Paintings, Writings, Remembrances

This monograph pairs full-color reproductions of Agnes Martin's grid and stripe paintings with her own writings on beauty, perfection, and abstraction, alongside reminiscences from people who knew her.

Compiled and edited by Arne Glimcher, Martin's longtime dealer at Pace Gallery, the 281-page book was published by Phaidon in 2012. It gathers Martin's spare, koan-like essays and lectures, texts she delivered irregularly over the decades and which circulated as often in artist circles as her paintings did. These sit alongside recollections from friends, curators, and fellow artists who tracked her career from Coenties Slip in 1950s New York to her later decades working alone in New Mexico.

Martin (1912-2004) spent much of her career developing a minimal vocabulary of pencil grids and pale washes of color on square canvases, work she insisted was about feeling rather than geometry. After a period of retreat from the art world in the late 1960s, she returned to painting in New Mexico and continued working into her nineties. She became one of the most influential painters associated with, and resistant to, both Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism.