Walker Evans and the Bad Plus in Vancouver

There was a terrific show of the work of the American photographer Walker Evans at the Vancouver Art Gallery.   Evans is one of the greatest of photographers, and the show, which was very large, did full justice to his entire career.   Evans is most known for his iconic images of tenant farmers created for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930's, but his whole career is filled with all kinds of different photographic projects.   And the show was curated so that you got a chance to see good examples of many these projects.   I loved the photos that he took in the NY subway with his clandestine camera. and the late photographs he called "color accidents".   And I loved the fact that he was a collector of all kinds of things  (I have a book that focuses entirely on the influence of his postcard collecting on his photographs.)

One of the reasons for going to see a photography show is to see the actual original prints of the photographs, which, in many cases, surpass the quality of what you can see even in today's supremely high quality reproductions in books.   (I've talked about this in this blog before...)  Seeing Evans's prints in the original versions can be extremely satisfying, although according to the article cited below he was notoriously haphazard in his approach to printing.   There were many wonderful original silver gelatin prints in this show.   There were also a number of inkjet prints.   But Evans died in the mid 1970's, when there were no inkjet printers, so he can't have made them.   So some investigation on the internet revealed that in fact his long time assistant and executor John Hill has been digitally scanning the original negatives and creating new prints.   This brings up all kinds of questions, which were cogently discussed by Michael Kimmelman in the NY Times in 2006 in reference to an exhibition which juxtaposed the original prints with the newly created digital ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/arts/design/25evan.html

I personally don't have a huge problem with the digital prints, though I always like the silver gelatin ones more.   Where I do have a problem is when the photographs are enlarged to a much larger size than Evans ever made, up to three feet long, for example.  I agree with Kimmelman that there is something about the size of a photograph which determines a certain kind of concentration or focus, and that somehow I concentrate better and see more in a smaller scale photograph than in a large one.  (Like the difference between a string quartet and a string orchestra.)   Kimmelman mentions the concept of a photograph as a musical score, where the original negative can be interpreted in various ways in the printing process.   There is some truth to this analogy, but, like musical scores, there is also a sense in which fidelity to the text and to the artist's original intentions is important, and a print which violates the original intentions in an extreme manner is annoying. (I would have appreciated it if the exhibit had made some reference to the nature of the different printing techniques, other than specifying them.)

You can actually go to the Library of Congress website and see examples of where they have scanned both the print Evans made and the original negative.

Another interesting idea that the Evans exhibit brings up is the extent to which any image can function political document.  The FSA photographs were created as propaganda for the US government, made in order to convince the nation of the need to address the poverty and social problems in rural America.   Evans was hired for the project, but stated that he wanted no part of any government agenda (in spite of the fact that he was clearly sympathetic with the government's agenda.)   So he went ahead to make the pictures that he wanted, while at the same time fulfilling the needs of his position.   So he wanted his pictures of poverty to be aesthetically pleasing in whatever sense that might have been for him.  Again I agree with Kimmelman;  to me his aesthetic is one that clearly relates to the French photographer Atget, in that there is a fascinating kind of directness and plainness which somehow allows the essence of what is photographed to emerge.  But this is done with a great deal of craft.    You don't feel an editorializing voice.   And many of the photographs that he made for the FSA are clearly nothing to do with his government mission, like the wonderful photographs of movie posters.

Here are a few Evans photographs:

We observed the really, really bad day of January 20th by going to see the jazz trio the Bad Plus in North Vancouver.   The Bad Plus are nominally a jazz trio; piano, bass and drums.   But their repertoire ranges from Ornette Coleman tunes to Cindy Lauper to Milton Babbitt to Igor Stravinsky.   But most of their repertoire is their own compositions.
They very much reminded me of the Vijay Iyer Trio, with their disjunct and modernist transformations of standard musical gestures.  And they have a kind of quirky sense of humor, as well.  Sometimes you really could not really define what it was you were hearing.   (I think that's a good thing.)  Some of the tunes I liked quite a bit, and others seemed a bit perfunctory and ordinary.   I would happily go to hear them again.

