Philadelphia Museum of Art presents 'Agnes Martin: The Untroubled Mind'

Agnes Martin: The Untroubled Mind, Works from the Daniel W. Dietrich II Collection features the style that emerged after Martin had painted for 20 years: six-foot-square canvases, sectioned with filaments of barely visible graphite, all grids. Tuttleman 174 could be a symposium on graph paper.

Turns out a lot can be done with lines on gesso-treated canvas. The Moment (Egg) (1963) consists of one-dimensional lines in the shape of… you know. Unlike neighboring works, it’s small, executed on brown paper, and is identifiably an egg. Contrast it with The Hill (1967): edge-to-edge horizontal lines on a large white canvas, and not a knoll in sight.

Many of Martin’s works have lines in two dimensions, making patterns that would resonate with any weaver. This style became Martin’s signature in the 1960s.

“My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square,” reads a quote in the exhibit. “They are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”

Martin immigrated to the United States from rural Saskatchewan in 1932 and taught on the West Coast before coming to New York City to paint. In the mid-1950s, artists who would become contemporary icons flocked to affordable studio spaces in lower Manhattan. Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana worked in the same building as Martin, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were nearby.

Grids: A framework for peace

Gradually, Martin relinquished a more recognizable abstract style for the spare and fragile grids as she sought “an untroubled mind” — her term for an artistic sensibility free of ego and open to inspiration. The phrase also likely expressed a desire to overcome mental illness. Martin suffered from paranoid schizophrenia that went undiagnosed until well into adulthood.

She found relief in Eastern philosophy and in the late 1960s moved to Taos, New Mexico. She spent time in nature, a refuge that was a theme in her work. The grids make more sense considered in this context, an artist’s visual representation of what contemplatives practice mentally. Martin stopped painting from roughly 1967 to 1974 in favor of writing and meditation.

ICA reignites career

Then came a request from Philadelphia’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) to mount a 1973 retrospective. The recognition inspired Martin to resume painting.

Among the archival materials on view is this stream-of-consciousness poem, written by Martin for the ICA exhibit The Untroubled Mind. This passage provides some insight into her creative approach:

Inspiration is pervasive but not a power

It’s a peaceful thing…

It is an untroubled mind.

Of course we know that an untroubled state of mind

Cannot last so we say that inspiration comes and goes

But really it is there all the time waiting for us to be

Untroubled again.

On a Clear Day (1973), a sampler of Martin grids exhibited at ICA, is here as well. It’s a grid of grids, a sampler of 20 identically framed, foot-square works hung in neat rows and columns.

Inspiration’s tabula rasa

Martin strove not to think, believing an empty mind the perfect vessel for inspiration. “I have a vacant mind in order to do exactly what the inspiration calls for,” she said in a 1997 interview.

In that interview, she rejected the intellectualization of art, desiring a purely emotional response from viewers. She wanted her work encountered like music, which she said is the highest art form because it is completely abstract and meets with more emotion than any other.

The eyes of the beholder

Following her hiatus from painting, the grids became bands of soft color, an exciting visual transformation after the grids’ bland precision. The style is exemplified by Untitled #6 (1985), a large painting of alternating gray-blue bands.

Subtle to the point of being imperceptible, Martin’s work challenges in any environment, but particularly when set amid works that are drenched in color, figuratively complex, and content-filled. She gives viewers a window and asks that they quiet themselves and look inside, which is akin to asking drivers on the Schuylkill Expressway to stop and meditate. Yet that’s what is necessary to grasp her art.

One pint-sized art critic in the gallery asked, “Why’s this famous? Anybody could do this!” He probably voiced what some bigger viewers wonder.

No matter: Martin would not have taken it personally, judging by something she wrote before the ICA exhibit: “A work may stimulate yearning, helplessness, belligerence or remorse. The cause of the response is not traceable to the work. An artist cannot and does not prepare for a certain response. He does not consider the response but simply follows his inspiration. Works of art are not purposely conceived. The response depends on the condition of the observer.”

Or, in the immortal words of Taylor Swift, “Haters gonna hate.”

Appreciating Martin’s minimalism requires effort. It takes time. It’s not for everyone. Neither is meditation — though, as with meditation, we might be all the better for it.