Agnes Martin The Distillation Of Color

Exploring the evolution of Agnes Martin's sublime use of color This handsomely designed, concise volume celebrates Agnes Martin's pursuit of beauty, happiness and innocence in her nonobjective art created while living in the desert of New Mexico. From her multicolored striped works to compositions of color-washed bands defined by hand-drawn lines, to the deep gray Black Paintings that characterized her work in the late 1980s, Martin's treatment of color in each of these phases is examined. A particular emphasis is placed on the latter half of her career and the broadening vision that developed during her years working in the desert, which crystalized her quest to deepen her understanding of the essence of painting, unattached to emotion or subject, yet radiant and meditative in its pure abstraction. With editorial contributions by a selection of writers whose cross-genre works span art writing, essay and memoir, this book expands an approach to Martin's paintings beyond a purely art historical lens, bringing new voices into the conversations around her career, inviting a rediscovery of her enduring legacy. An essay by author Durga Chew-Bose provides a poetic exploration of color; the writer Olivia Laing (author of The Lonely City) discusses the nature of solitude in her text; and Bruce Hainley uses a 1974 essay by Jill Johnston as a jumping-off point to delve into Martin's life during her years in New Mexico.

A close examination of Agnes Martin's grid painting in luminous blue and gold. Agnes Martin's Night Sea (1963) is a large canvas of hand-drawn rectangular grids painted in luminous blue and gold. In this illustrated study, Suzanne Hudson presents the painting as the work of an artist who was also a thinker, poet, and writer for whom self-presentation was a necessary part of making her works public. With Night Sea, Hudson argues, Martin (1912–2004) created a shimmering realization of control and loss that stands alone within her suite of classic grid paintings as an exemplary and exceptional achievement. Hudson offers a close examination of Night Sea and its position within Martin's long and prolific career, during which the artist destroyed many works as she sought forms of perfection within self-imposed restrictions of color and line. For Hudson, Night Sea stands as the last of Martin's process-based works before she turned from oil to acrylic and sought to express emotions of lightness and purity unburdened by evidence of human struggle. Drawing from a range of archival records, Hudson attempts to draw together the facts surrounding the work, which were at times obfuscated by the artist's desire for privacy. Critical responses of the time give a sense of the impact of the work and that which followed it. Texts by peers including Lenore Tawney, Donald Judd, and Lucy Lippard are presented alongside interviews with a number of Martin's friends and keepers of estates, such as the publisher Ronald Feldman and Kathleen Mangan of the Lenore Tawney archive, which holds correspondence between Martin and Tawney.

Visions of Savage Paradise is the first major book-length study of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout to be published in nearly seventy years. Eckhout, who was court painter to the colonial governor of Dutch Brazil, created life-size paintings of Amerindians, Africans, and Brazilians of mixed race in support of the governor’s project to document the people and natural history of the colony. In this study, Rebecca Parker Brienen provides a detailed analysis of Eckhout’s works, framing them with discussions of both their colonial context and contemporary artistic practices in the Dutch republic.

The first biography of visionary artist Agnes Martin, one of the most original and influential painters of the postwar period Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin’s austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. Martin identified with the Abstract Expressionists but her commitment to linear geometry caused her to be associated in turn with Minimalist, feminist, and even outsider artists. She moved through some of the liveliest art communities of her time while maintaining a legendary reserve. “I paint with my back to the world,” she says both at the beginning and at the conclusion of a documentary filmed when she was in her late eighties. When she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century. No substantial critical monograph exists on this acclaimed artist—the recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts—who was championed by critics as diverse in their approaches as Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Alloway, and Rosalind Krauss. Furthermore, no attempt has been made to describe her extraordinary life. The whole engrossing story, told here for the first time, Agnes Martin is essential reading for anyone interested in abstract art or the history of women artists in America.

Om den amerikanske kunstner, Agnes Martin, født 1912

"Eminently readable and extremely meaningful. The contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life. The book is also very timely, offering a way to approach Buddhism through unexpected channels."--Lynn Gumpert, Director, Grey Art Gallery, New York University

The function of the painted wooden object ranges from the practical to the profound. These objects may perform utilitarian tasks, convey artistic whimsy, connote noble aspirations, and embody the highest spiritual expressions. This volume, illustrated in color throughout, presents the proceedings of a conference organized by the Wooden Artifacts Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) and held in November 1994 at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia. The book includes 40 articles that explore the history and conservation of a wide range of painted wooden objects, from polychrome sculpture and altarpieces to carousel horses, tobacconist figures, Native American totems, Victorian garden furniture, French cabinets, architectural elements, and horse-drawn carriages. Contributors include Ian C. Bristow, an architect and historic-building consultant in London; Myriam Serck-Dewaide, head of the Sculpture Workshop, Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique, Brussels; and Frances Gruber Safford, associate curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A broad range of professionals—including art historians, curators, scientists, and conservators—will be interested in this volume and in the multidisciplinary nature of its articles.