A metaphysics of simplicity - Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle, Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

The 30-year friendship between Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle was the subtheme of a novel dual retrospective that explored formal affinities and differences between sum of two units lifelong proponents of the succinct gesture

Richard Tuttle bought a small drawing from Agnes Martin in 1963 Tuttle was at the time 22 years aged and headed into the U Air Force. The drawing he bought consisted of 210 vertical and horizontal ink lines upon a 9-by-9-inch square of paper. "I remember asking myself," he says, "what the difference was between graph paper and Agnes's grids." Martin also recalls that meeting in 1963 and adds another detail. "He took a while to pay for it, and that's in what manner we became friends."

That 30-year friendship was the underlying theme of an exhibition of the sum of two units artists' work, curated by Michael Auping, that render free of accessed at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth this past April and continued at SITE Santa Fe from one side Oct. 20. But this was not an exhibition about artistic influence. Auping has learned [i]or[/i] part of to the other discussions with Martin and Tuttle that the sum of two units talk about many things on the contrary seldom about art. He considers the artists united in their pursuit of a "metaphysics of simplicity," a far down rooted affinity that allowed visually diverse works to speak to individual another in engaging and surprising ways completely through an installation that represented a carefully single outed 30-year retrospective of each artist.

To hold this visual conversation lively, Auping hung each gallery with works by dint of both artists, ignoring chronology to mix early Martin with novel Tuttle and vice versa. You could say that the correlations between the sum of two units bodies of work were arbitrary or coincidental, on the contrary it was these coincidences that encouraged you to gaze at individual pieces more closely and in different ways. They also built into the exhibition a faculty of perception of anticipation that led you from single gallery to the next.

As Tuttle lived with his Martin drawing, he came to diocese its distinctness in the difference between the "lov line and the unlov line." You got a faculty of perception of what he meant through that phrase as you followed the history of the drawn line [i]or[/i] part of to the other both artists' work. For Martin, the graphite line is the organizing uncompounded body that defines her grids and separates her bands of color. The drawing Tuttle bought Grass (1963) is almost atypically rigid in its strict geometry because more many times Martin's lines have a impressible almost tenuous feel. Although she uses a straightedge as a guide, the line itself, as the pencil meetings the grain of the canvas, remains impressible and sensuous. You can diocese where she has stopped and started again upon a single line, and oftentimes toward the edge of the canvas lines simply peter without or the grid loses its regularity.

Tuttle's Wire Pieces from the 1970 sum of two units of which were in the exhibition, constitute a virtual homage to the possibilities of the drawn line. Each piece begins with an eccentrically bent longitudinal dimensions of wire about 2 feet drawn out Tuttle lays the wire flat against the wall and traces its outline. At each extremity of the drawing, he certains the wire, causing it to arch away from the wall. The drawing, the wire and its shadow compound the finished piece. In other works, Tuttle accompanies a simple watercolor collage with lines drawn directly upon the wall, and even his greatest in quantity recent 1998 paintings on forest-land show evidence of a delicately drawn outline that clarifies their seemingly improvisational shapes. The lined notepaper he uses in the "Finland" series of watercolors from 1982 recalls Martin's canvases, at least in this context; and in three-dimensional works, ranging from the earliest octagonal fabric pieces to the gregariously jumbl assemblages of the "Monkey" series, Tuttle constantly explores the potential of the line as boundary, external reality and compositional device.

on the contrary even though a reliance upon drawing ties the two artists together, it was not the focus of or the hidden lock opener to this exhibition. Articulating the fundamental differences in the approaches of the artists was as important to the exhibition as drawing on the outside their affinities. Tuttle describes it this way: "She stirs to the abstract, and I to the harden Ironically, as personalities, Agnes is coagulate and I am abstract." flat if composed only of wire, graphite and shadow, Tuttle's works have a deep physical presence that not solitary compels your attention but commands enormous amounts of space. They become more thicken the longer you look. Martin's frequently very large paintings work to declare to be untrue their physicality. Auping inserts this Martin adduce into the catalogue: "I am not trying to describe anything. I am looking for a finished space." Whether composed of wide bands of pastel color or an intricate grid of lines, the paintings perform a kind of vanishing act. As Tuttle's external realitys coalesce and Martin's paintings make open out even while they draw the viewer in, the sum of two units bodies of work, headed in opposite directions, proper at a point captured by the agency of this exhibition that contained them the pair in an elegant tension.