A close examination of Agnes Martin's grid painting in luminous blue
and gold.
Agnes Martin's Night Sea (1963) is a large canvas of hand-drawn
rectangular grids painted in luminous blue and gold. In this illustrated
study, Suzanne Hudson presents the painting as the work of an artist who
was also a thinker, poet, and writer for whom self-presentation was a
necessary part of making her works public. With Night Sea, Hudson
argues, Martin (1912-2004) created a shimmering realization of control
and loss that stands alone within her suite of classic grid paintings as
an exemplary and exceptional achievement.
Hudson offers a close examination of Night Sea and its position within
Martin's long and prolific career, during which the artist destroyed
many works as she sought forms of perfection within self-imposed
restrictions of color and line. For Hudson, Night Sea stands as the
last of Martin's process-based works before she turned from oil to
acrylic and sought to express emotions of lightness and purity
unburdened by evidence of human struggle.
Drawing from a range of archival records, Hudson attempts to draw
together the facts surrounding the work, which were at times obfuscated
by the artist's desire for privacy. Critical responses of the time give
a sense of the impact of the work and that which followed it. Texts by
peers including Lenore Tawney, Donald Judd, and Lucy Lippard are
presented alongside interviews with a number of Martin's friends and
keepers of estates, such as the publisher Ronald Feldman and Kathleen
Mangan of the Lenore Tawney archive, which holds correspondence between
Martin and Tawney.
