HOW TO LOVE THE WHOLE WORLD

A loving portrait of an intense, solitary American artist who found ways to express deep feelings in her minimalist abstractions.

Author Martin (no relation to the artist) may be overreaching when he claims that painter Agnes Martin (1912-2004) is as famous as Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo, and rather than providing concrete biographical details or even acknowledging that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he makes oblique references to her art materials and emotional extremes (such as her early tendency to set unsatisfactory work on fire). Still, in rapturous prose, he does coherently retrace her artistic development as she learned better ways of expressing her deep love for nature and the world with an “ordinary line” and shimmering colors: “Agnes’s ordered and controlled grid paintings of joy became translucent and expansive band paintings of happiness.” Hampe follows along, adding straight and flowing lines over subtle washes of transparent color and focusing more on evocations of select works than on depicting the artist herself. Readers catch only brief glimpses of a stylized face, a pair of hands, and a small figure who, even in the afterword’s one photo, is turned away from viewers. Readers’ appreciation for the qualities and appeal of her art will be further whetted by the occasional direct quote.

Emotionally rich, if so sketchy that the subject remains a remote figure.