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.

The Art Spirit: Alive and Well in Taos

These are rocky times in the art business. The depression in sales is nation-wide (except at the very top where, allegedly, there’s more money than ever to shower on blue chip art), and its effect is especially severe in a little town like Taos where the economy is so linked to the art market.  Sales here have been declining slowly but steadily for several years, and in just the past two months four prominent galleries have closed their doors. (Bucking the trend, Parks Gallery is doing just fine.)

                                                       Harwood Museum, Taos

The market will return, and in the meantime Taos’s art reputation is being maintained -- and even bolstered -- by two factors:  activity in our remarkable museums and the persistence in the Taos Valley of what I’m still romantic enough to call the Art Spirit. The town has four fine museums -- Millicent Roger’s Museum, Taos Historic Museums, Taos Art Museum and the Harwood Museum which is perhaps the finest small town art museum in the nation. In the last few years the Harwood has mounted a number of exhibitions that have garnered national attention, including important shows of Richard Diebenkorn’s early New Mexico paintings, Wayne Thiebaud’s wonderful but seldom seen landscapes, and in 2006 a splendid survey of Melissa Zink’s art. Next year, the Harwood will present an exhibition of Agnes Martin’s early work that is sure to attract an international audience.

And Art Spirit. Taos has been home to world-class artists for more than a century. While the early Taos painters were attracted by the dramatic landscape, the richness and authenticity of the Pueblo Indian and Hispanic cultures and the quality of the fabled “Taos light,” contemporary artists whose work has nothing to do with mountains or Indians are still lured and held by the ineffable Art Spirit, the sum of all the factors above plus something in the air that nurtures creativity. Taos remains important because Ken Price, Larry Bell, the late Agnes Martin, Johnnie Winona Ross, Jack Smith, Marc Baseman, Ron Davis and a handful of others have chosen to call Taos home. Just their presence makes this an important place. For the most part they don’t exhibit here. Taos is home because it inspires them and leaves them alone to work. Price, one of America’s most honored contemporary artists, will have a major retrospective next year at the Los Angeles County Museum, a show that will go on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Bell currently has a 50-year retrospective at the Carre d’Art Musee in Niems, France.

                                                      Taos Pueblo.

The influential art critic Dave Hickey wrote an essay a few years ago for a Harwood exhibition that, for me, sums up what Taos is, if not why:  “ . . . in my experience Taos is one of the most beautiful and chastening places in the world. It has an encouraging history of harboring fugitives, killing priests and assassinating governors. In the twentieth century, it has probably produced more serious art and literature than any other non-metropolitan area in the United States, and, throughout this century, Taos’ virtues have remained more amenable to producers of art than to its consumers. It has resisted gentrification because, for all its beauty, Taos is not a cozy place. There is not much that architecture or landscaping can do to mitigate the daunting hegemony of the sky, the sweep of the flat, the looming scale of the distant mountains, and the perpetual inference of D. H. Lawrence’s ghosts.  Day in day out, year round, Taos is hardly even a human place. It is the Top of the World, more the Wild West than the Southwest---more Tibet, in fact, than Palm Springs. So if you want a beautiful place to work that bears with it the perpetual reminder that all you do will be broken, buried, blasted and blown away---a place that makes you brave and serious, Taos is the place for you.” (from “Dennis Hopper Curates - Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, Ken Price & Robert Dean Stockwell,” Harwood Museum, 2009)

Why Taos?

   Detail of Illustration from New York Times, 1992, by Johnathon Rosen

Some years ago the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a long article on how money moves around the world. The piece was accompanied by a two-page illustration picturing an octopus/robot-like creature sitting on Manhattan, with tentacles running out to major financial centers around the world. Two-third of the way along the tentacle from New York to Los Angeles was a little spigot and under it the word “Taos.” Certainly the illustrator wasn’t including Taos because of its monetary riches (Taos wasn’t mentioned in the article). Rather, I suspect, he regarded it as an interesting, somewhat quirky place, a town that occupied a special niche in his – and I suspect the national psyche. Many have heard of Taos, some have visited, but few can define just why it is so special. Is it the ancient Taos Pueblo, the great sweep of the high desert valley, the fabled light? Or maybe the spirit of rebellion, from Po’pay leading of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, to the first territorial governor of New Mexico losing his scalp in the revolt of 1848 and the hippie influx of the 1960s. Or the art, from the Taos Founders of the early 1900s to the world renowned contemporary artists living here today.

   Petroglyphs north of Rinconada, NM

After nearly 40 years here, it’s the history that continues to captivate me and the way in which the history is literally embodied in the landscape. I try and get out once a week to wander across the desert or climb a mountain – I think of it as getting to know the neighborhood. I walk and climb to gain access to new views of this extraordinary landscape. But I’m also always on the lookout for links to the past, and I almost always find something – a pot shard or an arrow head that might have lain on the earth for 800 or a thousand years since the last human touched it. Recently I was hiking on a rough trail that ran along a ridge just north of the village of Rinconada, along the Rio Grande about 20 miles south of Taos. After 30 or 40 minutes I was drawn, who knows why, to some rock amongst the pinons off to the left of the trail and there, suddenly in front of me, was a house-sized boulder covered with petroglyphs. Many times I’ve stumbled onto such treasures and every time it’s a thrill.

Over the next few weeks I’ll ramble on in this blog about some of the Taos treasures that make the place so distinctive.