AGNES MARTIN

(1912-2004)

Autumn Watch
1954

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, New Mexico
Canfield Gallery, Santa Fe
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited
Taos, The Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, Agnes Martin: Before the Grid, 2012, pp. 24, 55, illustrated in color

Literature
Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, Agnes Martin, London, 2015, p. 24, illustrated in color
Tiffany Bell, ed., Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings, New York, 2019-ongoing, digital, no. 1954.009, illustrated in color


A sublime and enigmatic composition, Autumn Watch (1954) is a stunning example of Agnes Martin's lesser-known biomorphic paintings executed during her years in Taos. Painted in 1954, this is one of the earliest works by the artist to be offered at auction and showcases Martin's first exploration into abstraction. Her body of work created during the 1940s and 1950s belongs to art history; these works are the first steps of a major artist, and as such, invaluable in our understanding of her artistic evolution.

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, Agnes Martin has become one of the most pioneering and renowned artists of the Twentieth Century. Though perhaps more widely recognized for her luminous canvases navigated by delicately hand-drawn lines generally in the shape of a grid, it is her earlier works that provoke a sense of intrigue and understanding into the environments and influences she experienced in her seminal years. These earlier works take on an almost lyrical embodiment; composed in subdued colors and constructed with geometric shapes and forms. The titles of her work evoke her appreciation and love for the natural world, with references to the seasons and animals, as seen in this present work Autumn Watch and in other works created in the same year: Mid-Winter (1954), that currently resides in the Harwood Museum, Taos, and The Bluebird (1954), in the Roswell Museum & Art Center, New Mexico.

As a young adult Martin moved from Canada to the United States, first to Washington, to New York, and then to Albuquerque where she studied painting at the University of New Mexico. Inspired by nature and the outdoors, her earliest works are landscapes she painted as a student and teacher in Taos during the late 1940s. Always executed outside, they capture her love for the desert environment that she would call home, not just during this early period, but for over thirty years during the latter part of her life. She was not the first artist to fall for New Mexico; artists escaping urban industrialization in the 19th Century and the Abstract Expressionist painters in the late 1940s and early 1950s travelled to the state with some choosing it to be their permanent home. Celebrated artists included Georgia O'Keeffe, who also settled there in 1940 and became great friends with Martin.

It was in 1953 when Martin moved back to Taos that she started to formally develop an abstract style, and it was a year later that Autumn Watch was executed. Martin identified as one of the Taos Moderns; a group formed in the 1940s, who were a collective of mostly abstract painters that had moved to Taos. Taos at the time was considered an outpost for artists from New York, San Francisco, and Europe, many of whom seemed to be grappling with the legacy of Surrealism and issues of non-objective painting that had preoccupied the emerging New York School in the 1940s. They drew influences from the local light and landscape creating primarily non-figurative works. The years in Taos gave Martin an almost mystical understanding of tranquility, space and a deep appreciation of the spiritual forces of nature. This period, which continued until 1957, was termed her biomorphic period; her canvases focused on a form of abstraction that drew on rounded forms derived from organic shapes as opposed to the more ridged shapes found in geometric abstraction. Martin predominately worked in earthy palettes of beiges, greens, greys, and creams. This form of abstraction was prevalent in the works of the Abstract Expressionists during the 1940s and experimented by Pollock, Rothko, and Gorky, all of whom Martin admired during this time.

Autumn Watch encapsulates a true expression of her style during this period. The monumental and full canvas displays merging biomorphic shapes which are possibly suggestive of a mountainous landscape not unlike the New Mexican terrain she so loved. It is described in neutral greys, whites, and black passages of color. Martin's interest in line as a defining element in her later works, is already made manifest in her employment of a narrow and black contour line that runs throughout, connecting the organic shapes of her composition. It is a mesmerizing work that evokes a sense of harmony and simplicity to its beholder.

Autumn Watch was included in an important exhibition at the Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico in Taos in 2012. The exhibition, titled Agnes Martin: Before the Grid was curated in honor of Agnes Martin's centenary and offered a rare opportunity to showcase a selection of Martin's artwork made before the iconic grid paintings of the 1960s.

Agnes Martin was one of the most influential painters of her generation and has left an enduring mark on the history of Modern and Contemporary Art. Today her works reside in the international collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Dia Art Foundation, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate, London, among others. She was awarded a National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998 and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 2004. Sadly she was to pass away this same year. It is true to say that Agnes Martin was an artist who adopted a contemplative vision of nature and the world as an illusion fusing it in her art to create sublime but simple works of transcendental beauty.