Agnes Martin and Jim Wagner: An Odd Pair

Agnes Martin, 1954

Thinking the other day about Agnes Martin and her big exhibition next year at the Harwood Museum, I remembered that Jim Wagner had known her in Taos in the 1960s. It seemed like a most unlikely pairing – Martin who became famous for her spare, nearly monochromatic grid paintings, and Wagner, the master of loose expressionism whose principal subject has long been the off-beat, funky charm of Taos. I asked Wagner to recall his early meetings with Martin:

“When I was growing up in Monmouth, Oregon, we had a family friend, Mildred Kane, who came by the house a lot. She’d  been  my sister’s kindergarten teacher, and she was a close friend of Agnes Martin.   I think they’d gone to college together in Canada. Mildred often visited Agnes when she lived in Taos, it must have been the late 40s and early 50s, I was in the 4^th or 5^th grade, and she would always tell us these stories about Taos, what a great place it was for an artist, and she’d show us drawings and watercolors that she’d gotten from Agnes. Nothing like the grids she became famous for – these were like nymphs or fairies running through graveyards, that sort of thing.  They’re probably still around someplace. I think the Fine Arts Museum in Santa Fe has some.

“Because of Mildred’s stories, I knew Taos was the place to go when I decided to become an artist in the early 1960s. A few years later, in about 1965, I was going into a liquor store,  Mundos -- it used to be at the edge of that steep hill at the south end of Placitas Road. Anyway, I remember the day exactly because I’d just had a vasectomy, the pain pills were beginning to wear off and I was getting a bottle of bourbon to take home. So Agnes was in there and I recognized her, she was buying a bottle of Campari, and I introduced myself and told her about Mildred. Well, for whatever reason, she didn’t want to talk about Mildred but she invited me into the back room at Mundos where we sat and drank Campari.

Jim Wagner, c. 1965

“A few weeks later I was having cocktails at Louis Ribak and Bea Mandelman’s house, and Agnes was there. They were old friends. Agnes got pretty loose. We were all going to dinner at the old Casa Cordova restaurant in Seco, and I’ll never forget it, I had to carry Agnes into the dining room on my back. The owner, Godie Schuetz, was so mad at me . . .

“After dinner Agnes and I sat in the car for an hour and talked about art. It wasn’t technical stuff at all, not how to paint or anything but about how art made you feel. It was almost like religion. Listening to her talk was like music just flowing over me. Like liquid gold. I took it all in.”

After hearing Wagner’s story, I looked up a half-remembered quote of Martin’s that pointed toward a possible connection between the two: “If you live intellectually, you live with facts,” Martin said. “If you learn to surrender, you can go to bed, sleep, and then wake up with the answer. You have to surrender to inspiration . . . you have to put the intellect to sleep.”

Jim Wagner, The Committee, etching

“She was the first one to drive that home for me,” Wagner said. “Stop thinking. Let your subconscious do the work. You have to shut out the critics, the voices that want to tell you what you can do, what you can’t do. I call those voices  The Committee.”



Remarkable Women of Taos

In 2012, Taos museums, galleries and other institutions are banding together to celebrate one of the valley’s primary distinguishing factors – the preponderance of strong, independent women who settled here during the last century and created a virtual cultural matriarchy. The Harwood Museum, founded by Elizabeth Harwood, will mount major exhibitions of art by Agnes Martin and Bea Mandelman. Millicent Rogers Museum will honor its founder, the fashion maven and collector extraordinaire of Native American and Hispanic arts, along with a major show of pottery by the legendary Maria Martinez. The Taos Historic Museums will feature work by under appreciated artist wives and daughters of the Taos Founders. And the Mabel Dodge Luhan House will host seminars and lectures on various aspects of the subject.

            What follows is an essay I wrote for a book in production, “A Precarious Balance: Creative Women of Taos,” with photographs and essays by Robbie Steinbach and Lynn Bleiler.

 

left to right: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Freida Lawrence, Dorothy Brett

When I stumbled into Taos for the first time, September 30, 1973, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. A few months earlier I’d packed my small family into a Volkswagen van, crossed the Hudson and headed west in search of a new life. As it turned out, September 30 was (and is) San Geronimo Day at Taos Pueblo. The men were engaged in their centuries-old ceremonial foot races, and the rooftops of the pueblo’s magnificent adobe building were lined with women wrapped in colorful robes. Behind them was the stately Taos Mountain which in the evening burned blood red in the setting sun. Needless to say, I thought it might be interesting to hang around for a while.

I quickly became enamored with the town and its history, and one of my first and strongest impressions was that the place was filled with strong, independent women. In those years, 4 of the 5 best galleries in town were owned by women – Maggie Kress and Tally Richards, Mary Sanchez and Rena Rosequist. The co-founder of the Lama Foundation was Asha Breeson, a woman of great physical and spiritual authority. Billy Blair was the fearless editor of the Taos News. All the elected officials in the town and the county were male, but arguably the most influential political figure in town was Sally Howell – she gave me my first job in town as her gardener. Then I tended bar for a few years at the old La Cocina on the plaza, a raucous joint on a Saturday night but nobody messed with Ruth Moya, the sweet but steely strong cocktail waitress who could stop a drunken brawl without raising her voice.

Kathleen Summit, 1980

            And there was Kathleen Summit, a storyteller and, I’m convinced, bruja or shaman or shape-shifter. She lived alone in a little adobe on the side of the hill, overlooking the Valdez valley. Kathleen was short, on the stout side with piercing blue eyes and white hair cut straight across just above her eyes. She had the mien of an owl. Kathleen knew the legends of Taos, where to find the petroglyphs and ancient shrines. On the full moon she drummed and danced and howled in unison with the coyotes.

            Why Taos? What attracted Kathleen here, along with so many other strong women? The great preponderance of sky could be a lure, with its mythical associations with the feminine, as opposed to the common connection of males with the earth. Conversely, spirited women -- and it is spirited women who are drawn here, women dissatisfied with traditional roles and expectations and possessed with the gumption to test their limits  – seem drawn to the primeval, ritual-rich influence of Taos Pueblo, that most earth-bound of cultures.