Loving Love

Loving Love
1999
acrylic and graphite on canvas
60 1/8 x 60 inches (152.7 x 152.4 cm)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, The American Art Foundation, 2001
© 2018 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Loving Love, 1999 at the Guggenheim Museum

These paintings should extend your perception to the awareness of beauty around you, but more than anything else to the recognition of beauty within you. Agnes had a tiny little garden of roses in front of her door in this community of old people that she lived in — her studio was down the street in a little adobe building. I remember once there was a very beautiful rose in a bud vase and my granddaughter Isabel was looking at it. Agnes took the rose out of the vase and she said to Isabel, ‘Is this rose beautiful?’ And then Agnes put the rose behind her back and said, ‘Is the rose still beautiful?’ So the beauty is not the rose, the beauty is within you and the rose just makes you recognise that beauty. She was a great philosopher, but not a mystic as people like to say. There was nothing mystical about the work; it was, in its own way, practical. She was very down to earth, really a pioneering woman.

-- Arne Glimcher talking about Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin: philosopher, artist, pioneer, recluse