Film Restorations and Sound

I recently watched the new Blu-ray disc of the restored version of Kurosawa's 1951 classic "Rashomon".   Like many cinephiles of a certain generation, Rashomon was for me an introduction to the Japanese film.  It is now a certified "classic" of art cinema, and often featured on lists of the greatest films ever.   I haven't watched it for for some 25 years, and my appreciation of the range of Japanese cinema (in particular the films of Ozu) has considerably broadened since then.  I was curious how it would hold up.   Without going into too much detail, I certainly still appreciate the complexity of its story telling.   The celebrated "Rashomon" effect of conflicting memories is still potent, as is the stunning visual quality of Kurosawa's forest scenes.   On the other hand, the movie sometimes feels too ponderous, and the startling acting of Toshiba Mifune seems way over the top.   The constant scratching of his insect bites and his prolonged fits hysterical laughing are really too much.
One of the striking things about the movie is its soundtrack.   Kurosawa apparently instructed his composer to write something that sounded like Ravel's "Bolero", and that is indeed what we get, rather blatantly.  This is certainly jarring, and takes away from what we might want to think of as a medieval "Japanese" atmosphere.   (And perhaps even more so after "Bolero" became known as music for seduction for Bo Derek in "10" in 1979.)  The score also contains some rather ridiculous moments of classic Hollywood "mickey-mousing", where the music functions much like that in classic cartoons, in imitating exactly the character's actions.

The movie is advertised as "restored", and indeed the visual quality is quite good.  What is striking, though, is the quality of the soundtrack, which sounds very much "unrestored".  The orchestral recording sound absolutely terrible, like an old 78 recording.    I have no idea how well the music sounded on the original recording, though.    In some cases, restoration of the sound track just means removing extraneous sounds like "pops"  and "clicks" of various kinds.  But what is interesting to me as that there is very little they can do (or are interested in doing) to restore a very low fidelity recording.  In some cases, the original recording may have been of very low quality.  Or, in other cases, the soundtrack may have deteriorated over the years.   A classic case is the soundtrack for Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky", with wonderful music by Prokofiev.   The existing soundtrack is in fact a temporary, unfinished soundtrack that was put together for a showing for Stalin, who apparently pronounced everything fine as it was presented, and thus it stayed as it was.  (No one was about to explain to Stalin that what he heard wasn't perfect.)  The sound quality is truly terrible, and, in at least one case, there is a single note piano melody where a choir was supposed to eventually be added.   Another case I heard/saw recently was the Japanese film "Gate of Hell" (1953), which was one of the first Japanese films to be shot in color, and is as beautiful a color film as you will ever see.  In the restoration, the colors are vibrant and clear; it could have been shot yesterday.  At the same time, the audio is the same old creaky low fidelity sound.
One could perhaps say that, as always, the visual takes priority over the audio, and that companies that preserve or restore films are more willing to spend money on the visual.   Or, more likely, it is in the nature of early recorded sound to be resistant to restoration, in the sense the original recording might not have been that good to begin with.   And I am talking primarily about the musical part of the soundtracks, as the spoken dialogue is usually pretty good.   And, with the invention of stereo sound for films and the later multitrack sound tracks, sound was certainly improved, and in some cases, has been effectively restored.  (This was done for Hitchcock and Herrmann's "Vertigo".)
One case where technology has made a difference is when the original music track can be rerecorded in modern sound.   Technology has allowed the vocal tracks to sometimes be effectively isolated from the original musical tracks, and mixed in with a newly recorded music track.   This has been the case with Alexander Nevsky, which came out in a fantastic laser disc edition in the 1990's with a newly recorded orchestral soundtrack in true high fidelity.   It's an amazing experience to watch and hear this version, but unfortunately, it has never been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.  (Why?)  And now it has become very popular for symphony orchestras to perform live presentations of films, with the live orchestra replacing the original musical soundtrack.  (The latest being Herrmann/Hitchcocks "North by Northwest".)  Should this be called a restoration or a new version?   I don't know.   In an age when a dead actor can be digitally recreated (Peter Cushing in Rogue One), I'm not sure if it matters.  It's all digital data.    But I can certainly think of so many extraordinary film scores by great composers that I would love to hear in full high fidelity sound.   (Korngold, anyone?  Though the orchestras would probably never be as good or at least as well rehearsed.)  Maybe technology will get us there some day; though I am sure many people would prefer to have old movies with soundtracks that sound "old".   Once having heard the newly recorded "Alexander Nevsky" though, I can never listen to the old version.  I would be happy to have a choice.

