Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists - Part 4. Группа авторов

into the drivers of her artistic production, and during a lecture she gave at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pensylvania on February 14th, 1973, she reflected on the states of mind that triggered her paintings:

      The panic of complete helplessness drives us to fantastic extremes and feelings of mild helplessness drive us to ridiculousness. But helplessness when fear and dread have run their course, as all passions do, is the most rewarding state of all. [Flournoy, 2018]

      In addition to this, Martin was a very private and discrete person, unlike the 10th Street abstract expressionists. She destroyed her early paintings and she discouraged anyone from sharing facts from her life and discussing her painting.

      In 1966 Martin’s paintings were exhibited at Guggenheim’s “Systemic Paintings,” and later at Virginia Dwan’s gallery as part of the innovative exhibition “10,” where her works were shown together with those of other conceptual and minimalist painters [The Art Story, 2018c]. In 1967 she received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts [Miranda, 2016]. Around the same time, she broke up with Chryssa, a Greek-American sculptor [Greenberger, 2015], her friend Ad Reinhardt died, she had a relapse of her psychosis, and her studio on Coenties Slip was demolished. Following these events, Martin gave away all her painting tools and canvases, and bought a truck and camper and left New York [The Art Story, 2018c]. Martin escaped from all distractions and impediments in order to clear her mind and to achieve, as Kevin Salatino said, a state of being “egoless,” which allowed her to be free and happy [Salatino, 2008]. Many years later, Martin commented on her decision to leave New York:

      I could no longer stay, so I had to leave, you see… I left New York because every day I suddenly felt I wanted to die and it was connected with painting. It took me several years to find out that the cause was an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. [Laing, 2015]

      She embarked on a trip to Canada and ended up in New Mexico, initially in Portales Mesa, where she lived in very basic conditions without electricity, a phone or any neighbours. She built a house with her own hands with self-made adobe bricks and wood that she cut herself with a chainsaw [Laing, 2015]. After a few years she eventually settled in Galisteo, where she built another adobe brick home with a studio [The Art Story, 2018c]. During her stay in New Mexico, Martin focused on writing poetry and contemplation. In 1971, Martin was invited to prepare a series of prints which yielded a portfolio of 30 screen-prints called On a Clear Day, which were exhibited in 1973. The prevailing motive in these screen-prints is grids [Salatino, 2008]. Martin commented on this particular pattern, highlighting the play of geometrical shapes with an abstract emotional dimension:

      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.

      I was thinking about innocence, and then I saw it in my mind that grid. So I painted it, and sure enough, it was innocent. [Salatino, 2008]

      According to Salatino [2008], Martin was able to condense in those 30 screen-prints the essence of happiness, beauty, freedom, and at the same time perfection. Following this Martin took up painting again, and in 1976 she made a film entitled Gabriel, which featured a little boy meditatively walking around a beach. The film itself was not widely appreciated but it was Martin’s attempt to reach for something beyond her abilities [Greenberger, 2015].

      In 1992 Martin moved into a retirement residence in Taos in New Mexico. In her later paintings she returned to the theme of objects. She used more geometric shapes, such as trapezoids, squares coloured in black and put against simple sandy grey backgrounds, which Schjeldahl [2016] suggested as having a deathly appearance. Her very last work was that of a 3-inch-tall plant which was painted with a tottering ink line. As far as Martin’s medical condition was concerned at the end of her long life, she displayed features of dementia. She spent her last days in the infirmary of her retirement residence where she died in December 2004 [Laing, 2015].

      Overall, Agnes Martin’s artistic creativity was undoubtedly influenced by her paranoid schizophrenia, resulting in more systematic creations rather than being content with developing postage-stamp ideas into full-blown canvases. No convincing evidence has been offered by art critics on any deterioration of her artistic style and, on the contrary, her late artistic productions are considered as purification of her style and a consequence of her maturation as an artist and her personal emotional journey. One can say that she achieved purification of minimalism and abstraction, which is similar to what we saw in the case of Willem de Kooning and James Brooks. With application of scientific observational methods or fractal density assessment to interpret artistic changes, we can come to a more numerically palpable conclusion of the shifting of artistic output in abstract expressionists toward a more simplistic style. The question remains as to whether this is a consequence of the disease process or represents the mastering of artistic skills.

      References

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      Dekooning.org: Biography – The Artist – Willem de Kooning Foundation. 2018a. http://www.dekooning.org/the-artist/biography (Accessed May 16, 2018).

      Espinel C: Memory and the creation of art: the syndrome, as in de Kooning, of ‘creating in the midst of dementia’; in Bogousslavsky J, Hennerici MG (eds): Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists – Part 2. Basel, Karger, 2007, pp 150–168.

      Flournoy A: Agnes Martin’s notes. 2018. http://anneflournoy.com/agnes-martins-notes/ (accessed June 12, 2018).

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      Gaugh H, de Kooning W: Willem de Kooning. New York, Abbeville Press, 1982, p 112, note 17.

      Greenberger A: Off the grid: a new Agnes Martin biography explores the reclusive artist’s life. ARTnews, 2015. http://www.artnews.com/2015/06/18/off-the-grid-a-new-agnes-martin-biography-explores-the-reclusive-artists-life/ (accessed June 12, 2018).

      Guggenheim.org: Collection online: James Brooks. 2018. https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/james-brooks (accessed June 12, 2018).

      Laing O: Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert. Guardian, May 22, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/22/agnes-martin-the-artist-mystic-who-disappeared-into-the-desert (accessed June 12, 2018).

      Larson K: The art was abstract, the memories are concrete. New York Times, December 15, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/arts/art-architecture-the-art-was-abstract-the-memories-are-concrete.html (accessed June 12, 2018).

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      Miranda C: What the world misunderstands about artist Agnes Martin and how her biographer unearthed her story. Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2016. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-agnes-martin-nancy-princenthal-biography-lacma-20160411-column.html