![]() ![]() ![]() Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. (An interpretation she would have hated.If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations). Martin never went that way, at least in her art, which, with its endless horizontal bands, one might interpret as so many sticking plasters over psychic wounds. ‘Uplift’ is a slightly queasy word to include in one’s critical arsenal, and such qualities – alongside an animus towards ‘thinking’ – can make Martin’s gentle persuasions register as avant-garde, even now, while art continues to incline towards the darker emotions. The grey paintings from the mid 1980s to early ’90s, for instance, which turn out to be just as uplift-infused as any in Martin’s graceful oeuvre. Much here requires fortitude, and while some rooms stop you in your tracks – like the one devoted to The Islands – others you glide through on first visit. Such thoughts fade pretty quickly, in front of, say, Untitled #3 (1974), which fills six quadrants in watery blue and pink, and essays an improbable fusion of weightlessness and monumentality.Ī 100-work retrospective, with anterooms of drawings and a good deal of bustle, isn’t necessarily the best way to appreciate Martin’s gifts. When she began again, the washed-out pastel blues and ochres and (mostly) horizontals she adopted advocate desert-glare, sky and adobe but Martin always claimed to be a non-representational painter and her paintings aren’t sustaining as location-specific abstractions. (Martin was also schizophrenic, hearing voices and falling into trances, and had been hospitalised and given shock therapy in the notorious Bellevue.) She didn’t paint for several years. In 1967, several conditions – the death of her friend Ad Reinhardt, the loss of her Manhattan studio to developers, the end of a relationship, receiving a grant – compelled her to leave Manhattan and, eventually, settle for reclusion in New Mexico. You can’t say if the grid is on the ground or embedded in it, creating subdivisions the painting has few aspects but they’re intimately interconnected. In the gleaming white expanse of vertical lozenges, Morning (1965), structure and ground interpenetrate. The grids she made until 1967 are optical and philosophical. Martin said she discovered the grid in the early ’60s while contemplating the idea of trees – arriving emotively at the equivalence Mondrian had arrived at through looking – but the format is already in her paintings by the late 1950s. The early rooms, starting in the mid 1950s, see her working through foggy biomorphic abstraction and hostile sculptures before the grids filter in. This retrospective shows how she got there, which famously was not easy. She also decided that happiness is the most important, if evanescent, thing that we’re all receiving haphazard hints of bliss in our daily lives and that art ought to be a concentrated repository for them. Martin, a long-term meditator with a patchwork belief system, would hold that it isn’t. Once panic subsides (wait, aren’t I supposed to think, and judge, in front of a modern artwork?), pleasure tinctured with relief sets in, only anti-intellectual if you believe intelligence to be the conscious mind’s preserve. But Martin – through titling, tonality, and architectonics – takes you someplace else, where reception persists while binary discriminations don’t so much. Many other artists have deployed slow-release recalibration. In the silvery flutter of graphite demarcations and the huge, if hugely restrained, colour spectrum, gradations become monumental. ![]() Go with them, squashing analytic thoughts, and they deliver a synthesis of emptiness and fullness. Soon after, the viewer arrives at The Islands (1979), 12 luminous canvases in boundless shades of white and faintest blue, variably divided into rising or falling bands, their limpidity and certitude recalling Martin’s beloved Bach. ![]()
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