Agnes Martin is widely considered one of the great abstract painters of the 20th century. By turns garrulous or withdrawn, with a strong sense of humor, when she chose to use it, and a penchant for solitude, she was anything but straightforward. Her discipline and reserve made her an almost legendary figure, and her battle with schizophrenia, while known, was never discussed, as she moved through the liveliest art communities of her time, befriending Georgia O’Keeffe in 1940s Taos and Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly in 1960s New York. The recipient of two career retrospectives as well as the National Medal of the Arts, and championed by such diverse critics as Lucy Lippard, Lawrence Alloway, and Rosalind Krauss, Martin did not achieve recognition until she was nearly fifty. Her work–serene, austere, penciled grids on square canvases, washed with pale or neutral colors–helped give rise to Minimalism, while remaining grounded, she insisted, in the spirit of Abstract Expressionism. “When I first made a grid,” Martin is quoted as recalling, “I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, this is my vision.” Princenthal, former Senior Editor of Art in America and a contributor to Artforum, The Village Voice, and The New York Times, first saw one of Martin’s paintings when she was a teenager, and she first wrote about her when she was in college, leading to a brief, personal correspondence with Martin. With this book, she tells Agnes Martin’s extraordinary life story for the first time, presenting at the same time a long-awaited critical discussion of her work. Princenthal will be speaking about Martin's with a book signing to follow.