Agnes Martin by Nancy Princenthal

Author:Nancy Princenthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson

This particular trait — profound suspicion, impervious to logical or emotional dissuasion — is perhaps the biggest challenge to sustained contact with other people. “Agnes has problems with paranoia,” said Richard Tuttle, one of her most enduring friends. “Through the paranoia, she will hurt people, cut them off, not see them for years…. ‘I have no friends and you’re one of them’” is a favorite statement.45 Similarly, Bob Ellis, a faithful friend in her later years, recalled, “Occasionally she’d turn on people, if she didn’t take her medications. She talked openly about it. One time she voluntarily put herself in a mental institution. She was aware of [her illness]. There was a line she didn’t want to stray far from. She had her depressions, and she would have periods when she didn’t paint…. She’d sit in her studio or at home in her rocking chair and wait.”46 Kristina Wilson remembers, “There was a niece she liked for a long time, then abruptly ended it. She’d get paranoid.” And again, “She was close to my son, and when he had a daughter and named her Jade, she got furious, wouldn’t talk to him or his wife or the daughter, because she thought that was a terrible name and the child would suffer by it. We didn’t talk for a long time. That was very hurtful.”47

Donald Woodman was another close friend for several years with whom she abruptly and categorically ceased contact. Martin’s psychiatrist Donald Fineberg says that she referred to “Arnold [Glimcher] as her trusted friend and confidant and someone who couldn’t be trusted, sometimes in the same consultations.” As Fineberg explains, such discontinuous social reality is characteristic of Martin’s illness. “Putting things in separate boxes is the ambivalence characteristic of psychotic ambivalence. A neurotic ambivalence is like uncertainty, I want this, but I want that … But psychotic ambivalence is things are in separate boxes. Agnes had that.”48 This kind of erratic behavior, so hard on friendships, is no better for professional associations. The fact that she maintained both is a triumph that pales only beside her ability to produce artwork in a remarkably sustained way.

It seems that the compartmentalization to which Martin was subject — and which, perhaps, helped her manage her world — was reflected in her relationships: friends and associates similarly often put the various disjunctive elements of her character in separate, non-communicating boxes. Not surprisingly, friends with emotional difficulties of their own seem to have understood her trials best. One of her bonds with Chryssa may well have been that both suffered from mental illness. Reported Jill Johnston:

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