Agnes Martin
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. 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.
If you own a work by Agnes Martin
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 costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.