On Rachel Cusk and Agnes Martin and Art Moments
So the path reconnects again, and that may be part of the message in this art, writing, and curiosity, too. They are always filtering through us and our own noticing.
Several years ago I met my older son in New York for the weekend and we went to the Whitney Museum as something to do out of the cold. He was in his first year of boarding school and I felt terrible that he had left, that we thought boarding school across the country was a good idea. A close friend of mine had died that year and my grief made everything weigh more.
That afternoon, we wandered the museum and eventually, in what I remember as the back room of one of the upper floors, we walked into this Agnes Martin line painting.
I stopped at the painting and felt a connection that language feels inadequate to describe. I sensed the ivory bands as expansive, all seeing, a landscape capturing a vista though no nature was shown, framed and conjured further in the blue and red alongside them. The calm lines and pale palette and color shifts evoked a reassurance of possibility in their delicate manner and consistency. I almost resist this description now because the experience wasn’t taking in a composition as much as an emotional vibration or message. I had never responded to art this way, where I felt as if in my looking, someone had seen me and spoken the most simple words, ones that I had not known I was looking for. I understand.
At the time, I had not heard of Martin or seen her work. I didn’t know that she came from Canada, through the Northwest to the artist community in Taos, New Mexico and then New York for two separate periods, the last ending in 1967 when she lived and worked on Coenties Slip with Ellsworth Kelly, Lenore Tawney, Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, and other artists. Eventually Martin returned to Taos. That afternoon, I almost didn’t want to know anything about her. I took photos of the exhibit, but didn’t write down the title of this piece, though I think likely “Untitled” and painted in the 1990s.
From the curator’s description printed on the wall: “Martin tirelessly explored the potential of abstraction to communicate on an emotional and spiritual register as well as a formal one.”
I’m struck most by the desire Martin’s piece evoked in me, with such clarity and compassion, a desire to be understood, seen, felt, connected. While we often write about art’s capacity in this regard, it is really something to feel it. A month later when I noticed in the window of McNally Jackson Books Nancy Princenthal’s Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, I bought the biography and felt I was on some kind of mysterious path.
A few years later, I read Rachel Cusk’s Second Place. In the novel, M. recalls a destabilizing work trip to Paris when she was a young writer, wife, and mother, and encountered a painting and then a gallery of the male artist L.’s work. Gazing at the paintings, she experiences a transcending connection with her true self that leads her to leave a marriage. In M.’s account to her friend Jeffers, Cusk at first notes the limitation of language to describe the moment with L.’s art, but then finds words that align to my experience with Martin’s painting in the Whitney that afternoon:
What was it? It was a feeling, Jeffers, but it was also a phrase. It will seem contradictory, after what I’ve just said about words, that words should accompany the sensation so definitively. But I didn’t find those words. The paintings found them, somewhere inside me. I don’t know who they belonged to, or even who spoke them—just that they were spoken.
M. eventually reveals the words she heard, different, though also similar to mine. And while L.’s landscapes offer her “absolute freedom”—interestingly she sees landscapes as I did in Martin’s painting—they eventually will entwine her with the volatile L. Fifteen years after her day in Paris, she invites the artist to stay with her and her new husband in the country at a guest house they describe as the second place. The attempt at reconnection does not go well.
For me, Martin remains a touchstone, a lineage to my sense of an understanding. And to my vulnerability. Like M.’s disrupted time in Paris, my grief and loss may have created the opening to see, feel, and hear art with such singularity. I’ve continued to read about Martin, and I’m immediately curious when she comes up for other writers, like Garth Greenwell considering a Martin painting for his book cover, or at AWP this year, when I noticed a slim book with a blue grid painting on its cover. I intended to return to buy the book, but in the convention center chaos, I couldn’t locate the bookseller’s table again.
I like these unexpected Martin’s, even when I lose sight of them. At SFMOMA this winter, I tracked down an Ellsworth Kelly only to turn a corner and find, again in the back of an upper museum floor, this octagon room of Martin’s expansive grid and line paintings. It was a Family Day Sunday, the museum crowded with parents and kids, and yet no one interrupted me as I took a photo. Then I sat on the round bench with the paintings for as long as I wanted.
I felt an echo of that first experience looking at the Martin painting in New York. That initial impression like a wave, as M. describes in Second Place: “Over and over as I faced the image, the sensation came.” And sensation leaves an imprint, the doorway remains.
I had forgotten the author’s note at the end of Cusk’s novel; she cites as an inspiration for her book Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos about the time D.H. Lawrence came to visit Dodge Luhan there. Martin overlapped with Dodge Luhan in Taos, and Princenthal notes the non-Western spiritual beliefs of Dodge Luhan and her friends likely influenced Martin.
So the path reconnects again, and that may be part of the message in this art, writing, and curiosity, too. They are always filtering through us and our own noticing. What are your art or artist moments like? I’d love to hear.
All my best and till next time,
Kelly
Recommended:
Prudence Peiffer’s The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever and on Audible (I like listening to biographies).
Cover Thoughts from Garth Greenwell’s newsletter To a Green Thought.
Untitled #5, 1998 After Agnes Martin by Victoria Chang and her interview at Oxonian Review about writing in response to Martin’s painting at MoMA.
The forthcoming novel by Rachel Cusk, Parade (June 2024), about turning points in an artist’s life.
And I talked with my friend, writer and teacher Emily Mohn-Slate about writing and meditation at her Be Where You Are newsletter, one of my favorite Substacks.