Gate of Hell colors:

Museums Again

I saw a show of the work of the Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013) at the Asia Society.   It was an interesting exhibit; Zao is really a fusion artist.   You see echoes of Klee, Matisse, and the abstract expressionists in the context of clear evocations of traditional Chinese arts like calligraphy.   But what emerges is clearly a style all his own.  I liked some of then more than others.   Sometimes, when  I look at abstract art, there is a very fine line between what seems moving and of sustaining interest and what seems purely decorative.   When I look at some paintings in galleries, sometimes they look merely like stuff which decorators might add to make innocuous color additions to a residence.  Some of Zao's works came dangerously close to straddling that line to me.
Photos were not allowed, but here are a few images from the internet:

This one was quite large, and clearly refers to screen paintings:

This one was entitled "Le Mistral":

This one had a lot of Klee in it:

MOMA had a new exhibit of Russian art from the period 1912-1930, all things from their collection. It included paintings, photographs, poster, drawings, etc.  It was an excellent show and a good example of what they can do without a whole lot of effort and money.   The art is striking for its radical rethinking of what art should be, with artists talking about things like the dynamism of intersecting planes, along with the assumption that abstract art could empower the workers and create a sense of liberation and freedom from the old bourgeois thinking.  And there was also the notion that artists could create works that were part of daily life, like porcelain and movie posters.   We all know what happened, of course, when Josef Stalin laid down the law.   

Another striking thing about the art of the show was the number of women artists who were involved in the movement, like Stepanova, Goncharova, Exter, Popova, and others. Has any other art movement in history had so many women participants?  I can't think of one, other than those that were intentionally feminist.

Here are some things I enjoyed looking at.   Most of them are by women.


Larionov:

Exter:

Popova:

Stepanova:

El Littsky

Wonderful movie posters:

Also at MOMA was a big Picabia retrospective.  Or retrospectives, I should say, because every time you went into a different room, you got a new and different Picabia.    Picabia could be called a modernist, and clearly had the talent and will to do wonderful things with paint.   But he was also totally preoccupied with the subversion of most known assumptions about art.   Even at the beginning of his career, he was painting impressionist style landscapes, but not from real life but from postcards.   There are also paintings created from what passed for softcore pornography in France.    As Roberta Smith puts it, he was interested in "destabilizing notions of good and bad".    Well, that certainly sounds very contemporary to me.   The experience of viewing the retrospective, then, is very different from the conventional one of seeing an artist slowly develop his or her style.  It is bewildering, which, of course, is the point.  One fascinating and compelling painting is next to a garish and ugly one.   Here are a few photos:

The paintings are more or less in chronological order:

Impressionism from a postcard:

Cubism is around:

Dada and machines:

From a series called "Monsters":

Matchsticks:

Josef Stalin might have liked this one:

From a series called "transparencies", one of my favorite parts of the show:

Postwar;  abstraction is back:

One of his last works:

The Whitney had a show about film etc. entitled "Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art".   There are certainly a lot of different things you could put into this category; mostly you got video.    In general, I am not very happy with video works that are displayed in gallery or museum environments.   My main problem is sound.  Virtually none of these works are silent; all of them have sound, and I have never seen an exhibit that successfully isolates the sound of one work from another.   So while the visual qualities of the works are frequently respected, the audio qualities are treated with near derision.  Thus, when you are watching and listening to one work, you may well be hearing the sound tracks of several other works at the same time.   Ugh!     This proved to be the case for the most part in the Whitney exhibit.   That said, there were several things I was happy to see, including Bruce Conner's "Crossroads", with its astonishing slow motion footage of a Bikini atomic test, set to mushy music by Terry Riley.   My favorite was a work by Oskar Fischinger  "Raumlichtkunst", a recreation of a 1926 work, restored by the Center for Visual Music.   It consists of three separate visual tracks (originally each a different projector), all consisting of abstract color animations.   (Fischinger also worked for Disney on some of the animation for "Fantasia".)   It made for a very rich and involving viewing experience.   Unfortunately, the only record of what music was used mentions some "percussive accompaniment".  The solution proposed by the Center for Visual Music was to use Vareses's "Ionisation" and Cage and Harrison's "Double Music".   The choice could have been a lot worse, musically speaking (I've seen and heard worse), but the choices inevitably color our viewing in ways that Fischinger would not have intended.  I would have much preferred to watch it in silence.   It's kind of like taking a black and white photograph and adding color to it.   I was also happy to see Joseph Cornell's "Rose Hobart", though it was displayed on a small video monitor and I can't possibly think of in what sense this would qualify as "immersive".   Another favorite was "Imitation of Life" by Mathias Polenada.    I wandered in to it not knowing what it was;  what I saw and heard was a few scratchy lines on the screen and some vague blips in the sound.  I thought it was some sort of minimalist thing; then gradually, what emerged was a full fledged, 1930's Disney style color animation, with a singing donkey.   Checking the label outside to see which film it came from, I discovered it was an astonishing faithful recreation of the style, but made in the past few years.   It even had the full orchestral score and sound world recreated.   The point?   I have no clue.

