Advances, Withdrawals, and Retirement Plans: Artists and their Publics
- Nancy Princenthal
- Jul 25
- 8 min read
‘I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years’, the painter Agnes Martin wrote to a friend in the late 1960s, adding, ‘I do not think that there will be any more people in my life’.[1]
This vow of silence was soon broken, the prediction of solitude proving false. Nevertheless, Martin did leave New York City rather dramatically, or at least unexpectedly, in 1967. She had spent ten years there as a working artist, belatedly gaining, in her mid-fifties, some recognition for her work’s intimate geometries and whispery colours. Following her departure, she spent eighteen months wandering, mainly in the American Northwest, before resettling in New Mexico. There, she established herself, at first, on a punishingly remote mesa. Turning her back on the rising capital of the international artworld forged a cultish image of Martin as a kind of saint of the desert.
She wasn’t alone in being distinguished for her withdrawal. In ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, written at the time of Martin’s retreat from New York, Susan Sontag surveyed the many artists who were turning away from public institutions, proclaiming, ‘Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence (or unintelligibility or invisibility or inaudibility)’.[2] Louise Bourgeois, an artist born a year before Martin, in 1911, made some of her most recalcitrant work in the mid-sixties. Bourgeois’ stubbornly formless sculptures in plaster and latex described, roughly, a series of hideouts: nests, lairs, caves. The work’s hermeticism matched Bourgeois’ own, as her fame, cemented by very different bodies of mostly figurative work, was then still a decade in the future.
In Idra Novey’s acclaimed 2023 novel Take What You Need, both Martin and Bourgeois figure as joint spirit guides for the protagonist, Jean, a mad old bird living alone in rust-belt America, sustaining herself on junk food while welding towering assemblages from scrap metal. Having myself written a biography of Martin,[3] and embarked on one of Bourgeois, I read Novey’s book with interest. ‘I had no nerve in the morning if I skipped my nightly Louise’, [4] Jean reveals. ‘To keep from passing out, I tried to call up my Agnes Martin mantra about letting expectations go—to accept inaccuracy or accept failure’,[5] she says, while stanching a gaping wound caused by the errant blade of an electric grinder. Gruff, but kindhearted, and determined to live independently in her inhospitable, isolated studio, Jean is impervious to pain and deprivation.
Novey’s admirable, albeit fanciful, portrait of Jean typifies a popular—if generally misleading—notion of artistic vocation as marked by determined retirement from the world. It also speaks to the fact that few artists achieve fame. When attention comes, it often takes its time. Bourgeois wasn’t well known until she was 70—a wait only a little longer than Martin’s—but she was hardly in hiding until then. Married to an esteemed art historian and curator, socially connected to many artists both French and American, and the mother of three sons, Bourgeois lived in the thick of things. Martin spent her decade in New York City living in Coenties Slip, a close-knit Manhattan community of artists who, paradoxically, craved privacy (and, not coincidentally, were largely queer, at a time when being homosexual was acutely dangerous). She, too, consorted with notable colleagues and frequented various vanguard art events. Her closest friends at the Slip included Ellsworth Kelly and Lenore Tawney; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were neighbours. It’s true that both Martin and Bourgeois were beset and sometimes sidelined by internal clamour, which was diagnosed and treated, if not exactly cured (an outcome that neither really sought). Both wrote copiously, if elliptically, the snippets that were publicly released proving helpful to admirers with a narrative bent.
Most importantly, both artists were immensely ambitious, for their work and also for its public. Martin’s pledge to abstain from speaking was made to Sam Wagstaff, a prominent curator and collector as well as a friend. She had left her beloved New Mexico for New York on the urging of a visiting gallery owner, the renowned Betty Parsons, who made the move a condition of Martin’s representation. From the late 1940s on, Bourgeois actively sought, and periodically attained, exhibitions in both museums and commercial galleries. After she became famous, her appetite for engagement with peers, younger artists, and others in the artworld only grew (although at the end of her long life she became increasingly reclusive). Recognition never comes by accident. When Virginia Woolf mused a century ago on the history of female writers’ suppression and encouraged women to insist on a room of their own—one with a lock on the door—she also insisted they have an income (and, unafraid of crass specifics, named an amount). She advocated neither monasticism nor vows of poverty. In the 1979 classic, The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar compare Emily Dickinson’s self-description to that of her contemporary, Walt Whitman: ‘While Dickinson, the “slightest in the House”, reconciles herself to being Nobody, Whitman genially inquires, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)”’.[6] But Dickinson, the authors maintain, not only wrote prodigiously, she wanted to be read. Gubar and Gilbert argue that while Dickinson struggled with the ‘double bind’ of the woman poet incapable of self-assertion, yet determined to succeed’,[7] she chose, on occasion, a voice of no small aggression. ‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun’,[8] she wrote.
I have so far focused on departures from public life made by women, arguing that such absences are often both overstated and involuntary. My emphasis has been on those artists (and writers) whose emotions and thoughts were subject to disorder, and on their determination to succeed nonetheless. Hypostasizing the contradictions of this position is the decidedly publicity-friendly Yayoi Kusama, one of the world’s most widely celebrated artists. Now best known for spectacular installations of lights, mirrors, and shiny patterned objects, the ninety-four-year-old has been a resident in a mental-health facility for five decades. The spectrums on which lie solitude and agoraphobia, melancholy and clinical depression, flights of fancy and schizophrenia, do run through many women artists’ biographies. But this propensity might say more about a genre of biographies than their subjects.
