MOLLY WARNOCK
WRITING IN 1966, Ann Wilson noted the ways in which Agnes Martin’s paintings “seem to grow out of the fabric” of the underlying support. The critic meant to stress the extent to which artistic process appears effaced, aesthetic subjectivity suppressed, in Martin’s impersonal-looking works. I recently found myself reconsidering these claims, standing before two roughly contemporaneous paintings currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Both pictures draw impetus from the distinctly taupe-colored canvas that recurs throughout the artist’s defining New York–based period, but each does so differently, offering a singularly vivid interpretation of the relationship between painted field and chosen fabric. By that very fact, however, they attest to the continued importance of Martin’s carefully calibrated decision making.
The title of the earlier painting, Garden, 1964, all but begs for Wilson’s metaphor, even as the results eschew organic continuity. Adopting Martin’s six-foot-square standard format, the work reveals an allover armature of upright, uniformly sized rectangles, doubly limned by faint, ever so slightly spaced tracings of red and green colored pencil on a white synthetic-polymer ground. Significantly, the pigmented area is not exactly coterminous with the stretched surface: Instead, the artist leaves irregular bits of the slightly darker linen cloth exposed around the edges, as if inviting the attentive beholder to observe properties that are quite precisely counterbalanced—but never simply superseded—within the complex entity of the completed painting. So, for example, Martin’s white field denaturalizes, but is also warmed by, the canvas’s found coloration, while the thinly applied medium at once covers and accentuates the fabric’s weave. The repeating vertical units, for their part, both counter and underscore (one might say: render meaningful through opposition) the material’s markedly horizontal grain. And then, of course, there are the contrasting complementaries of the barely-there lines. The subtle phenomenal bloom of optical vibration produced by their interaction registers as responsive to the variegated but comparatively inert tonality of the underlying canvas, especially where that substrate is left to complete or “draw” the bounds of the grid as a whole. Garden’s growth, in other words, appears rigorously plotted.
Installed next to Garden is the slightly later Play, 1966, which is of equal size but offers a painted surface rather differently rooted in its canvas support. Here, too, the horizontal grain of the fabric shows through clearly, and once again, the vertical thrust of Martin’s grid—now constructed of wider and narrower rectangles in wavering, white-painted lines—reads as dialectically opposed to that inbuilt directionality. Unlike Garden, however, the painted field cedes nearly no terrain to nonpainted, chromatically contrasting fabric. Rather, the surface as a whole appears very close in color to—although notably different in texture and reflectivity from—the revealed cloth around Garden’s edges, as if Play’s pigment were in some sense extrapolated from that natural coloration, or as if the new work’s support were not so much covered as somehow burnished by the overlying synthetic polymer paint. Yet where the wheat-colored tonality of the cloth in Garden is a simple material given that the white paint counters, the 1966 canvas takes over and transforms that color as created effect, layering a tan coat (or coats) atop white underpainting. The latter does not quite stay “beneath” the former but gleams forth everywhere, suggesting a surface that will not be stabilized once and for all; a ground that is luminous rather than strictly obdurate—a structure, in other words, always already in play.
Molly Warnock is an assistant professor in the history of art at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