Fischender stills, from the internet:

Polenada:

There was also a small show at the Whitney of work by Cuban-American painter Carmen Herrera, who is now 101 years old and still painting.   These were hard-edged abstract works from 1948-1978.   I gave them some time, but I didn't get much out of them.   Somehow the hard-edge aspect puts me off; I like things that are more smudged and ambiguous.    But they are colorful.

Theme de Yoyo

We continue to go back and forth between jazz and classical music, with stops in between.   We heard the Maria Schneider Orchestra at the Jazz Standard.   Schneider is a composer, and has worked with such luminaries as Dawn Upshaw and David Bowie.  Her medium is the jazz orchestra; in this case, four trumpets, four trombones, five multi-instrumental sax /flute players, guitar, accordion, bass, piano, and percussion.   She has a wonderful ear for sonorities with these combinations.  (She was a student of Gil Evans.)  The instrumentation certainly suggests jazz, and she employs the conventional practice of solos versus ensembles, but her overall approach is more classical.  Everything is notated and carefully developed, and she conducts the ensemble (except during extended solo sections).     I liked the music a lot, but I felt she had a too predictable structure for her pieces, always beginning with a quiet, meditative mood and gradually building up to a louder and more rhythmically and harmonically complex texture.  It all feels very classical, somehow.  A new piece, "Big Data", was my favorite, with a more lively tempo and some wonderful ensemble writing.    It was interesting to compare this music with the Mingus Big Band we had heard eight days earlier.   Part of the excitement of the Mingus Band is the sense in which things are not in control; that everything might fall apart at any minute, and that the unpredictable is always on the horizon.   Each band has its virtues, of course.

An old picture from a different show:

After a Thanksgiving break, we heard Eric Comstock and Barbara Fasano in a new show at Birdland.   Comstock and Fasano get better every time we hear them.   Fasano has become more and more capable of using beautiful shadings and colors in her voice, and the blend of the two of their voices is superb.  I also think Comstock and Fasano are really an extraordinary arrangers (I have no idea who does the arranging among them).  No song is ever done routinely; they are always thinking of creative and interesting ways of making a song work.   And Comstock's piano playing is equally creative; he is always using all the registers of the piano with a witty and inventive musicality.   And sometimes he just stops and lets the amazing Sean Smith on bass keep the tune moving. Their last number "Broadway", was a real knockout.


A few days later, it was time for more Mahler at Carnegie Hall, this time the Fifth Symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Semyon Bychkov conducting.   The Concertgebouw Orchestra has a reputation of being one of the world's greatest orchestras, and they certainly sounded like it.  The concert began with a 25 minute piece by the German composer Detlev Glanert  "Theatrum Bestarium".   It was about humans as "beasts".  In other words, it was program music. It was strikingly orchestrated, with some fascinating sonorities, but it was genre of music that doesn't really excite me that much.  At a certain point, I started hearing it as cartoon music in the manner of Carl Stallings, music for a cartoon of said beasts.   It was also notable for the extensive use of Carnegie Hall's organ.
The Mahler, though, was truly extraordinary.   Semyon Bychkov is an exemplary Mahler conductor; he seems to concentrate very hard on ensuring we hear everything in the music that Mahler wrote, and with an orchestra of the caliber of the Concertgebouw, the results are amazing.  Incredible details of orchestral balance emerge, especially in the acoustic of Carnegie Hall.   Every time I hear a Mahler symphony I get different ideas about what Mahler is doing; this time, it felt like he was an alien who had come to Earth around 1900 in Vienna, heard a lot of music, and then put it all in a symphony without really understanding how it all worked.   (OK, this is a little exaggerated.)   But I constantly hear these very familiar little chunks of music that you expect to do certain things, and then they don't.   That little landler tune comes in a beat too late, and then the harmony goes in the wrong direction.   Or that triumphal march suddenly gets interrupted by something completely contrasting.   In other words, it's modern.   But it all depends on using very predictable bits of music.  (In contrast to the Glanert piece, where very little is predictable, thus there are no really unexpected happenings.)  
It is an extraordinary privilege to hear an orchestra of the caliber of the Concertgebouw; the extended ovations and bravos for many the the individual players in the orchestra at the end were truly deserved.   New York concert goers are lucky to have all these orchestras come to visit.

