Agnes Martin (born 1912) was a Canadian-born American painter who became well known in the mid-1970s for her spare canvases of geometric lines and grids.

Agnes Martin was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, where her father was a wheat farmer, in 1912. After his early death, she spent her youth in Vancouver, where her mother renovated and sold old houses. She studied in Washington State, the University of New Mexico, and Columbia University in New York City, after which she taught in public schools and universities in the West, Southwest, and East Coast of the United States. She became an American citizen in 1950, and took several sojourns in New York between 1941 and 1954. In the 1950s she settled in Taos, New Mexico, only to come back to New York in 1957 at the urging of art dealer Betty Parsons. She returned again to the Southwest, where she remained.

Prior to her move...