Friendship

The subtractive test is hard to run on a work built by one rule. Take away the gold and the painting is another of her grids in oil and pencil, a different work: the gold is required. Take away the grid and the field is a gilded panel, an object of decoration with no measure in it and nothing human in it: the grid is required. Paint the lines on instead of cutting them, and they would sit on the gold instead of opening it: the incision is required. What yields is the single unit. No individual line bears load, since the law is the even repetition, and a grid with a line or two more or fewer is easy to imagine without loss. Three parts, each indispensable; many lines, one decision repeated.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Two things can be stated as true, and they hold. First: that the most impersonal of structures, a ruled grid, can carry the trace of a person, since a line cut by hand along a rule is never perfectly even, and the eye close to the canvas finds the hand inside the system. Second, particular to this canvas: that the gold of the sacred image, with its figure taken away, can hold a human bond instead of a saint. The title names a relation between persons, and the painting offers it as evenness and constancy, a light without incident: friendship as a steady state rather than an event. But that second claim rests heavily on the title, and much of what the work gives is a mood of calm and radiance, which ranks below a disclosed meaning.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The elevation is real and of one kind: a quiet, radiant transport. The gold at the scale of the body changes with light and with the viewer’s movement, darkening and brightening across the square, so the painting is never seen the same way from two positions; the incised lines catch light differently from the leaf around them and appear and disappear. Close to, the grid is an exact and fragile web; from across a room it softens into a shimmer. There is a grandeur here that her pale pencil grids do not have: the gold confronts as well as recedes. What holds the axis is kind and range. There is no terror and no drama, the height is sustained rather than repeated in summits, and it depends on light and presence, so that in reproduction much of it goes.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The gold ground is the oldest sign of sacred light in Western and Byzantine painting: the icon, the Sienese panel, the field against which the holy figure stands. Here it stands with no figure, and the grid takes the saint’s place, as if the order of things were itself what is held in gold. That much is built: the gold is not an allusion laid on top, it is the field, and the absence of the figure is the work’s one structural relation to that tradition. Beyond it the archetypes are evoked rather than constructed. The grid as cosmic order is summoned, and nothing in the canvas makes the bond between two persons archetypal beyond the name. Martin’s own writing on innocence, perfection and the classic is doctrine around the work, not built in it.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The inheritance is Abstract Expressionism in New York, with its gesture, its scale and its claim to the sublime, from which Martin came; and beside it the reductive painting of Reinhardt, Kelly and the early Stella. The departure of her grids was to keep the scale and the spiritual ambition of the older generation and give up gesture entirely, for a hand-ruled, even, quiet structure, neither expressive nor mechanical. This canvas adds a second wager: gold leaf, a craft material of the altar and of decoration, in serious abstract painting in 1963, at the risk of seeming precious, and the cut line in place of the drawn one. The stake was real. Held below 8 because the grid itself was begun in her work of about 1960 to 1962, and the gold is a turn within the series that she did not long pursue.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The cut is the knowledge: a line incised through gold is an opening in the light onto something beneath it, so the grid is made of absences of gold, and the measure of the field is literally drawn out of it. Painted lines would lie on the surface and the relation would be lost. The gold is the knowledge: it makes the field a light that moves with the viewer, so the even grid is seen inside a surface that is never even. The square at body scale is the knowledge: no direction dominates, the field is met face to face, and it reads as exact structure close to and as haze at a distance. Held below the top because the hand-ruled grid at body scale the series already knew, and the title carries a part of the meaning the form does not.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over promise: sixty-three years and a large literature on Martin, grown especially since the retrospectives of the 1990s. The questions stay open: whether the grids are Minimal painting or the last of Abstract Expressionism; whether they are perceptual objects, with the much-discussed passage from structure to cloud as one steps back, or spiritual ones; how far her own writings should govern them; what titles of nature or of feeling do to an abstract field. Friendship adds questions of its own: the gold against the cloud reading, since gold does not dissolve into atmosphere as her pale grids do, and the relation of the title to the field. Held below 8 because much of the return is to the series and the career, and because on return the canvas yields the same calm.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The field is American abstract painting of the early and middle 1960s. The intrinsic force is the hand-made grid as a whole painting, neither gesture nor system: a real reorganisation, which sat between Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism and was claimed by both. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Martin’s grids were taken up as a precedent by the grid and serial art of the later 1960s and by much abstraction since, her standing has grown steadily, and later painters of the quiet, hand-made grid and the restrained field name her as a source. The discount is heavy. Most of that reach belongs to the series and to the bands of the 1970s and after, not to this canvas, and the gold works were a side branch from which no later line of work is known to start.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at sixty-three years. Form: whole, one canvas, unaltered after the painter so far as is known. Presence: in a private collection and then in a major museum collection; shown and reproduced among her best-known paintings of the 1960s, though not on continuous view, and her presence as a whole is wide rather than the widest. Fabric: gold leaf on canvas is chemically stable, but a gilded and incised surface on a flexible support is open to abrasion, to flaking along the cuts and to cracking where the canvas moves; and the incised grid is the work’s form, so damage to it would take from the meaning. No such damage is known; the charge is for the general risk and for a presence short of the widest, a tenth below the usual figure for its age.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged as command of gilding, oil and incised line, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The leaf is laid over a square at about the height of a standing person without its joins breaking the field into decoration. The incising is a cut through a fragile metal skin, in long straight lines by hand along a rule, with no means of correction, so that one slip would mark the field. The interval is held even across the square, and the layer beneath is chosen so that the cut reads as a line of darkness in the gold. The hand’s slight unevenness is part of the achievement, a human line inside the rule. What holds the axis is range: one field, one mark, one interval, narrow by design, asking less of the hand in variety than calibrated colour or the figure.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the shimmer of the gold seen from across a room, where the grid is a haze, and a single incised line seen close, an exact cut with its small wavers. They obey one law: an even, hand-ruled order held inside a field of light, the measure and the radiance inseparable. Every element is the law at one distance or another; there is no second kind of mark, no colour but the gold and the line, no incident, and nothing contradicts it. Its range across distance, structure close and light far, is real, and the law holds across it. But narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one field, one mark and two directions, and the law, once grasped, governs a small world. Held for the territory’s size.

Score: 8.4 / 10

An abstract field holds few orders, and this one holds four, by implication more than by presence. The sacred, in the gold. The human bond, in the title, made visible only as evenness and constancy. Perception and the self, in the viewer’s changing relation to a surface that alters with position and light. And order as such, the measured grid, which her writings make an order of mind. They are integrated in one surface, but the second rests on a word and the fourth is doctrine. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no figure, no family but by the title, no labour, no state, no history and no story; the America of 1963 is outside the square. The figure describes the form.

Score: 6.2 / 10