Agnes Martin

Painter Agnes Martin's quietly radiant geometric abstractions reflect her quest to capture moments of beauty or transcendence of ego and petty distractions. Her personal philosophy, as reflected in her semimystical writings, seems an amalgam of the Bible, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, William Blake and positive thinking. Featuring 60 color and 40 black-and-white plates, the volume profiles the Saskatchewan-born artist, now 80, who participated in the heyday of New York abstract expressionism and later settled in New Mexico. Whitney curator Haskell charts Martin's shifts from landscape to biomorphic abstractions to minimalism. Chave, a Hunter College art historian, looks at Martin's calm, grid-like compositions. Krauss, a professor at the City University of New York, endorses Martin's claim to be a classicist in the objective tradition of Egyptians, Greeks and Copts. This catalogue accompanies a traveling exhibition that opened at New York City's Whitney Museum. (Jan.)