Andrew Graham-Dixon reviews the Agnes Martin retrospective at the Serpentine, London

THERE IS a venerable tradition of American painting whose greatest theme might be described as nothing much at all. Vacancy, emptiness, the void - such apparently unpromising subjects for visual art have been the perennial preoccupations of the American painter, who seems always to have been dogged by the ambition to find new ways of picturing that which by definition cannot be pictured.
 
It may be some measure of the distrust with which such an ambition has generally been regarded in this country that Agnes Martin, now in her early eighties and the last survivor of that generation of great American abstractionists which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, should have been granted her first retrospective in a British public gallery only at this late stage in her career. ''Agnes Martin: Paintings and Works on Paper 1977-91'', which opens tomorrow at the Serpentine Gallery, is a partial and belated tribute to the grande dame of American abstract painting. But better late than never: the work has been carefully selected, sensitively and sparely hung, and the result is by some distance the most engaging exhibition of contemporary art on view in London.
 
Martin was never catapulted to the same heights of fame and infamy as her better known male contemporaries in the New York School, partly perhaps because she was a woman in the notoriously misogynistic American art world of the post-war years, but also because she was the victim of her own slow development. She did not begin to paint with authority until 1960 or so, when she was in her fifties, and the abstract paintings which she then showed - tremulously drawn grids traced in pencil over thinly laid grounds of...

To read the full article please either login or register .