Her father died when she was three, shortly before her younger brother was born. The frontier mentality evolved from the anxiety of moving to an alien world and from the dashed hopes brought by farming failures, poverty and extreme isolation.

Martin’s parents (whose own parents had migrated from Scotland) took up land in what would become the township of Macklin, around 1906, when a great wave of settlers arrived from the UK and the US. She was born in a prairie farming community in Saskatchewan, western Canada, in 1912, the same year as Jackson Pollock and John Cage, both of whom would come to represent key aspects of her sensibility. Irrespective of her vulnerability, in artistic terms she was exacting and forceful. She destroyed a great deal of her earlier work, and throughout her career was a severe critic of her own work, discarding any she was not completely satisfied with. The Tate Modern exhibition spans Martin’s career from the early 50s to the last drawing made before her death. A superb, fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the Martin retrospective: a scholarly appraisal of her career. The exhibition is the latest in a seriesof important exhibitions of the work of female artists at Tate Modern, which has included Eva Hesse in 2002, Frida Kahlo in 2005, Louise Bourgeois and Doris Salcedo in 2007, Yayoi Kusama in 2012, Saloua Raouda Choucair and Mira Schendel in 2013, and Marlene Dumas and Sonia Delaunay in 2015. The curators, Frances Morris from Tate Modern and Tiffany Bell have set out to redress the fact that Martin is a major, but underrepresented, artist, who is not well known in Europe. It is a form of local exaltation but also, sometimes, of disorientation, even disturbance.” Martin did not achieve recognition until she was in her 40s. In her introduction to Agnes Martin, Princenthal defines abstraction poignantly in the context of the Tate exhibition: “To be abstracted is to be some distance from the material world. The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power 1973–1991, (2011), edited by Princenthal, in keeping with its excellent title, progresses the debate at a profound level, enabling further access to the careers of key women artists. Eleanor Heartney’s 2007 book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art has also become an indispensable publication for any scholar or artist trying to achieve a well-balanced view of culture and art practice since 1970. For those familiar with Princenthal’s writing, it will come as no surprise that the study of Martin is difficult to put down, based as it is on great insight into the artist’s life and the greater issues that pertain to a female artist of her generation. Martin’s personal life played a significant role in the choices she made as an artist, so it is fitting that, to coincide with the Tate retrospective, Thames and Hudson has published a superb new study by Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art.

At the time of her death, aged 92, it is said that she had not read a newspaper in half a century. In Taos, New Mexico, she led a solitary existence, claiming that she painted with her back to the world.

She had the condition intermittently for the rest of her life, much of which was spent in the American South-west. In late 1961, following a catatonic episode in New York, she was admitted to hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia. The stillness achieved in artistic terms is the polar opposite of the severe psychological crises that characterised her personal life. The austere painting anticipated and helped to define minimalism. Her works are composed of the simplest formal elements – ruled pencil lines and a limited number of forms, including grids, stripes and, occasionally, circles, triangles and squares, painted in a reduced palette on square canvases. Agnes Martin This major retrospective spans Martin’s career from the early 50s to the last drawing made before her death, and confirms her as one of the foremost painters of the 20th centuryĪgnes Martin (1912-2004) at Tate Modern is the first major retrospective exhibition, since her death, of one of the most esteemed artists of the 20th century.

Agnes martin on a clear day 1973