Equally important, there is no shortage of men whose professional and personal lives can be plotted along the same lines. This is true not just of Van Gogh and Gauguin, or social isolates Adolf Wölfli, Henry Darger, and James Castle, but also plain ornery dudes like Donald Judd, who headed to the ends of the earth (well, Marfa, Texas) only to have the artworld follow him. Men not only compel attention with less effort than women, but can retreat with less suspicion. If the tourism that Judd’s removal produced is unusual, his choice to leave New York wasn’t. The cosmopolitan artworld can be soul-sapping, and many artists depart to more salutary places once they’ve established their careers, some ostentatiously (consider Anselm Kiefer’s palatial rural strongholds, glorified in a misty, if epic, recent film by Wim Wenders), most more modestly. At the same time, two mid-century modernists deeply associated with a certain kind of removal from the grubby business of making and selling art objects—John Cage, whose Zen-inspired work hovers at the edge of materiality, and Duchamp, who famously excused himself from showing art at all for several decades—were both consummately urbane showmen, ready and willing to reel in audiences and fully engaged throughout their lives with contemporary culture.
To be clear, many artists do choose retreat for both secular and spiritual reasons. Just as important, there is a political valence to exiting society. At present, survivalism—living off the grid—is generally promoted by those rather far to the right, politically. While few artists fit the profile of conspiracy-theorizing deep-woodsmen, commitment to progressive art does not necessarily equate with left-leaning political positions. For artists of whatever political (or religious) stance, there is also historical variability in the choice—or possibility—of silence. Visual art has always been, almost by definition, a way of exceeding (or evading) verbal language. But ever since art education shifted, in the mid-20th century (and especially in the US), from academies and ateliers to degree-granting institutions with liberal arts as well as studio curricula,[9] artists have been trained to speak up. Crafting and presenting an artist’s statement is a culminating exercise in the majority of graduate-level studio programs. Many artists are at heart opposed to this mandate, but opposition to (or discomfort with) articulating one’s thoughts has long since been a professional nonstarter.
Here, art discourse, and in particular art criticism (of which I am a practitioner), comes into the arena. Inside the dwindling publications that still include coverage of contemporary art, artists’ voices are increasingly favoured over those of writers. Contours around criticism redrawn decades ago by the Internet were reinforced during the pandemic: at home with a screen, everyone can be their own exegete (or press agent). And while expertise has fallen into disrepute, the composition of art writing’s readership has grown increasingly murky. Obscure though its outline may be, the artworld—its current slump notwithstanding—has in recent years grown mightily. One thing is certain: fame and critical approval have conclusively parted ways.
Ben Davis, critic for Artnet, wrote in late 2023 about the sudden rise of Devon Rodriguez, whom Davis described at the time as ‘almost certainly the most famous artist in the world’. Still in his 20s, Rodriguez, working spontaneously and without announcing himself to his subjects, has been sketching people in the subway then turning the sketches into paintings. Photography was also involved. Davis, who judged the work skilled and appealing but hardly novel, reported that Rodriguez had more than 30 million followers on TikTok (in 2024, Time.com puts the number at 33 million), and made more than $20,000 per day for sponsored content. He met with then-US President Joe Biden. Yet, Davis writes, ‘[a]lmost no one I know has ever heard of him’.[10] Davis is thoughtful and deeply informed—it would be hard to accuse him of social or cultural bias—but he was clearly not spending a great deal of time on TikTok. Should he have been? Is Rodriguez an obscure young artist, or a global celebrity? Is he working, as the punning title of his 2023 exhibition in a pop-up gallery in Chelsea had it, underground? A comparison might be made with social-practice artists, who commit their efforts to communities of various kinds in projects that involve service and activism, often at the expense of their personal status and income. How should they measure their impact against that of someone like Rodriguez?
Addressing the question of withdrawal requires specificity about the public that is being spurned. The confusion that currently prevails concerning art’s constituency could make anyone want to run and hide. Yet engagement is more important than ever—and many artists said to have foresworn it in fact did no such thing.
Nancy Princenthal
Nancy Princenthal is a New York-based writer whose Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art received the 2016 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. She is also the author of Unspeakable Acts: Women, Art, and Sexual Violence in the 1970s and Hannah Wilke, and her essays have appeared in monographs on Doris Salcedo, Alfredo Jaar, Willie Cole and Gary Simmons, among others. A longtime Contributing Editor (and former Senior Editor) at Art in America, she has also written for the New York Times, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere, and taught at Bard College, Princeton University, Yale University, and the School of Visual Arts.
[1] Samuel J. Wagstaff papers, AAA.wagssamu, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
[2] Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ in Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1976) 7.
[3] Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames and Hudson 2015).
[4] Idra Novey, Take What You Need (Viking 2023) 25.
[5] ibid 17.
[6] Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press 1984) 556.
[7] ibid 584.
[8] ibid 607.
[9] Howard Singerman makes this argument in Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (University of California Press 1999).
[10] Ben Davis, ‘TikTok Star Devon Rodriguez Is Now the Most Famous Artist in the World. But What About His Work?’ (Artnet, 6 October 2023) <https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/devon-rodriguez-painter-tiktok-underground-2373157> accessed 8 December 2024.