Art I Can't Show You

the famous art dealer Arne glim sure tells this story about

the American artist Agnes Martin he

says that once his 11 year old granddaughter Isabelle

was visiting Martin and the little girl was holding on to a rose clipped

from a bush outside Martin's

house Agnes Martin took the rose and said to the girl is

this rose really beautiful

and Isabel said yes and then

Agnes Martin hid the rose behind her back and said

is the rose still beautiful yes

said Isabelle and then

Agnes Martin said you

see Isabelle beauty is in your mind not

in the rose today

I want to tell you about this group of six Agnes Martin paintings

called with my back to the world that Martin painted in 1997

near the end of her life Martin

often spoke about painting

with her back to the world she said she was not trying to paint

anything of or from

the world but was instead trying to paint inspiration

itself emotion itself when

I first saw these paintings

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City I

was so moved by them that I started crying which

is weird because the paintings themselves are just horizontal

bands of faint color pastel

pinks and yellows and blues in some cases the colors are barely visible the

paintings 60 inches square look

like almost nothing okay

so some art is as moving in replicas

as it is in person like seeing the Mona Lisa under

glass while being jostled by hundreds of other people trying

to see the Mona Lisa is not at least in my experience more

profound than looking carefully at a good reproduction

of the Mona Lisa but with my back to the world loses

everything in the replication

of it you would see nothing

but bands of pastel

paint they're incredibly quiet paintings

and this is a deeply

unquiet visual space so

I'm not even gonna try you can google them if you want instead

I want to try to share these paintings with you by sharing

how they made me feel Agnes

Martin once said that from music

people accept pure emotion

but from art they demand explanation

but of course even offering that quote to you is a kind of explanation

it's a kind of explanation

to say that Martin famously

abandoned the New York art world in

1967 eventually settling in New Mexico

where she lived in a series of adobe

homes that she built herself its

explanation to say that she was gay to say that she was diagnosed

with schizophrenia that she was friends with artists

like ad Reinhardt and Bruce Nauman

that she lived alone for most

of her life its

explanation to say that at the time of her death in 2004

Agnes Martin had not read a newspaper

in over 50 years she

painted with her back to all of that and so

much more this is explanation to

after 20 years of becoming a progressively

more abstract painter struggling

everyday with her work she

was thinking one day in 1964

about the innocence of trees an

image appeared in her mind she

described it as lines

going this way and lines going that way and they

were innocent they looked like

innocence she called the resulting artwork the tree and it was a revelation for

Martin this gets at an old problem in art whether music or literature or

visual art or whatever it's

easy enough to paint a symbol

of innocence an unclothed

newborn baby say or the unlined

softly lit face of a maiden or a lamb or whatever but these are

not pictures of innocence

itself innocence has no shape or face it's an abstract

idea and of course metaphor can be a way into

those abstractions but when

over relied upon metaphor

becomes not just a crutch but

a falsehood if we start to conceive of innocence

as having the form of a lamb then

we've wrongly defined both lamb

and innocence what Martin tried to do was to paint emotion

itself to paint the deeply abstract

feelings that are so resistant

to direct expression or form and when

we can't label or name our

abstract feelings in some ways we

don't know them we

need language to describe

the way down wonders

and terrors otherwise they're

impossible to reckon with Martin

once said if you wake up in the morning

and you feel very happy

about nothing no cause that's

what I paint about the

subtle emotions that we feel without

cause in this world now

that thought to say that Martin was unfamiliar

with suffering or misery in her work or outside of it when her paintings

became popular with collectors Martin

became wealthy but she never moved out of her self-made

adobe homes instead she donated

millions of dollars to

charity especially organizations that supported

marginalized kids and victims of domestic abuse I would argue that her paintings don't

ignore suffering they transcend

it she once said I believe

in living above the line above

the line is happiness

and love you know below

the line is all sadness and

destruction and unhappiness and I

don't go below the line for anything we

often talk about how difficult it can be to render suffering

in art and it is difficult

Picasso's Guernica for instance is rightly celebrated

as a masterpiece because it found a way to communicate the

jumbled horrors of mechanized warfare and

in an essay about Picasso's

work the French writer Michele lares wrote everything

we love is about to die and that is why everything must be summed

up with all the high emotion

of farewell and something

so beautiful we shall never forget it

that kind of grandiosity is

indeed what we've traditionally heralded

as genius and art but it seems to me that finding

direct expression for something other than the high emotion of farewell is also

really valuable how do you paint the sublime how

do you paint the beauty that is in your mind how do you paint

the rose that is hidden behind your back this

was the challenge that Agnes Martin set for herself and I know it's easy

to dismiss canvases lightly painted with bands of pastel

color but if you ever find the opportunity

to commune with Agnes Martin's

paintings you may find as I did that

they make visible a joy you

know but cannot name

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