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On a Clear Day #28

Agnes Martin

On a Clear Day #28

1973

Screenprint on Japanese Mulberry paper

Edition of 50 with 14 APs lettered ‘A’ through ‘N’, along with a number of APs and PPs that were not lettered. This one being an “AP”
Image size: 6 7/8 x 8 inches (17.5 x 20.3 cm)
Paper size: 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm)
Frame size: 15 1/8 x 15 1/8 inches (38.4 x 38.4 cm)
Signed ‘A. Martin’ lower right, numbered ‘AP’ lower left, and inscribed ’28’ upper left corner in graphite
(Inventory #32269)

Agnes Martin created her only major print project, “On a Clear Day,” towards the end of a seven-year period (1967-1974) during which she made no paintings. Martin had moved to an isolated mesa in New Mexico to live in isolation. She had spent the previous decade in New York City, a time during which she had critical and commercial success but disliked the distractions of the busy city, desiring a quieter, clearer place to live where she could make her “egoless” art that was imbued with beauty, openness and joy. Invited to make a print project in 1971, it took her two years to bring it to fruition. The results were “On a Clear Day.” Shortly after finishing the project, she resumed her painting practice, which she continued until she passed away in 2004.

In 2008, the curator, Kevin Salatino, then Curator of Prints at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now Chair & Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote the following about Martin and this project:

As with all of her mature work, the prints of “On a Clear Day” take as their subject matter the grid, rendered with an astonishing diversity of expression, focused with severe rigor yet compositionally and interpretatively open. About her grids, Martin famously said, “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles . . . . When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.” Elsewhere, she explained that the grid came to her as an inspiration. “I was thinking about innocence, and then I saw it in my mindthat grid . . . . So I painted it, and sure enough, it was innocent.” Martin’s grid of rectangles, as one critic noted, “eradicated the hierarchical balancing of parts. The effect was not only a surface in perfect equilibrium, but one that epitomized unity and wholeness.” While her grid was early on interpreted as a purified analog of nature, Martin vigorously rejected this reading. “My work is anti-nature,” she declared. “[It] is about emotionnot personal emotion [but] abstract emotion. It’s about those subtle moments of happiness we all experience.” She succinctly defined art as “the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” Grander in conception than any of Martin’s paintings, “On a Clear Day” condenses through multiplication thirty ways of constructing a grid, of expressing happiness, beauty, freedom, and the impossibility of, though yearning for, perfection. Its individual parts, recalling the number of days in a month, imply the passage of time. Its title declares the long-sought-for clarity the artist had struggled to find in the barren New Mexican desert. One of the great works of graphic art of the late twentieth century, “On a Clear Day” announces with luminous clarity and conviction Martin’s return to aesthetic wholeness.

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Agnes Martin was born in 1912 in Macklin, Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She came to the United States in 1932 and lived in Washington and Oregon until 1940. Martin studied at Western Washington State College, Bellingham, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She received her BS and MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York and taught at public schools in Washington, Delaware, and New Mexico during the late 1930s and the 1940s, at the University of New Mexico in the late 1940s, and at Eastern Oregon College, La Grande, in 1952-53. She became a United States citizen in 1950.

Martin lived and taught periodically in New York in the 1940s and early 1950s. In 1957, she settled in Coenties Slip in lower Manhattan, where her friends and neighbors included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Jack Youngerman. In 1958, her first solo show took place at Section Eleven of the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York. By the late 1950s, Martin’s landscape and figurative watercolors, surrealistic oils, and three-dimensional sculptural objects were supplanted by her highly simplified abstractions. These mature works distinguished by square formats, grids, lines drawn on canvas, and monochromatic color with subtle variations in hue have been an important influence for younger artists. In 1966, her work was included in the exhibition Systemic Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim as representative of the Minimalist art current in New York.

After Martin left New York and moved to Cuba, New Mexico, in 1967, she did not paint for seven years. However, she returned to painting in 1974 and produced a number of works in which she replaced neutral tones with brighter color. After 1973, she exhibited regularly and major traveling exhibitions of her work have been organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Philadelphia (1973), Hayward Gallery in London (1977), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1991), Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1993), and Dia:Beacon in New York (2004). Her writings were published in 1992 in conjunction with her exhibition at Kunstmuseum Winthur in Switzerland and again in 2005 by Hatje Cantz Publishers. Martin has been honored with, among other awards, the Skowhegan Medal of Painting and Sculpture (1987), Oskar Kokoschka Prize (1992), Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1997), National Medal of Arts from the Office of the President, and Lifetime Acheivement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art (2005). Martin died in Taos, New Mexico, in 2004.

–Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

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