Art in Review; Agnes Martin
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: February 17, 2006
Closing the Circle, Early and Late
32 East 57th Street, Manhattan
Through March 4
Agnes Martin's monastic adherence to pale colors and austere geometries may have earned her a place in the frosty Minimalist pantheon, but it also can cause the many PaceWildenstein exhibitions devoted to her paintings to blur in the mind.
The latest, made up mostly of loans, distinguishes itself partly by tracing the components of Martin's narrow vocabulary to their original utterances. It contrasts works from the late 1950's and early 60's with those made a few years before her death in 2004.
Arranged by formal likenesses, the display moves from vertical elements to horizontal ones to occasional intersections of both. There are side trips into triangles and some atypical floating shapes, including circles, squares and, in one case, angled planes that cause a rare foray into deep pictorial space.
Martin's preference for faint milky yellows emerges in ''Wheat,'' from 1957, and her experiments with watercolorlike blurs and plumes can be spotted in the scudding lavender strokes of a small canvas from 1959.
Martin was clearly more robust and adventurous earlier than later, but this show reflects her continued striving and establishes the consistency, and thus the value, of some of her more anomalous later pictures. ROBERTA SMITH