light industrial gray. Where many of Martin's abstractions seem to pulse softly, like submerged fishnets, these buzz with all the charm of hot night air conditioners. After all, they look just like air conditioners, or like something that would amuse Francis Picabia.

In short, they are the last thing that you would expect from a sensibility such as Agnes Martin's, They are also-even though they hit near the end-the first reason why this show should not be underestimated.

The case that needs to be made, for Martin, is not so much that she is a great painter as that she is an interesting one. Her work is close enough to both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism that it already looms with austere large-format "greatness," and it can't hurt that efforts to expand the art historical canon are gaining both momentum and common sense. When Lee Krasner graced the Jewish Museum a few seasons ago, it didn't seem like empty identity-politics pandering because, frankly, it wasn't. It was another female artist of real elegance coming into her own, and demanding evaluation. Curated by Tracey Bashkoff and Tiffany Bell, the Guggenheim's paraphernalia-free showcase-no videos, few documents, and consistently easy-to-miss wall texts-dares us to think about not about Martin's life or gender or society, but about how deeply her art is worth thinking about.

At every turn, this exhibition enables us to pit Martin's ideas against her practice. Born on a farm, drawn for a time into the midcentury New York avant-garde, and drawn inexorably back into nature later in life, Martin often explained her work in terms of beauty, perception, understanding, and other values that can be a little too new-agey for comfort. Disregard it all; she was an aggressively good observer, as the better of her testimonies reveal: "I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it." The best of Martin's own paintings begin with nature (trees, islands, seasons, plants), transform into something that looks borderline industrial, and-no small feat-work their way back to sublimity. With her large graphite-and-paper compositions from the 1960s, she runs this cycle effortlessly; the effects of her 1970s watercolors are even more complex, their blue and red pastels equally evocative of long evenings and crisp, perfectly-paired fabrics.

The art isn't always ravishing and some of it, to tell you the truth, looks like it could have been made not simply by an inferior painter, but by virtually anyone who's read a couple Clement Greenberg essays. Martin obliterated much of her early work; too much of what survived delivers dull biomorphs and silly geometries. Granted, she probably needed to make her way through all this to get to the grids and lines and 1960s-ish suburban home textures that represent her real breakthroughs. But once Martin had arrived at a signature style, she couldn't push outside of it with satisfactory results-not any more than Pollock or Frank Stella could push outside a style of monumental restraint without looking desperate. A few of the polygon paintings of Martin's absolute last years finish off the retrospective. These entries recall Malevich's dark shapes, and even O'Keefe's entryways and emptinesses. They're crisp the first time you see them, interesting enough by the second or third. Still, they don't feel like Martin.

Yet Martin will perhaps be more visible from here on out, and visible in the right way thanks to the Guggenheim. Without quite meaning it, critics tend to subject female artists of a certain sensibility-minimalistic, lyrical, compositionally adept-to a vision of their talents and accomplishments that does more harm than good. Quite simply, we accept, enshrine, and unknowingly pigeonhole them as formal masters without wondering, well, are they more than empty form? I see the ravages of this kind of deference all the time in literature: it's one reason why a heartbreakingly economical writer like Elizabeth Bishop continues to be seen (wrongly) as a mere "poet's poet," and a reason why a structurally adept yet emotionally vapid writer like Alice Munro continues to be seen (wrongly) as "essential reading." I had feared that Martin, as a painter of economy and grace, would be bogged down in the same way by the Guggenheim's big name showcase-or by any showcase. The opposite happens. Her work becomes something transcendent, a meditation on how contrast and color can transform space that lifts itself beyond any easy matter of identity and commemoration.

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