This brisk tour of Agnes Martin’s career—forty years in twenty drawings—is anchored by On a Clear Day, 1973, a series of prints offering thirty ways to regard the square. The number of horizontal and vertical lines in Martin’s dark, delicate fretwork varies from print to print, creating subtly different optical effects as the lines reverberate with the blankness around them. Laid flat on a table, the works align the viewer’s gaze with the artist’s by drawing it downward, and they prompt the questions that Martin may have asked herself: Why does a grid inside a square undermine its squareness? What ratios of rows to columns make it look oblong or squat?
In the 1970s, Martin pared down an already spare vocabulary. These prints are a glimpse of her shifting priorities, and the drawings around them protract that glimpse into a lifelong panorama. As they progress chronologically along three walls, Martin’s constructions lose their architectural flourishes and pick up coats of limpid watercolor. In its total unlikeness to the preceding utterances, the scribble of a collapsing cactus billed as Martin’s last drawing has the finality of a period.
The geometric figures in these works can be replicated on a larger scale, which raises the question of whether Martin’s sequences and patterns should be seen as segments of an indefinitely expandable ideal form, manipulations of a finite space. The empirical On a Clear Day and the laboratory quality of some drawings favor the latter interpretation; they look like the methodical workings of Martin’s untroubled mind.
