Life on the Grid

A new biography examines the life, loves and schizophrenia of Saskatchewan-born artist Agnes Martin. Her ephemeral grids belie the turbulence of her life.

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The early childhood of Agnes Martin was, by her own account, a Dickensian experience of deprivation on a farm near the small Saskatchewan town of Macklin, not far from the Alberta border.

Martin’s mother hated her, we are told repeatedly in a new biography, Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon, by Irish writer Henry Martin, who's not related to the artist. Agnes, born in 1912, was supposedly forced to take public transportation by herself when she was just six for an overnight stay at the hospital to have her tonsils removed.

“When I was two, I was locked up in the back porch, and when I was three, I would play in the backyard,” Martin claimed in an interview a few years before her death from congestive heart failure in 2004, at age 93. “When I came to the door, my sister would say, ‘You can’t come in,’ and shut the door. All day I was out, all day, till five o’clock. When I was four, I was in the yard. When I was five, I started walking around the town. Six – when I went to school I didn’t come home from school, ’cause I wasn’t wanted.”

According to Henry Martin, Agnes often talked to her friends about her childhood, her early years in Saskatchewan (misspelled at least twice in the book) and her time in Vancouver, where she became a provincial swimming champion and almost made Canada’s 1928 Olympic swim team.

But were her stories all true? The author’s research leads him to speculate her relatives were not as uncaring as Agnes made them out to be. He also demonstrates that she was, at times, an unreliable narrator with schizophrenia and attendant aural hallucinations – Agnes claimed she obeyed the voices she heard – as well as memory lapses caused by repeated electroshock treatments.

In the Canadian art world, Martin is the one who got away. She left the country in 1931, at age 19, for Bellingham, Washington, and became an American citizen in 1950. She lived for a time in a goat shed in Taos, New Mexico, dumpster diving for food. But by the 1970s she was the most famous female artist in the United States after Georgia O’Keefe, who, like Martin, was associated with New Mexico. She died a multi-millionaire.

Martin never returned to live in Canada and had little to do with her family back home. Nor did Canada embrace her. The National Gallery of Canada owns only one painting (and some prints) by Martin, one of the most famous and financially successful Canadian-born artists ever. In Saskatchewan, the first major exhibition of her work was held at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina only in 1995, long after she was a star in the United States and Europe, especially Germany.

The book devotes considerable ink to Martin’s many love affairs with women. She spent most of her life closeted, fearing her sexual orientation would hurt her career. She also felt strong emotional attachments would stymie her work, so she frequently and abruptly ended relationships, sometimes telling her lovers to find a husband and raise children.

Martin is best known for her pale, Zen-like grids and, to a lesser extent, paintings of ethereal bands of colour. She claimed she got the idea to paint grids by watching children play hopscotch. “People can put their troubles into those little squares,” she said. The paintings were peaceful and harmonious, in contrast to Martin’s rollercoaster life, which included moves back and forth between New York City and New Mexico.

The book contains no reproductions of Agnes’ paintings. This is a shortcoming. However, most of her works, which now sell for millions of dollars apiece, do not reproduce well in print because of the whites and pale pastels she used to create delicate, almost ephemeral effects.

Fly over Saskatchewan in the winter and you’ll see snow-white fields in perfect, Martin-like grids. Cindy Richmond, who curated the 1995 Regina exhibition, believes Martin’s paintings reflect the Prairie landscape.

“Definitely, for me there was a connection there, although she denies the paintings have any reference to landscape herself and she seems to think they're more of a kind of poetry or more of a kind of emotion involved in the works,” Richmond said in a 1997 interview, shortly after Martin won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, equivalent to a movie star earning an Oscar for lifetime achievement.

Canadians, like Richmond, can be excused for wanting to see their own country reflected, for better or worse, in Martin’s art. While this book helps readers understand her better, particularly in terms of her background, there’s still much to decipher about an elusive and contradictory artist. ■

Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon by Irish writer Henry Martin was published in 2018 by Schaffner Press in Tucson, Arizona.