We went to a house party/concert at a brownstone in Brooklyn to hear the singers Sanda Weigl and Libby Shapiro, accompanied by Shoko Nagai.  We have been to a number of house concerts lately, and it's a pleasure.  (The Microcosmos Quartet in Vancouver is doing this, too.)   In this case, Weigl and Shapiro did a wonderful set of songs, primarily from Germany around the years 1927-1931, by composers such as Theo Mackeben, Werner Heymann, Friedrich Hollander, and others.  Part of the fun, too, is to see the homes of the hosts of the concert.   This one was in an old brownstone in the Fort Greene section of Brookyn, and the owners had a wonderful collections of both of art and odd sorts of things, all of which reminded me of my old family home.    The highlight was their collection of coat hangers, beautifully displayed on a stairwell wall.  I am not being sarcastic; it was a truly memorable sight.   Like the Becher's photography of the typologies of German industrial sites, this collection showed an astonishing variety of shapes designed to perform the basic function of hanging clothes.


At the Met, we heard Kaija Saariaho's opera "L'Amour de Loin" in a production by Robert Lepage.   The opera, which was first done in 2001, was done at the Met for the first time.   It has a cast of thee solo voices and a choir.   The plot is quite simple; in medieval times, a troubadour falls in love with a princess who he has never seen.   The first three acts, were, to my ears, too static.   Saaraiho's music, while sensuous and subtle, can sometimes lack the necessary drive to sustain my interest over longer spans of time.   The fourth and fifth acts, though, were considerably more involving and dramatic.   The Lepage production was visually spectacular; the stage was covered with some thirty or so parallel strands of LED lights which could change colors and go on and off.   The strands could also move up and down.   All of this computer controlled, of course.  The sea is an important character in the opera, and the lights were usually meant to convey the sea.  The opening of the fourth act was a stunning invocation of the sea, with Saariaho's powerful music invoking a stormy sea, and the lights moving in great waves.   The choir was nestled between the strands of lights, and would appear and disappear.  (They functioned both a a chorus in the plot and as a pure sound color in Saariaho's sonic palette.)   There was one major miscalculation to my ears; Eric Owens, the bass-baritone, was the troubadour.  His voice, though, is more of a stentorian Wagner type, with a heavy vibrato and little in the way of tone color or dynamics.   Saariaho often invokes medieval music for her medieval tale, and it would have been better to have a male voice who could sound like a troubadour, and not like an Alberich.   The female voices also were singing more in a nineteenth century operatic mode, but I gradually warmed up to them.   Needless to say, the Met Orchestra under the baton of Susan Malkki was superb.

And to end the fall season, I went back to where I started with a premiere of a new dance work by the great Pam Tanowitz.  In this case, it was a work created with the Juilliard dance students, as part of their end of semester performance of four newly choreographed works for the students.  I went specifically to hear/see Tanowitz's work, and it was excellent.   She really is the best choreographer who is carrying on the Cunningham tradition; the work is about the movement and the music, and she is consistently inventive, unpredictable, and original.  Patterns interact in asymmetrical ways, and her vocabulary is always a bit quirky.   The music in this case was Andrew Norman's "Companion Guide to Rome", played by a live string trio of Juilliard students.  (It is helpful when a dance program is part of a school of music; you get live music!)   I wasn't familiar with the music. On first hearing, it made a wonderful dance score and went very well with Tanowitz's choreography.
One of the great things about having a student company is that a choreographer can afford to work with a lot of dancers.   Each piece on the program used twenty or more dancers.  And I thought the student dancers were excellent.  The rest of the program was not as good.   A piece by the choreographer John Hegenbotham was set to the first movement of Schubert's profound C Major string quintet.   It's not something I would recommend doing for any choreographer.   Hegenbotham has danced with Mark Morris, and I couldn't help but see some similarities with Morris's approach to music, with a sometimes excessive correlation of the choreography with the music.   It can become goofy sometimes.   In Morris's case,  he somehow makes it all work.   It didn't work so well in this case.  Schubert doesn't take well to choreographic imitation.   The other two works were forgettable; the last, choreographed to soporific recordings of Rufus Wainwright, reminded me of many things I don't like in dance.   And beware of dances where the costumes include madras shorts and suspenders!

