Agnes Martin: Pioneer, Painter, Icon

In this satisfactory biography, poet Martin (One Complete Person) traces the life of pioneering painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004, no relation to the author) from a tomboyish introvert growing up in rural Saskatchewan Canada in the 1920s to a world-renowned abstract expressionist. The author maps out the evolution of Martin’s work as she moved away from her early narrative style to the meditative line drawings from the middle of her career, in which she began to embrace the freedom of abstraction that came to characterize her most well-known work. The author notes that Martin “offered her work as a kind of therapy to the onlooker” and that it also functioned as a form of healing for her schizophrenia, serving as both therapy and spiritual exercise in her search for inner peace. The scholarship is thin; most of the book’s insights come from other sources, including numerous interviews with the artist’s inner circle of friends and family, which author Martin conducted as researcher for the documentary film, Agnes Martin: Before the Grid. The book fitfully outlines the arc of Agnes Martin’s career, but readers seeking more in-depth, critical analysis of Martin’s creative process should look to Nancy Princenthal’s 2015 book (Mar.)