It seems overly simplistic, saccharine even, to describe Agnes Martin’s paintings as pure , but I just can’t find a way around it. Using only simple lines and grids, often in gray or very muted colors, Martin somehow distilled the essence of human emotion in pictures so seemingly plain you can barely photograph them. And yet they are so moving it is common for even the most art-skeptical among us to stand in front of an Agnes Martin and feel a sense of awe.

Perhaps she said it best: “If you wake up in the morning and you feel very happy, but [there’s] no cause—that’s what I paint about.”

Martin, who died in 2004 at the age of 92, was well into midlife when she hit her first career peak in the 1960s, after she developed her signature minimal grid. The reception in New York, where she wa

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