Back to Museums

I went to the Jerusalem show at the Met; it was centered around the period 1000-1400.   It's a fascinating subject; the city was a genuine mosaic of the Middle East, sacred to Christians, Muslims, and Jews (as it still is) and this was the time of the the Crusaders as well.  The show is as much a historical one as it is an artistic one; many artifacts are there to illustrate the history.   And the show has to navigate some cultural minefields, given the conflicts surrounding the religious claims on the city.  But there are some fascinating and beautiful things to see, and the whole interplay of the different cultures was exciting.
For example, this beautifully illustrated book in Arabic script:

What is it?  It's a copy of the Four Gospels, written in Arabic for Arabic Christians.   (There was also an example of an Arabic language text, written in Hebrew script.)

Mosque lamps:

Or these limestone capitals made for a Crusader constructed church in Nazareth:

A Persian representation of the prophet Muhammad before the Angel with 70 heads:

A panorama of the city, with the Dome of the Rock labelled as the Temple of Solomon:

And over-the-top riches, the Chasse of Ambazac:

Also at the Met is a show of paintings by the French painter Valentin de Boulogne, who worked in Italy and was a follower of Caravaggio.   It's a "blockbuster" show, featuring 45 of the 60 known paintings of Valentin, except, of course, that nobody has ever heard of him.   The show is spectacular, and indeed demonstrates that we should have heard of him.   And the paintings are the real thing: dramatic and visually compelling.  One whole room was nothing but paintings of music being performed.  Here are a few highlights:

And some details:

We also saw the Agnes Martin retrospective at the Guggenheim.   It was simply one of the best shows I have seen in years.  Her work gains in meaning when you see it in the context of her career, and seeing many of her works makes you appreciate the rigor of her painting.   Martin comes from the generation that believed in the possibilities of non-representational painting to convey profound human emotions.  She came out of the tradition of abstract expressionism, but her works convey a profound and more meditative meaning.   (We saw the exhibit on the day Pauline Oliveros's death was announced; I was struck by some of the similarities of their artistic goals.)    She also has something in common with Mark Rothko, except that her favorite color is grey or white, and her palette is distinctly muted.    Her best work to my eyes is the work she created when she settled on the standard of a 72 inch square canvas.    Looking at these canvases, all kinds of subtle and shimmering colors and patterns gradual emerge.  It's work that you would really want to live with.   As I write this, I feel the urge to go back and see them again.

It was a well put together show, but I did have some quibbles.   When you have paintings that are mostly white and delicate shades, the light around them makes a great deal of difference in what you see.  (Anyone who has ever tried to pick a shade of white paint by looking at paint store chips will agree with that.)   The Guggenheim lighting certainly casts its own colors on the works; I would have loved to see them in a purely natural light (outdoors!), or in an environment like the new Whitney Museum.    My second quibble has to do with the nature of the walls in the Guggenheim; in general you are kept about six feet away from the works by the sloped area in front of the walls.  Part of the pleasure of viewing a Martin work comes from the way the work looks differently depending on your distance from it.   When you are very close (as is the case with Martin paintings in other museums), you can see the extraordinary intricate detail with which she worked.  All of this is not apparent when you are restricted to viewing the works from 6 feet away.

It is wonderful to see this work in which the art of painting is so profoundly explored. Especially in the context of today's art world, where ideology trumps painting, and the notion of dedication to craft is dismissed.

You can't really properly photograph a Martin painting, but in any case, here are a few examples to give some idea  (The lighting plays havoc with my cameras rendering of white):


Installation view:

Large view partial  (you really need to click on these to enlarge them to see anything):

Detail of above:

Smaller, earlier works:

Several typical 72 inch square paintings:

Agnes Martin goes bling?    This atypical work is made with gold leaf:

View across the Guggenheim: