Like many of the momentous choices Martin would make, her decision to leave Washington State for New York City in 1941 has the shape of myth, at once dramatic and blunt.
—Nancy Princenthal on the book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art
So in the fall of 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor, she started classes at Columbia University Teachers College. She had also found a new vocation. "I saw all the paintings in all the museums. Then I thought, If you could possibly be a painter and earn a living—which you can't," she adds, laughing—"then I would like to be a painter. That's when I started painting."
—Benita Eisler, on her 1993 New Yorker profile of Agnes Martin
