Agnes Martin created her only major print project, “On a Clear Day,” towards the end of a seven-year period (1967-1974) during which she made no paintings. Martin had moved to an isolated mesa in New Mexico to live in solitude. She had spent the previous decade in New York City, a time during which she had critical and commercial success but disliked the distractions of the city, desiring a quieter, clearer place to live where she could make her “egoless” art, imbued with beauty, openness, and joy. Invited to make a print project in 1971 by Robert Feldman of Parasol Press, it took her two years to bring it to fruition. The results were the 30 silkscreens of crisp lines and grids that make up “On a Clear Day.” Upon completion of the project, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition of the project and was the first museum to acquire the entire suite.

In a 1973 review of the MoMA exhibition, Thomas Hess wrote, “[Agnes] Martin has become the object of a cult and, as if to back off from her admirers, has done a series of silkscreen prints, currently shown at the Museum of Modern Art. In these, she has stripped her image of all hand-quivers and fluttering variations to emphasize the mechanics of its linear structure. The basic schema is a square grid. The number of vertical and horizontal lines is different, so each square is filled with either thin or wide rectangles. Thus one work has nineteen horizontal lines and nine vertical ones, yielding squat, wide, tile-like rectangles. Another has nine horizontal lines and 23 vertical ones, with narrow, upright tiles. Other combinations include: 8-10, 8-2, 12-9, 19-12, 9-23, 6-23. Counting the lines in a Martin composition suggests the chiming quality of her work… In Martin’s paintings on canvas, these developments were accomplished with a refinement of touch which led many of her admirers to applaud her manual dexterity and sensitivity. Now she chooses to direct us to the bare bones of her art and expose the imaginative leaps that underlie her craft.”

In her private writings, Martin affirms the balance of calculation and intuition in her compositions, stating, “My formats are square, but the grids never are absolutely square; they are rectangles … When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.”

35 years later, in 2008, Kevin Salatino, then Curator of Prints at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and now Chair & Curator of Prints & Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote, “Grander in conception than any of Martin’s paintings, “On a Clear Day” condenses through multiplication thirty ways of constructing a grid, of expressing happiness, beauty, freedom, and the impossibility of, though yearning for, perfection. Its inpidual parts, recalling the number of days in a month, imply the passage of time. Its title declares the long-sought-for clarity the artist had struggled to find in the barren New Mexican desert. One of the great works of graphic art of the late twentieth century, “On a Clear Day” announces with luminous clarity and conviction Martin’s return to aesthetic wholeness.”