Painter Agnes Martin dies at age 92

updated 4:44 p.m. ET Dec. 16, 2004

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Agnes Martin, one of the world’s foremost abstract artists, whose spare paintings reflected the simple life she sought, died Thursday. She was 92.

Martin died at 6 a.m. at the Plaza de Retiro, a retirement community in Taos, N.M., said William Himes, the community’s owner and administrator. Martin had lived a simple life in the artists’ haven in northern New Mexico since 1991, even as her art grew in popularity in major cities throughout the world.

She was one of America’s most distinguished artists with an “amazing ability to reduce to essence all that we feel about space and light,” said Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. “She stands for an awful lot in the story of contemporary art over the past 50 years.”

Martin’s abstracts have been included in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London. In 1998, she won the National Endowment for the Arts’ prestigious National Medal of Art.

“She was one of America’s most significant and best-known artists, certainly one of the most innovative and original artists of the 20th century,” said David L. Witt, curator at the University of New Mexico’s Harwood Museum of Art in Taos.

“She was a painter. A lot of the work was in acrylic. She is known for her minimal — not minimalistic — style of painting. Minimalist has to do with artists who leave little trace of their own personality in the work. But Agnes came out of abstract expressionism.”

Martin’s abstract expressionism evolved during the 1950s, he said. “By the end of the 1950s, she started developing what was recognizably her work, which was this minimal kind of thing having to do with the grid. But there were other kinds of lines as well. Some of them were stripes,” Witt said.

In a 1997 interview with The Associated Press, Martin said she wanted her paintings to evoke a purely emotional response.

“There’s nothing in the paintings to remind you of anything in the world,” she said. “I think we have lots of emotions that aren’t caused, like when you wake up and you’re just happy.”

Her quiet life in northern New Mexico allowed her to achieve the abstractness she desired in her work.

“I often paint tranquility. If you stop thinking and rest, then a little happiness comes into your mind. At perfect rest you are comfortable,” she said.

Born in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan in 1912, Martin moved to the United States in 1931. She spent periods in New Mexico, New York and Oregon teaching or studying. She returned to Taos in June 1952 where she remained for five years before moving to New York to show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. In the late 1960s, she spent time traveling around the West and Canada in a pickup truck with a camper.

For a couple of decades, she divided her time between New York and New Mexico, including time in Galisteo, N.M.

Martin said in her AP interview that she didn’t own anything she considered a personal possession and that she hadn’t read a newspaper in more than 50 years because they clutter the mind.

“I recommend that students I speak to have nonpolitical involvement because when you are waiting for inspiration, you have to have your mind clear,” she said.

Martin never married and had no children. Himes said there will be no funeral services.

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