Agnes Martin: Taos' Reluctant Leading Lady Takes Her Leave

January 15, 2005

Agnes Martin: Taos is smaller without her. She was one of the true believers, a woman who thought she could come here and find the answer. Perhaps she did. In 1954, under the blue Taos sky that she saw as happiness, she painted her first semi-abstract work. And it was to Taos she returned after achieving success and sold-out shows in New York City.

Here, Agnes found the space she needed. A loner who rejected the conventions of marriage and motherhood, she sought only inspiration, and the freedom to turn it into art. She sought the impersonality of a solitary life, which cleared her mind and released her from responsibility. “I don’t believe in emotional involvement,” she once told me. “That just messes things up.”

And yet Agnes was far from alone, for here she joined good company—if not with the living, then with the ghosts of women who made Taos what it is—a wild country that nonetheless feeds and propels the commanding, contrary, authoritative monster female. We know the myths—the scary constellation of Millicent Rogers, Mabel Dodge, Georgia O’Keeffe, Rebecca James, Dorothy Brett, Frida Lawrence.

In Taos, it is the woman who rules. Each is a force in her own right. These amazons took charge—and imposed their creative needs, their hungers, on their environment. Mabel built a monument to her own hospitality. Frida constructed a monument of her own to D. H. Lawrence’s ashes, forever cementing him to her and none other. These two predators took what they needed, and then wrote about it.

The thrice-married Millicent: who could ever get close to her, with that armor of silver and turquoise corseting her smile into a repellant, perfect mask? Too much wealth, too thin for mortal men. Clark Gable excluded, she must have crunched them like flies. Today she remains a symbol of steely female beauty, too cold to live long, too tough to die young.

It is only Agnes who wanted nothing but a small home, a simple studio, in which to empty her thoughts and summon onto blank canvas the abstract emotions she craved: innocence, beauty, love. It was her choice to never experience them for herself, in intimate close-up. She would have scoffed at the scratching between Frida, Mabel, and Dorothy Brett over the emaciated Lawrence, whose talismanic powers would have passed her right by.

Agnes didn’t waste her time with men—she had better fish to fry. Not that there was anything wrong with them, of course; she had succumbed to their charms in her day. But she chose a life in which she was able to eat, drink, sleep, and paint on her own terms. And this she did, to the utmost, in Taos.

Now about that work. It was masculine art—inscrutable, a statement men could not dismiss. None of Georgia O’Keeffe’s overt, frightening flowers here, no tortured female sympathies on display, blasted on the cross of the second sex. Agnes made art that made room for her. She chose where the boundaries lay—faint graphite lines, holding color at bay.

Who owns Agnes now? Her agent? The museums lucky enough to be gifted her work? Will her message be wrested from her, drafted to suit future battles? Surely she had the time to think these things through.

Agnes wanted silence now, as ever, with just the work to speak for her. But despite the rights she won, the art she made, the power she accumulated, Agnes is subject to the same forces that erode the adobe at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, that corrode the magnetism of Millicent Rogers, that cause Dan Flavin’s minimalist fluorescent light bulbs to burn out.

Agnes, whose body had begun to give way some time ago, was prepared for death. “I don’t want to have a long old age,” she told me, already 87. “I’m ready to go on finally. I certainly don’t think that’s the end, when you die. Do you?”