Beschreibung:

AGNES MARTIN (1912-2004)Autumn Watch 1954 signed oil on canvas 33 1/8 by 53 1/4 in. 84.1 by 135.3 cm. This work was executed in 1954.FootnotesProvenance Private Collection, New Mexico Canfield Gallery, Santa Fe Acquired directly from the above by the present owner Exhibited Taos, The Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico, Agnes Martin Before the Grid, 2012, pp. 24, 55, illustrated in color Literature Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, Agnes Martin London, 2015, p. 24, illustrated in color Tiffany Bell, ed., Agnes Martin Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings, New York, 2019-ongoing, digital, no. 1954.009, illustrated in color A sublime and enigmatic composition, Autumn Watch (1954) is a stunning example of Agnes Martin's lesser-known biomorphic paintings executed during her years in Taos. Painted in 1954, this is one of the earliest works by the artist to be offered at auction and showcases Martin's first exploration into abstraction. Her body of work created during the 1940s and 1950s belongs to art history; these works are the first steps of a major artist, and as such, invaluable in our understanding of her artistic evolution. Born in Saskatchewan, Canada in 1912, Agnes Martin has become one of the most pioneering and renowned artists of the Twentieth Century. Though perhaps more widely recognized for her luminous canvases navigated by delicately hand-drawn lines generally in the shape of a grid, it is her earlier works that provoke a sense of intrigue and understanding into the environments and influences she experienced in her seminal years. These earlier works take on an almost lyrical embodiment; composed in subdued colors and constructed with geometric shapes and forms. The titles of her work evoke her appreciation and love for the natural world, with references to the seasons and animals, as seen in this present work Autumn Watch and in other works created in the same year: Mid-Winter (1954), that currently resides in the Harwood Museum, Taos, and The Bluebird (1954), in the Roswell Museum & Art Center, New Mexico. As a young adult Martin moved from Canada to the United States, first to Washington, to New York, and then to Albuquerque where she studied painting at the University of New Mexico. Inspired by nature and the outdoors, her earliest works are landscapes she painted as a student and teacher in Taos during the late 1940s. Always executed outside, they capture her love for the desert environment that she would call home, not just during this early period, but for over thirty years during the latter part of her life. She was not the first artist to fall for New Mexico; artists escaping urban industrialization in the 19th Century and the Abstract Expressionist painters in the late 1940s and early 1950s travelled to the state with some choosing it to be their permanent home. Celebrated artists included Georgia O'Keeffe who also settled there in 1940 and became great friends with Martin. It was in 1953 when Martin moved back to Taos that she started to formally develop an abstract style, and it was a year later that Autumn Watch was executed. Martin identified as one of the Taos Moderns; a group formed in the 1940s, who were a collective of mostly abstract painters that had moved to Taos. Taos at the time was considered an outpost for artists from New York, San Francisco, and Europe, many of whom seemed to be grappling with the legacy of Surrealism and issues of non-objective painting that had preoccupied the emerging New York School in the 1940s. They drew influences from the local light and landscape creating primarily non-figurative works. The years in Taos gave Martin an almost mystical understanding of tranquility, space and a deep appreciation of the spiritual forces of nature. This period, which continued until 1957, was termed her biomorphic period; her canvases focused on a form of abstraction that drew on rounded forms derived from organic shapes as opposed to the more ridged shapes found in geome