Worth a Pilgrimage

Since late last summer, most of the national attention directed at art in New Mexico has focused on the long-awaited opening of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. The new museum is an expensively produced tourist attraction just off the plaza in the center of town, reflecting the artist’s iconic status and her huge popularity with general audiences.

By stark contrast, a 90-minute drive northeast of Santa Fe leads to the very different home of another permanent museum display, which opened with considerably less fanfare five months ago. It too is dedicated to an esteemed painter who is a longtime resident of the state--albeit one whose name resonates more in art circles than with the general public. Built as an addition to the historic Harwood Museum, a beautiful 1918 adobe now under the auspices of the University of New Mexico, the new Agnes Martin Gallery is a gorgeous installation. So gorgeous, in fact, it seems destined to become a pilgrimage site for avid followers of contemporary art.

Unlike the tens of millions of dollars lavished on the O’Keeffe Museum and its small, uneven collection, the Martin Gallery was part of a larger building renovation and expansion, designed by the Albuquerque firm of Kells + Craig, whose total budget was a modest $1.5 million. Its lovely suite of seven Martin paintings, made in 1993 and early 1994, were a gift of the critically celebrated artist, who lives in Taos and turns 87 this year.

The gallery is an intimate octagonal white room, set off by itself in a rear corner on the first floor, with sturdy oak floors and an opaque cylindrical skylight. The paintings, each 5 feet square and all mounted in brushed-aluminum strip frames, are hung one to a wall; the eighth wall is pierced by a doorway. Beneath the skylight in the center of the room stands a cluster of four plywood-box stools, designed in a severe, geometric style by the late Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd and stained the color of autumnal aspen leaves.

As in all of Martin’s best work, it’s plain that these paintings were mapped out in advance with meticulous care. They’re composed from cool horizontal stripes of pale blue and white paint, sometimes delineated by pencil lines, and in a variety of combinations and complexities.

In the first picture, for instance, four white bars alternate with four pale blue bars. In the second, four narrow blue bars are separated by three wide white bars. In the third, six pairs of off-white and off-blue bars are separated by five thin white lines. And so forth around the room.

There doesn’t seem to be a distinct pattern at work from painting to painting, except that the seven appear to alternate in terms of visual complexity. Sometimes the blue was over-painted with white, tamping down the tone. Brush marks show that the paint was applied thinly and in short, steady, methodical strokes across the canvas. The horizontality of the bars and the brush strokes nudges you from picture to picture around the room, while the repeated square format acts as a gentle brake, encouraging pauses.

The Martin Gallery is by no means a dark or dimly lit room, but most visitors still automatically start to whisper when they enter. The paintings and their harmonious environment gently carve out a space for quiet contemplation. Both the individual compositions and the differences between pictures are subtle and nuanced, slowing down the otherwise busy pace of normal perception.

Without any pictorial references to actual landscape elements, these pictures recall the distinctive experience of the remarkable New Mexican desert outside. They do it in rigorously abstract terms.

The dual components of surface and edge are critical to geometric abstraction, and both loom large here. In these spare, carefully controlled fields, surface and edge assume a richness and resonance that give the slightest inflection of the brush or mark of pencil an outsize gravitas. These works feel uncannily vast and filled with an expansive light--even though paintings 5 feet square possess a distinctly intimate, bodily scale.

That wonderful paradox animates much of Martin’s work. The Harwood installation is a pacific daydream, in which acute attention to the detailed nuances of form establishes, in the viewer, a surprising sense of formlessness. Martin’s art, as critic Peter Schjeldahl once nailed the gently destabilizing experience, stirs in us “an oceanic feeling.”

I’d seen this suite of paintings once before, at the 1995 Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, but the group looked rather dull there. Conventionally hung and artificially lit in a large gallery with tall walls, the paintings seemed adrift. By contrast, in the carefully calibrated, enveloping Taos installation, which was the brainchild of Harwood Museum Director Robert M. Ellis, they fairly sing.

The room stands as a classic demonstration of how sensitive curatorial presentation can (and should) elucidate art. In a museum world increasingly overrun with education programs, didactic wall labels, computer terminals and other interpretive gewgaws that supposedly assist audiences in understanding art, the Agnes Martin Gallery takes another tack. Rather than larding the space with information, as if it were a classroom, the gallery is recognized instead as a distinctive platform for an experience of art. It’s a testament to curatorial presentation as potentially the most powerful and effective tool of art education.

In a larger sense, the Harwood Museum also provides an illuminating context for Martin’s paintings. Partly it stems from the artist’s long connection to Taos and its museum.

Martin had her first museum exposure there in 1947, when she was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. (The Harwood owns a Martin painting from the period, an interesting, vaguely Surrealist organic abstraction typical of advanced art of its day.) She lived in Taos from 1952 to 1957, returning to New Mexico in 1968 after a decade spent working in lower Manhattan. In 1992, Martin moved from her home near Santa Fe to live in Taos once again. Thus, the November opening of the Agnes Martin Gallery was a kind of 50th anniversary celebration of her Harwood debut.

The Harwood has also been attentive since the 1920s to certain currents in 20th century American art that cast Martin’s paintings in an interesting light. Before World War II, this remote, centuries-old town in the magnificent high desert was a magnet for any number of Modernist painters who were intent on disengaging themselves from the soul-crushing pressures of the industrial world; in the decade after, it attracted progressive painters from New York and San Francisco, then the two principal American centers for abstract art.

One result is an eclectic collection of Modern paintings at the Harwood, ranging from evocative landscapes by Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Ernest Blumenschein early in the century to poetic abstractions by Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Corbett and Clay Spohn in mid-century. Martin was a veteran painter by 1960, when she developed her now-classic method of making symmetrical pencil grids on monochrome grounds. The Harwood’s earlier 20th century paintings are an ideal preparation for an in-depth encounter with her work.

A profoundly spiritual chord is struck by the Agnes Martin Gallery. It recalls such earlier precedents as Barnett Newman’s cycle “Stations of the Cross,” often installed downstairs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and--especially--the Rothko Chapel in Houston, with its suite of 14 big wine-dark canvases in a rather grim octagonal space designed by architect Philip Johnson.

What’s different is that both precedents are in the poignant class of noble failures. Martin’s pictures at the Harwood may not be as big or dramatic in their aspirations, but the indelible experience they provide is unequivocally satisfying.

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* Harwood Museum, 238 Ledoux St., Taos, N.M. Closed Mondays. (505) 758-9826.