Agnes Martin valuation
Drew graphite grids on square canvases in the New Mexico desert, and asked for nothing else.
Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan in 1912, came to the United States in her twenties, and spent years in Coenties Slip in New York alongside Kelly, Indiana and Youngerman before leaving the city abruptly in 1967, giving away her materials and driving west.
What a work by Agnes Martin is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan in 1912, came to the United States in her twenties, and spent years in Coenties Slip in New York alongside Kelly, Indiana and Youngerman before leaving the city abruptly in 1967, giving away her materials and driving west. She lived alone in New Mexico for years, latterly in Taos, and lived with schizophrenia throughout. The work is a six-foot square canvas with a hand-drawn graphite grid or bands of extremely pale wash, made slowly and by hand so that the line wavers. She rejected the Minimalist label and called herself an Abstract Expressionist. She died in 2004.
Condition determines value here more than in almost any other market. The surfaces are pale, thin, unvarnished gesso and acrylic with graphite drawn directly on top; they cannot be cleaned, they show every handling mark, and a single fingerprint or scuff is effectively permanent. Martin destroyed a great deal of her own work, and unsigned or rejected canvases occasionally surface and are contentious. The Agnes Martin catalogue raisonne is the reference. Her prints, particularly the On a Clear Day portfolio, are the accessible part of the output.
At a glance
- Born
- 22 March 1912, Macklin
- Died
- 16 December 2004, Taos
- Movements
- Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism
More on Wikipedia.
The catalogue raisonné, On a Clear Day and Taos
The Agnes Martin catalogue raisonné is published online by Artifex Press, with the paintings released in 2017 and the works on paper in 2019, and a painting or drawing should be found there. The Harwood Museum of Art in Taos has an octagonal gallery for seven late paintings she gave it in 1993 and 1994, and Tate Modern gave her a retrospective in 2015.
On a Clear Day, published by Parasol Press in New York in 1973, is a portfolio of thirty screenprints of grids and lines in an edition of fifty, with fourteen lettered artist's proofs. It was made near the end of the seven years from 1967 in which she stopped painting altogether. Single sheets from the portfolio are common, and the sheet's place in the series and its edition number should be recorded.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
