NPR Interview Highlights Alumna Agnes Martin's Art and Life | Teachers College Columbia University

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NPR Interview Highlights Alumna Agnes Martin's Art and Life

WNYC's Leonard Lopate interviewed Nancy Princenthal, biographer of alumna and influential postwar painter Agnes Martin. In Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson, 2015), Princenthal covers Martin’s 50-year career, and how her austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest.

To listen to the interview, aired on July 8, go to The Creativity, and Crisis, of the Minimalist Artist Agnes Martin.

Although she identified with Abstract Expressionism, Martin's spare, linear, grid paintings in subtle colors led some critics to characterize her as a Minimalist. She was the recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts. After teaching in high schools in various states, she transferred to Teachers College, where she earned a Bachelors of Science degree in 1932 and a Master's of Art degree in Art and Art Education in 1942.

Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912 and attended Western Washington College of Education, in Bellingham, Washington. After teaching in high schools in various states, she transferred to Teachers College, where she earned both her bachelors and masters degrees. She died in Taos, New Mexico in 2004.

Read more:Agnes Martin Biography

Princenthal will be discussing her book at the FLAG Art Foundation on August 5th at 6 p.m. A retrospective of Martin's work is showing through October 11 at the Tate Modern in London.

Twenty-four of Martin's paintings are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.


Published Thursday, Jul. 9, 2015
Agnes Martin (Photo from WNYC.org)

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