Page 27 - Studio International - February 1973

Formlessness breaking down form

the paintings of Agnes Martin Lawrence Alloway

By 1957 Agnes Martin had a secure sense of the module, its occupancy of space rather than destroys its power.'1 The grids vary in size,
what her style was to be. In paintings like Water its duration in time. Accepting the format of the emphasis, and colour from one painting to
Sign and Wheat she produced symmetrical works painting (that is, the shape of the ground) as another. Here are the measurements of three
that depended on either an arrangement of an absolute, as we must be prepared to do in grids : in Park the rectangles are `5/16 wide by
similar forms (Water Sign with its two rows of interpreting painters' ideas of space, it is possible 1 1/8 long', in Desert they are '3/4 wide and 1/2 long'
three circles) or one large form (Wheat, a to say that Martin's seamless surface signifies, and in No. 3 (date unknown) they are 'one
square painting containing a large square, for all its linear precision, an image dissolving. half inch by 3/16 of an inch.'2 The grid in Park
placed just in from the edges). Thus her painting The uninflected radient fields are without the is drawn in green pencil and that in Desert in
by this date, although not openly manifesting a formal priorities of figure and field or lead pencil. Max Kozloff pointed out that 'the
grid form, rested on the definition of painting as hierarchic ranking of forms and the skinny grids micro-intervals of these works seem to contract
a sequence of recurrent points or a holistic form are set in monochrome colours that make visible upon examination. They hover on the verge of
with kinship to the form of the canvas itself. The the shifting gradients of real light across the becoming tone, but never lose their porosity.'3
former motif developed through 1959 in a group painting. The effect is of precision and The grid is of course a network of uniform
of pictures with rows of uninflected circles illusiveness at once. elements and Martin does not depart from the
(Reflections and Earth, for example). A painting Martin has pointed out that 'my formats are stimulus domain (the set of rules by means of
like Dark River, 1961, combines Martin's sense square, but the grids never are absolutely which each pattern is constructed), but the
of points in space with the drawn image of a square, they are rectangles a little bit off the whole grid is characterized physically by her
square that consists of regular horizontal lines square, making a sort of contradiction, a way of working. Her pencil lines on canvas, the
crossed by a column of dots. Martin's 1961 dissonance, though I didn't set out to do it that strokes and dabs of pigment, have an inherent
exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery shows that way. When I cover the square surface with sensuous facture, an irreducible blur beyond
by this date she had adopted grids, hovering rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, the theoretical structure of the grid. A play of
equidistantly from the edges of square canvases
as a means of preserving symmetry and Wheat 1964. Watercolour and ink on paper, 8 x 8 in.
wholeness without isolating successive points
on the canvas.
The grid at first is an area just within the
canvas, a few inches from the edges, with a
potential for unitary form that Martin was early
to realize in American art. As she draws it the
grid is half-way between a rectangular system of
coordinates and a veil. It is put down in pencil
so that the network consists of marks far less
clearly given than we are accustomed to in
American painting with its usual standard of
high emphasis and unrelieved clarity. Thus the
grid, though tight, does not close the surface,
but establishes an open plane, identified with the
surface of the picture but accumulating
sufficient differences to suggest, for all its
regularity, a veil, a shadow, a bloom.
In Wheat the big square is created by
overlapping bands of colour at the edges of the
picture, the side bands having priority over the
top and bottom, but this kind of overlaying of
colour is abandoned by Martin to preserve the
unity of the picture surface. The grids that
followed, though there is no detachable edge,
colour and generate, so to say, their own limits,
and resemble Wheat in that they are hung inside
the canvas, away from the edges. From about
1964, however, the area of the grids extends to
the edges of the canvas, making a single
undifferentiated tremor of form, or a plateau of
non-form, across the whole surface. By
removing the internal boundaries of the grid, by
which it was seen to stop and start, Martin
emphasizes not the succession of the modular
bits from, say, left to right, but the wholeness of
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