Date of Award
2018
Document Type
Restricted Access Capstone
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Department
Art History
Abstract
The painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004) loathed overly intellectual readings of her work. Her statement, "the intellectual life is in fact death" sparks curiosity of her ideology, process and output to her oeuvre. Martin's lifelong commitment to the grid and geometry greatly changed modern and contemporary art.' Her drive to paint with " her back to the world" premiered true non-objectivity in painting in one of the first instances worth mentioning in the history of art.'. Further, she accomplished all of this being a woman artist amidst the competitive and aggressive male-centric art world of the 1950's. While noting that Martin reminded her critics that her work is neither masculine nor feminine, it is significant that as a woman artist she revolutionized the modern art world with her first grid painting, becoming in fact vital to the state of art thereafter.3 It seems as if this particularly modest and otherworldly individual asks for her work to be thoroughly analyzed when she explicitly urged for it to remain uninterpreted.
Recommended Citation
Herbert, John, "Agnes Martin: Feminine Impacts on the Masculine Grid" (2018). Capstone Projects. 2.
https://idun.augsburg.edu/capstone/2