The Easel

Agnes Martin in Two Books: A Life Revealed

Still rivers run deep. Agnes Martin’s show at the Tate (noted in a recent Easel) highlighted the calmness in her work, a quality also noted in two new books about her. It is surprising that she saw herself not as, say, a Minimalist but as an Expressionist and it makes this quote revealing:  “When I had the inspiration for the grids, I was thinking of innocence[,] and the image was a grid. That was it. I thought, ‘My god, am I supposed to paint that?’”