The Art Assignment | Art I Can't Show You | Season 4 | Episode 27

(soft music) - The famous art dealer Arne Glimcher tells this story about the American artist Agnes Martin.

He says that once his 11-year-old granddaughter Isabelle was visiting Martin and the little girl was holding on to a rose clipped from a bush outside of Martin's house.

Agnes Martin took the rose and said to the girl, "Is this rose really beautiful?"

And Isabelle said, "Yes."

And then Agnes Martin hid the rose behind her back and said, "Is the rose still beautiful?"

"Yes," said Isabelle.

And then Agnes Martin said, "You see, Isabelle, "beauty is in your mind, not in the rose."

Today I want to tell you about this group of six Agnes Martin paintings called With My Back to the World that Martin painted in 1997 near the end of her life.

Martin often spoke about painting with her back to the world.

She said she was not trying to paint anything of or from the world, but was instead trying to paint inspiration itself, emotion itself.

When I first saw these paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, I was so moved by them that I started crying, which is weird because the paintings themselves are just horizontal bands of faint color, pastel pinks and yellows and blues.

In some cases the colors are barely visible.

The paintings, 60 inches square, look like almost nothing.

Okay, so some art is as moving in replica as it is in person, like seeing the Mona Lisa under glass while being jostled by hundreds of other people trying to see the Mona Lisa is not, at least in my experience, more profound than looking carefully at a good reproduction of the Mona Lisa.

But With My Back to the World loses everything in the replication of it.

You would see nothing but bands of pastel paint.

They're incredibly quiet paintings, and this is a deeply unquiet visual space, so I'm not even gonna try.

You can Google them if you want.

Instead, I want to try to share these paintings with you by sharing how they made me feel.

Agnes Martin once said that "From music, "people accept pure emotion.

"But from art, they demand explanation."

But of course, even offering that quote to you is a kind of explanation.

It's a kind of explanation to say that Martin famously abandoned the New York art world in 1967, eventually settling in New Mexico, where she lived in a series of adobe homes that she built herself.

It's explanation to say that she was gay, to say that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, to say that she was friends with artists like Ad Reinhardt and Bruce Nauman, that she lived alone for most of her life.

It's explanation to say that at the time of her death in 2004, Agnes Martin had not read a newspaper in over 50 years.

She painted with her back to all of that and so much more.

This is explanation too.

After 20 years of becoming a progressively more abstract painter, struggling every day with her work, she was thinking one day in 1964 about the innocence of trees.

An image appeared in her mind.

She described it as, "Lines going this way "and lines going that way, and they were innocent.

"They looked like innocence."

She called the resulting artwork The Tree, and it was a revelation for Martin.

This gets at an old problem in art, whether music or literature or visual art or whatever.

It's easy enough to paint a symbol of innocence, an unclothed newborn baby say, or the unlined, softly lit face of a maiden or a lamb or whatever.

But these are not pictures of innocence itself.

Innocence has no shape or face.

It's an abstract idea, and of course metaphor can be a way into those abstractions, but when over relied upon, metaphor becomes not just a crutch, but a falsehood.

If we start to conceive of innocence as having the form of a lamb, then we've wrongly defined both lamb and innocence.

What Martin tried to do what to paint emotion itself, to paint the deeply abstract feelings that are so resistant to direct expression or form, and when we can't label or name our abstract feelings, in some ways we don't know them.

We need language to describe the way down wonders and terrors.

Otherwise they're impossible to reckon with.

Martin once said, "If you wake up in the morning "and you feel very happy about nothing, no cause, "what's what I paint about, the subtle emotions "that we feel without cause in this world."

Now that's not to say that Martin was unfamiliar with suffering or misery in her work or outside of it.

When her paintings became popular with collectors, Martin became wealthy, but she never moved out of her self-made adobe homes.

Instead she donated millions of dollars to charity, especially organizations that supported marginalized kids and victims of domestic abuse.

I would argue that her paintings don't ignore suffering.

They transcend it.

She once said, "I believe in living above the line.

"Above the line is happiness and love, you know.

"Below the line is all sadness "and destruction and unhappiness.

"And I don't go below the line for anything."

We often talk about how difficult it can be to render suffering in art, and it is difficult.

Picasso's Guernica for instance is rightly celebrated as a masterpiece because it found a way to communicate the jumbled horrors of mechanized warfare.

And in an essay about Picasso's work, the French writer Michel Leiris wrote, "Everything we love is about to die, "and that is why everything must be summed up "with all the high emotion of farewell "in something so beautiful we shall never forget it."

That kind of grandiosity is indeed what we've traditionally heralded as genius in art, but it seems to me that finding direct expression for something other than the high emotion of farewell is also really valuable.

How do you paint the sublime?

How do you paint the beauty that is in your mind?

How do you paint the rose that is hidden behind your back?

This was the challenge that Agnes Martin set for herself.

And I know it's easy to dismiss canvases lightly painted with bands of pastel color, but if you ever find the opportunity to commune with Agnes Martin's paintings, you may find, as I did, that they make visible a joy you know but cannot name.

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