Although the painter Agnes Martin deliberately moved from New York City to a small town in New Mexico more than twenty years ago, she has retained her almost legendary status as one of the important post-painterly abstract expressionists. "I don't believe in the promotion of art," she once declared. "I believe in its discovery." Half a continent away from the reputation-making center of the American art world and in her late seventies, she has continued to arouse critical interest, for she is one of those artists whose work transcends stylistic labeling yet is always somehow in style.

Over the course of her long career, Miss Martin's name has b

The only art Miss Martin created between 1967 and 1974 was a suite of thirty serigraphs, On a Clear Day, which was published by Parasol Press in 1971 and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York two years later. Variants on the grid, the serigraphs are a deliberate attempt to achieve clarity by means of precise, mechanically rendered gray lines, with all traces of the hand effaced. According to Riva Castleman, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, when viewed as a whole, the spaces between the lines "compound to indicate a sense of the illimitable scale of infinity."

When he interviewed her for the Vanity Fair profile, Mark Stevens found Agnes Martin to be friendly and affable, but firm in her refusal to relate personal anecdotes, which are, to her, digressions from the main concern: art itself. Like her work, Miss Martin registers an inner security. Her strong, weathered face seems to reflect her down-to-earth, unsentimental approach to life. Her intense blue eyes have a direct, level gaze, and her smile is warm. A 1973 photograph in Newsweek showed her splitting logs, a somewhat stocky figure with close-cropped gray hair, dressed in work clothes and a rancher's broad-brimmed hat. Invited to a Harper's Bazaar luncheon honoring "100 Women of Achievement" in 1967, she turned up in moccasins, a rumpled skirt, and an unironed blouse, apparently unfazed by the presence of elegant women in designer dresses. In the early 1980s she lived in Galisteo, New Mexico, in a small house that, like her studio, she built herself. She has since moved to Lamy, south of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Although she has claimed that "it's absolutely necessary to be alone to make artwork," Agnes Martin is no hermit. As she explained to one interviewer, "I paint to make friends and hope I will have as many as Mozart."

In the simplicity and solitude of rural New Mexico, Agnes Martin eventually found the freedom and serenity essential for her artistic inspiration, and she began to paint again. In her new works, the impersonal linearity of the pre-1967 grids gave way to compositions based on arrangements of parallel stripes of varying breadth. With the introduction of soft washes of pinks, blues, and yellows, her touch became more painterly. She spread the surface layer of acrylic paint so thinly that light seemed to glow through it, even though the canvas—which was, in most cases, six feet square—had often been prepared with up to eight coats of white gesso. The painted stripes were painstakingly integrated with ruled pencil or ink lines, so that soft played against hard, interval against line.

The critic Lawrence Alloway included several of Agnes Martin's compositions in the important exhibition called "Systemic Painting," which he organized at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1966. These works, along with the contributions of her fellow exhibitors, helped to define a kind of painting known as systemic, or modular, art that Alloway perceived as an outgrowth of minimal art. In these paintings, holistic and self-contained images come together by means of the repetition of a single motif, or module, with no visual climaxes or hierarchical order among the modules, and the field, or space, is inseparable from the design elements within it.

Miss Martin's early grid drawings, which were almost always nine inches square, featured ruled lines done in red ink or colored pencil, or black or gray pencilings over a delicately tinged ground. Drawing, in any case, has remained basic to the artist's work, for in her paintings pencil lines of varying weight can often be seen under the acrylic washes, giving, as the New York Times critic Hilton Kramer put it, a "curious intimacy" to her work and directing the viewer's attention to every detail of the composition.

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