BOOK:Agnes Martin Her Life and Art, Thames & Hudson Publications

How does one begin to tell the story of Agnes Martin, one of modern art’s most original and self-effacing artists, especially when so many aspects of her personal history are shrouded in mystery, misinformation, myth and misunderstanding. Much of the fog enveloping Martin’s story owes a lot to the artist’s own contradictory statements and to numerous details of her life, which, over the years, have been hard to corroborate. “I paint with my back to the world”, she claimed and when she died at 92, in Taos-New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century. Faced with the challenge of documenting such an elusive subject, Nancy Princenthal, in her superbly researched new book:  “Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art” (Thames & Hudson), offers the first comprehensive biography of Martin as well as a critical examination of the unusual body of work she produced. The Writer tells her whole story chronologically, from Martin’s birth in Saskatchewan and her early years as an artist, living in derelict Manhattan shipping lofts with Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and others, to the seven years she stopped painting, just as her career was taking off, the months she spent roaming the country in a pickup truck and her last 30 years, in Taos some of that time, in an adobe house she built with her own hands. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in Abstract painting or the history of women artists.-Efi Michalarou