Martin, Agnes Bernice

▪ 2005

      American painter (b. March 22, 1912, Macklin, Sask.—d. Dec. 16, 2004, Taos, N.M.), developed a spare, meticulously drawn, and meditative style that made her one of the giants of 20th-century Abstract Expressionism. In 1931, already interested in art, she moved to the United States for teacher training. While in New York City, where she attended (1941–42) Columbia University, she began to paint portraits and landscapes and to work seriously as an artist. Martin moved to Albuquerque, N.M., in 1946 and became a U.S. citizen in 1950. She moved often in the next several years, earning an M.A. in New York, living in Taos, teaching in Oregon, and in 1957 returning to New York. There she had her first one-woman gallery show (1958), and—in association with artists such as Barnett Newman, Lenore Tawney, and Ellsworth Kelly—she began painting the gridlike abstractions that drew attention to her. In 1967 she abruptly left New York and the art world, beginning to paint again only in 1974. Thereafter, she lived in New Mexico and, until the last months of her life, painted her characteristic six-foot-square (in her later years, five-foot-square) canvases with light-soaked, quiet, endlessly absorbing abstractions.

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