Agnes Martin

Over the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Agnes Martin's austere, serene work anticipated and helped to define Minimalism, even as she battled psychological crises and carved out a solitary existence in the American Southwest. 'I paint with my back to the world', she claimed; when she died at ninety-two, in Taos, New Mexico, it is said she had not read a newspaper in half a century.

Nancy Princenthal tells her whole story chronologically - from Martin's birth in Saskatchewan and her early years as an artist, living in derelict Manhattan shipping lofts with Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and others of their ilk as neighbours; to the seven years she stopped painting, just as her career was taking off; the months she spent roaming the country in a pickup truck; and her last thirty years, in Taos some of that time, in an adobe house she built with her own hands.