The decade Martin spent living among the artists of Coenties Slip influenced the development of the painter’s mature style. With the latter two artists she was known to have close relations, which some speculate to have been romantic, though Martin never spoke publicly on the issue. Her peers included Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, and Chryssa, a Greek immigrant and artist who soon ascended to artistic fame. Martin found her place in Coenties Slip, a loosely affiliated group of artists living in the decrepit buildings surrounding South Street Seaport. Martin’s return to New York in 1956, commercially supported by the gallerist Betty Parsons, was defined by a new society of artists, as the Abstract Expressionist dominion of the late 1940s and early 50s was beginning to wane. © Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. There she was an avid swimmer, and just fell short of making the Canadian Olympic team.Īgnes Martin, The Spring, 1958. Though still a Canadian citizen, Martin would move to Bellingham, Washington to attend high school. Martin’s youth was itinerant after her father’s death, her family moved to Calgary and then to Vancouver. Perhaps her somewhat unhappy home life accounted for the artist’s later personality and behavior. In her daughter's words, Margaret Martin was a “tremendous disciplinarian” who “hated” young Agnes because she “interfered with her social life” (Princenthal, 24). From then on her mother ruled with an iron fist.
Records of Martin’s father are minimal, though they place his death around the time Agnes was a toddler. Her childhood was characterized by the bleak endlessness of the plains, where she, her parents, and her three siblings lived on a working farm. © Mildred Tolbert Family.īorn in 1912 in Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin grew up on the often unforgiving frontier of the North American West. The Harwood Museum of Art, Gift of Mildred Tolbert. Agnes Martin in her studio in Taos, New Mexico in 1953.
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