Agnes Martin

Letter from Agnes Martin to Pace Gallery founder Arnold Glimcher.

Dear Arnold,
I have only one worry in the world. It is that my paintings will show downtown and fail there. They will fail because they are non-aggressive - they are not even outgoing - in a competitive environment, with big displays of aggressive art work.
With the dark paintings it was not bad because they do have some "force". I did not get one compliment on that show, however.
The competitive environment is made by the huge audience of mostly young (ambitious) painters that are "making" the "scene".
The "art scene" is really a lot of words put out by journalists. With its charming trends it bears very little relation to ART defined as part of the structure of social human life. I particularly do no want to be on the art scene. If you come on with the scene you go off with the scene. I want to stay away from it. It is downtown with these young artists. They are not like the students who do not yet think of "the market". They are really wild.
I am deeply concerned about this. What I want is so far from the downtown scene, just a little room, just a few paintings contemplated quietly. Unaggressive paintings*, unaggressive showing - just the opposite. It worked well in the past.
Hoping you agree with me, Agnes.
* P. S. for unaggressive collectors.

(photo: Lisa Day Sandstrom)

Elizabeth Peyton

WHAT WONDROUS THING (LOHENGRIN), 2012

DENEUVE AND TRUFFAUT ON THE SET OF ‘MISSISSIPPI MERMAID’, 2005

Hiroshi Sugimoto

SEVEN DAYS / SEVEN NIGHTS (Gagosian, 2008)

IRISH SEA, ISLE OF MAN, 1990

Hanna Liden

KARMA: NEW YORK, 2014

William Gedney

W. W. NORTON: NEW YORK, 2000

The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly, the photograph takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusions perfect.
What is the picture of a drum without the marks on its head where the beating of the stick has darkened the parchment?
(Oliver Wendell Holmes)
----
We can not shake the illusion of the truthfulness of photography. - William Gedney

Siri Hustvedt

"Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember."

Joan Mitchell

MERCI, 1992

“Completed about the same time, Joan's approximately nine-by-twelve-foot diptych movingly titled Merci makes its viewers feel small because of the scale of its strokes, the wallop of its colors, and the vastness of its space.

Four powerfully painted calligraphic shapes—five including a scribble of near white on white— hang in the void. Joan’s marks are primal, charged, and devoid of convention, cliché, or irony. How anyone frail, arthritic, semi-ambulatory, farsighted, and dying of cancer could make such a swaggeringly bold painting will always be a mystery.

Short-hand for Joan’s lifelong adoration of painting. Merci contains the lake, the sunflower, and the tree; the blue and the orange; the white; van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and the Great Abstract Expressionist Mark; fear, fury, aloneness, and love.”

(Joan Mitchell “Lady Painter”, Patricia Alberts, pg 429)

Ian Wallace

MASCULIN / FÉMININ, 2012

Michael Almereyda

Skinningrove, 2013, 15 min.

About the making of the short:
Skinningrove is drawn from a slide lecture that Chris Kilip showed in preparation for their conversation, which Almereya decided to document: “We shot two takes, two camera angles, late one afternoon. In the course of editing I began to realize that the Skinningrove chapter would make a film on its own. The photographs embodied something essential about Chris’s relationship to his subjects, to the world. And so an hour-long lecture was whittled down to fifteen minutes.”

Mark Rothko

FROM MARK ROTHKO AT MOCA PDC, JAN 2007

BLACK ON DARK SIENNA ON PURPLE, 1960

RED AND BROWN, 1957

Catherine Breillat

A SHORT FILM MADE FOR VENEZIA 70 - FUTURE RELOADED, 2013, 2 min.

“Today, cinema is the art most dependent on money. Money desires not splendor, but to be multiplied.”

Joel Meyerowitz

SUPER LABO: TOKYO, 2014

‘I began to understand that the car window was the frame, and that in some way the car itself was a camera with me inside it, and that outside the world was scrolling by with a constantly changing image on the screen. All I had to do was to raise the camera and blink to make a photograph. In this way I surrendered all the controls I had normally developed when I was out walking, for the raw, fragmentary images that were emerging out of my moving world.' —
Joel Meyerowitz.

Nan Goldin

JOANA WITH VALERIE AND REINE IN THE MIRROR, L'HOTEL DES BEAUX ARTS, PARIS, 1999

SELF-PORTRAIT IN BLUE BATHROOM, LONDON, 1980

I’ll be your mirror

David Armstrong

Peter Hujar

SCALO: ZURICH, 1994

Howard Hodgkin

GRIEF, 1999-2002

“One of the few skills, as such, that I can be said to have acquired is to make the beginning and the end lie down side by side,” he says with particular care. So how does he know when his work is done? “When the original feeling comes back as a painting.”

Newyorker: Howard Hodgkin at the Gagosian, NYC, 2003

THE SKY IS THE LIMIT, 2002

Axel Hütte

HOLZWARTH PUBLICATIONS: BERLIN, 2002

Ori Gersht

AUGUST MEDIA & TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART: LONDON & TEL AVIV, 2002

Uta Barth

MOCA, 2002

FROM UTA BARTH ‘PERIPHERAL VISION’ AT THE GETTY CENTER, NOV 2022

Wolfgang Tillmans

HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS, 2002

Lynne Ramsay

Swimmer, 2012, 17 min.

A SHORT FILM COMMISSIONED BY LONDON OLYMPICS.

“For me, a good film has to tell a good story, but more than that, it has to know how to manipulate the language of cinema.”

- Lynne Ramsay interview

Joe Bradley

FROM ‘ERIC’S HAIR’ AT GAGOSIAN, MARCH 2017

ONE AND TWO, 2017

SOI COWBOY, 2017

Darren Almond

FROM ‘HEMISPHERES AND CONTINENTS’ AT MATTHEW MARKS, FEB 2013

Zoe Leonard

FROM ‘ANALOGUE’, AT HAUSER & WIRTH LA, OCT 2018

MOCA Geffen, MARCH 2019

Sato Tokihiro

NIKKOR: TOKYO, 1997

LESLIE TONKONOW, NY 2005

Lisa Sanditz

FROM ‘SEASON TICKETS’ AT CRG GALLERY, 2003

Elizabeth Murray

Art21 - Episode #175, 2002

Elizabeth Murray (1940-2007) is shown working on the large-scale painting "Bop" (2002-03) in her Manhattan studio.

Frank Stella

MOMA: NEW YORK, 1987

“There was a time, it says in books, that the Icelandic people had only one national treasure: a bell. The bell hung fastened to the ridgepole at the gable-end of the courthouse at Thingvellir by Oxará. It was rung for court hearings and before executions, and was so ancient that no-one knew its true age any longer. The bell had been cracked for many years before this story begins, and the oldest folk thought they could remember it as having a clearer chime. All the same, the old folk still cherished it.”

“They started gathering bones together along the shore. Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you're looking for. If you're picking raspberries, you see only what's red, and if you're looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, and have to be handled with great care. Sometimes they are large, heavy thighbones, or a cage of ribs buried in the sand like the timbers of a shipwreck. Bones come in a thousand shapes and every one of them has its own structure. Sophia and Grandmother carried everything they found to the magic forest. They would usually go at sundown.”

“Once the arrangement of objects had settled down, I felt that I was finally ready to establish myself in this place. “This is where I will live,” I thought to myself. Perhaps it was because I’d now developed a feeling for the passing of the seasons in our new abode - as if each new house, each new neighborhood contained its own unique experience of the passage of time.”