Agnes Martin: Nailed It

16 squares of canvas painted creamy yellowish white laid, slightly overlapping along their right edges, in a grid to cover a 12 x 12 inch panel. a nearly flat arc of 21 small steel nails crosses like a horizon line at the top of the second row of squares. all in a wood slat frame. titled homage to greece, this 1959 painting by agnes martin belonged to her lover and neighbor, the excellent textile artist lenore tawney. img via christies

Saw this perfect, little Agnes Martin, very early, via @punk-raphaelite‘s reblog.

Along with the carefully imperfect grid built up from painted squares of canvas—one scholar calls them selvedge edges—Homage To Greece (1959) is one of a handful of works where Martin used nail heads like dots. The ones I’ve seen date from a little later; did Martin add the nails then, or was this an early example?

a 1962 agnes martin painting 12 inches square is a graphite grid ten rows high on a concrete colored oil paint base. the vertical elements are very narrow, and at the top and bottm of each vertical rectangle, martin has hammered a tiny brass nail head, which read as painted dots, in slightly imperfect rows, obviously hand-done. owned by the mca san diego
Agnes Martin, Untitled, 1962, graphite and oil on canvas, brass nails, artist’s frame, 12 x 12 in, MCASD

Prior to her expansion to 6-foot square canvases, Martin worked in this small, handheld size, creating not just paintings, but objects, thick with her own slat frames. One group of shallow little boxes, incised with a grid and enclosed in a plexiglass top, have little balls rolling around inside. Called The Wave, one was in a toy-themed group show once, but the others were just for friends.

Probably the friendliest among them was Lenore Tawney, who got a The Wave, and Homage to Greece—which the Tawney Foundation sold in 2011—among many other Martin works. While the two were Coenties Slipmates.

Happy Pride?

Obviously, I needed a line there that started with H.