Agnes Martin - Her Life and Art

Author(s): Nancy Princenthal

Art

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.


Agnes Martin, the recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts, was championed by critics as diverse in their approaches as Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Alloway, and Rosalind Krauss. The whole engrossing story, now available in paperback, Agnes Martin is essential reading for anyone interested in abstract art or the history of women artists in America.

Review: 'Thorough and illuminating' - Apollo (Shortlisted for Book of the Year)
'Scholarly, thoroughly researched ... an accessible and fascinating story' - Aesthetica
'Doggedly researched and gracefully written... [Princenthal] shines in describing Martin's earthy good humour and dedication to her art and in capturing the atmosphere in which the artist came of age ... it will remain definitive for a good long while' - Wall Street Journal


Contents: Introduction: Abstraction * 1. Northwest Passages * 2. Student/Teacher * 3. Reaching Harbor * 4. Lines of Thought * 5. As Shown * 6. Silence * 7. Departures * 8. Back to the World * 9. Contours Redrawn * Epilogue: Composure


 


Author Biography: Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer. A former senior editor of Art in America, where she remains a contributing editor, she has also written for the New York Times, Parkett, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She is currently on the faculty of the MFA art writing program at the School of Visual Arts. Her previous book, Agnes Martin, won 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld award for biography.


Product Information

Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer who is the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s; she is also the author of Hannah Wilke, and coauthor of three books on art by women, including Mothers of Invention: The Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art. A former Senior Editor of Art in America, she has also contributed to the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Bomb, Apollo, and elsewhere. Princenthal has lectured widely, and taught at Bard College, Princeton University, Yale University, the School of Visual Arts, New York University, and its Institute of Fine Arts.

General Fields

  • : 9780500294550
  • : Thames & Hudson, Limited
  • : Thames & Hudson Ltd
  • : 0.3
  • : October 2018
  • : ---length:- '9.5'width:- '6.5'units:- Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Nancy Princenthal
  • : Paperback
  • : 1809
  • : English
  • : 709
  • : 320