In my opinion, the finest modern picture in any Irish public collection (Belfast excluded) is the Agnes Martin painting in the Hugh Lane Gallery. It was bought, as I remember, shortly after one of the Rosc exhibitions and stirred up a mini-controversy at the time in which a well-known media figure alleged that public money had been squandered on a "bare canvas". It was rather like the silly row over the Tate Gallery bricks some years later. The Martin canvas was, of course, both primed with gesso and painted, which makes you wonder once again just how many people have eyes in their heads. Still, there is no denying that her style (in her mature work at least - her earlier work was different but is rarely seen) at first glance appears faint and tenuous, even precious. Physically, in fact, it is barely there - fields of soft, cloudy colour traversed by faint, roughly parallel lines which frequently are merely pencilled in, then overlaid with a thin wash of colour. It is reticent and subdued, like a voice which you can barely hear, but that voice is a thrilling one. Agnes Martin's paintings have a meditative depth and mystery which suggest a comparison with Rothko, or even with Oriental art - she is deeply influenced by Zen and Taoism.
The Minimalists have claimed her as one of themselves, but she seems to be unhappy with the label and has kept herself apart from the group - and, indeed, from all groups. Though she is Canadian-born, she has identified strongly with the deserts and wide-open spaces of the American West and for some decades has lived there in semi-seclusion. Earlier, she lived in New York and even mixed in its bohemian circles with artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana, but those days are long behind her. She avoids publicity and does not encourage visitors to the New Mexico adobe house where she lives and works - a professional photographer sent down there was reportedly kept waiting for some days before he managed to get a quick shot of her on a tractor seat.
It has taken Agnes Martin a long time to arrive at this spiritualised, down-to-the-bare-essence style of painting. She began as a figurative artist and worked her way through a stage of biomorphic semi-abstraction before finding her own unique language. However, there are hints that this apparently self-contained, self-referential style may have at least some basis in nature. A favoured visitor who was admitted to her studio happened to glance through the window in the evening light and, so he claimed, saw that the sky and the stretching desert outside had taken on the gradated hues and the configuration familiar from her pictures.