Agnes Martin

Acquired directly from the artist by the previous owner in 2000

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at (212) 606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a metal strip frame with a small black float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Agnes Martin’s Untitled 1999-2000 is a breathtakingly assured expression of the artist’s mesmerizing, striated facture. Alluring washes of soft yet fiery pinks and hazy powder blues form hypnotic horizontal bands across the work’s expansive surface, immersing the viewer in the sheer tranquility of a uniquely sublime vision. Painted just four years before the artist’s tragic passing, waves of diaphanous color render Untitled truly at the apex of the artist’s later output. Following her relocation to New Mexico in 1968, Martin’s works had been dominated by a palette of grays, black and white. Yet just over two decades later in 1993 the artist’s deteriorating health prompted her to move to an assisted living facility in Taos, and it was from this point on that she began to explore the emotive effects of color once more. Partially out of necessity, in this period Martin moved away from her 72 by 72 inch canvases, taking a step down to the more intimately scaled 60 by 60 inch size. Evident in the present work, this scale lends itself readily to the stimulating palette which commands a more personal perceptive dialogue with the viewer. Created at the zenith of an illustrious career, just a year after she received the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from the College Art Association and the National Medal of Arts from the Office of President Bill Clinton, Untitled is a ceremonious culmination of Martin’s prodigious advances in the field of abstract painting. Drawing from the greatest international museum collections, Martin’s enduring status as one of the most dynamic and prestigious artists of our time was most recently recognized by a breathtaking retrospective at the Tate Modern, London in 2015.

Martin’s oeuvre is frequently divided into two distinct phases: first are the paintings she created in New York up until 1967, after which she left the city and gave up painting for five years; the second were works created from 1972 in New Mexico where she remained until her death in 2004. Her early experiments into abstraction enacted in New York were heavily influenced by early Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism and geometric compositions. This period of formal exploration culminated in the artist’s now iconic, meticulously drawn pencil grids on large white canvases. Having to deal with both mental illness and financial instability at overlapping points, these were the most tempestuous years of Martin’s life. Perhaps the product of a greater sense of personal security, Martin’s second period witnesses less change, but rather a nuancing of the idiosyncratic style that she had begun to perfect in her earlier praxis. Rooted in her innate sensibilities, these newer paintings represented a series of acute modifications in the structure of the canvas, centered on the balancing of color. The logic of the grid, remained a constant for Martin but gradually a more painterly tendency encroached upon her structured methodology. Displaying an intuitive yet profoundly logical approach to color, Untitled is a paramount achievement of this long sustained inquiry.

The broad open bands of Untitled infer the intellectual framework through which the work was conceived, influenced by the wide open plane of Taos, New Mexico where she found sanctuary for thirty years.  From visiting New Mexico as student and teacher at the University of Albuquerque and Taos from 1946-49 Martin was enamored by the burgeoning community of artists and writers that she found there. Nestled between majestic mountain ranges and home to an ancient Native American population, this small town had drawn a veritable stream of creative individuals who since the late Nineteenth Century, offering an awe inspiring natural landscape and an artistic freedom unencumbered by urban life. Martin’s idol Georgia O’Keefe had famously moved to New Mexico in 1940, with Edward Hopper and writer D.H. Lawrence also making visits.  In the immediate post-war period artists Richard Diebenkorn, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko entered the locale, the abstract influence of whom can be felt surely in Untitled. Specters of Reinhardt’s geometric shapes, are mirrored in the present work’s stripes which appear to hover in front of an incandescent ground. The repeating veils of color that flow across the surface enter into a poetic dialogue with the evocatively spiritualistic color planes of Rothko. With ecstatic serenity Martin pours into her canvas the open air of her New Mexico relocation, eloquently described by her as a transition from “joy to happiness.” (Agnes Martin quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern (and travelling), Agnes Martin, 2015, p. 29)

Martin originated the shimmering surface of Untitled with discrete lines of graphite across drawn across an uneven surface of gesso, dissecting the color fields into different bands. The gesso ground crucially imbues the paint with a unique luminosity and sense of spatial depth. By applying a thin acrylic to a chalky white primer, color is simultaneously absorbed and reflected; the painted bands appear to disintegrate into atmospheric light. The distinctive pink hues stem from the additional use of a warmer orange that, reacting with the white ground, seems to emit light from within. Applied by hand using masking tape small irregularities and touches of imperfection give the present work a unique vitality and strength. As such the limitless vistas of both sky and sand that surrounded Martin in New Mexico are transposed to canvas, with surface glitches appearing like mirages emerging or disappearing in the desert sun. Endlessly inspired by nature, Martin compared the experience of looking at her work to “watching clouds and never seeing any the same, or viewing waves of the sea, continuously breaking on the shore always the same but always different.” (Ibid.) Untitled thus encapsulates a unique artistic vision, stirred by the resplendent austerity of the desert.  As one of her last paintings, Untitled is remarkable for its exuberant emanations, its delicate crafting of colour, and as such it undeniably one of Martin’s very best.