“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” Audre Lorde wrote in A Burst of Light, 1988.

After 20 years of working and volunteering in a mixture of direct anti-poverty services, Jewish community organizations, and the arts, I find there is almost no situation that writer, poet, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde hadn’t already anticipated, considered, and conquered. At a moment of local, national, and international crises, when I consider the role I must play—and the space the organization I lead, Los Angeles’ Skirball Cultural Center, should occupy—I find reason and answer in Lorde’s indelible wisdom.

Lorde—who was Black and queer—lived the daily reality that her very being had been politicized, with or without her art and activism. This is the experience of many non-dominant artists and culturally specific institutions today: Your very existence is, apparently, political. You don’t have the luxury of deciding whether you are or are not an activist. You will be perceived as such, and as engaging in culture wars, regardless of your intention or action.

That assumption, and others that underlie it, are worth pushing back against. Especially right now.

I am not an artist, but as the head of a Jewish-identifying cultural institution, I have encountered such assumptions in small, largely innocuous, ways. I have been assumed to have a political agenda vis à vis Israel. I have encountered an assumption of progressive politics and feminism in my work. I have been assumed to work in the nonprofit sector to enjoy more time at home with my young children (ha!). And I have seen far more problematic instances of assumption and even aggression impact my colleagues of color, different cultural backgrounds, or minority sexual orientation.

It is infuriating to be reduced to one aspect of myself, without regard to the merit of my whole person, or the effect of my demonstrable efforts. It makes me appreciate those moments when I do have the freedom to decide to engage in activism. Or not. What extraordinary luck of birth and circumstance to have the freedom to make art without political retribution. It seems to me that the least those of us with that privilege can do is attempt to extend that freedom to others. This includes the freedom to choose not to be an activist, or to choose what issues to address and when and how.

Many artists I have had the privilege to know stress that their work is in dialogue not just with external influences and influencers, but with the audience itself. For them, the art is completed in the reaction and response of its consumer. Activism is, by definition, intended to persuade. To force artists to engage with audiences as activists is to narrowly define what creative interaction can entail.

I know this because I am one such audience member. On bad days at the office—when the office was a homeless shelter, a street clinic, or a courtroom during my time as a civil rights lawyer—the artists who brought me comfort, joy, distraction, and ultimately resilience were those who took my mind off my work. Who reminded me of my humanity. I would sit as the sun set on the Temple of Dendur. I would rest beside Whistler’s “Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink.” I would take a break from trial at the Irvine courthouse and have lunch in the Noguchi Garden. In each of these moments, the art felt just for me, no matter how many hundreds of other people were walking by. These scenes touched something in me. Not because of their subjects, much less the political context in which they were created, but because of the works’ aesthetics and mine.

Activism is inherently time-bound. To force artists to speak only of the here and now is surely to deprive them of their chance at timelessness. Their chance at connection to the as-yet unborn, whose needs we can hardly imagine, but might yet be healed centuries from now, by the art of today.

I think of Peter Krasnow, the Ukrainian refugee whose oil paintings we showcased in a collection spotlight at the Skirball this past spring. In response to the events of World War II and the Holocaust, he transformed his artistic style completely, moving to the abstract and a color palette of highlighter greens and bubble gum pinks. He explained in his autobiography that this was his personal therapeutic approach to the depression he experienced as war raged and his family and homeland were annihilated. Seventy years later, his work not only feels current, but his clutching for beauty and light in a period of overwhelming darkness is resilient and instructive. I saw visitors to this show smile, cry, wonder aloud, point, decipher, get close, take a step back, and move forward.

Would we say to the Peter Krasnow of today, “No, your emotional expression, your desperate attempt to heal yourself, this is insufficient”? I hope not.

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Martin is best known for her sublime abstract paintings of grids and lines, which at first glance may look like hand-drawn ledgers. Her early work from the 1950s and 1960s is mainly black, white, and earthen tones. In her long career, Martin did not solely rely on a monochromatic palette—she went into color, in a subdued way, in the 1970s—but she did return to it again and again.

After seeing “Agnes Martin,” the breathtaking retrospective of her work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through Sept. 11), a show that reminded me of the extraordinary beauty and discipline of her art practice, I wanted to explore some possible reasons why.

I found a clue in the opening lines of “The Untroubled Mind,” Martin’s thoughts from 1972, when she was returning to making art again after a hiatus of several years. These thoughts were recorded like a poem, in phrases, and read like a quiet but self-assured manifesto.

People think that painting is about color
It’s mostly composition
It’s composition that’s the whole thing.
The classic image—
Two late Tang dishes, one with a flower image
one empty. The empty form goes all the way to heaven.

The reference to the Tang dynasty of China is not accidental. In her writings and interviews, Martin often cited the strong influence of Asian philosophies. “My greatest spiritual inspiration came from the Chinese spiritual teachers, especially Lao Tzu,” she once said. Lao Tzu (now Laozi) has been generally accepted as author of the famous Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism. In the same statement she also mentioned the influence of Buddhism, especially the Zen branch. Scholars can only conjecture as to where she picked up this knowledge, but it had a deep impact on her painting and her discipline.

Later in life Martin repeatedly spoke of the need for humility and ego-lessness, which is in sync with Taoism’s call for naturalness and simplicity. And as an adult, she meditated regularly, a Zen practice. She advocated looking inwards and of emptying the mind, tenets of Zen monks, some of whom became known for their monochrome painting. (She famously refused to accept awards or honorary degrees because, she said in an interview, “I don’t really think I’m responsible, so I don’t accept any awards.”)

In the late 1950s, Martin had moved to New York City at the urging of her dealer, Betty Parsons. However, she left in 1967, packing up her things and going on a road trip for 18 months. She eventually settled in New Mexico, and reducing the distractions of daily life—diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, she had had more than one breakdown while in New York. In 1973, she announced her return to the art world with a series of 30 monochromatic screenprints, “On a Clear Day.” Each print is composed of thin black lines in grids or horizontal lines. “These prints express innocence of mind,” she wrote in 1979. “If you can go with them and hold your mind as empty and tranquil as they are and recognize your feelings at the same time you will realize your full response to this work.”

In this latter period, she often said that her work was about happiness, perhaps her way of describing inner peace. I find that looking at her work demands focus and shutting out distractions. Your eye swims around the soft lines, simple forms, and translucent pastel colors, until your mind finally comes to rest. The newly re-opened San Francisco Museum of Modern Art very deliberately sets her work apart, presenting seven of her paintings in an octagonal room, with seating in the middle, a kind of Martin “chapel” which facilitates quiet and contemplation.

Basic black-and-white drawings and paintings show composition most clearly. She must also have appreciated Chinese brush painting, which is traditionally done with a soot-based ink with highly flexible brushes. Arne Glimcher, her longtime dealer and friend, recalls in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances that in the 1980s he had sent her a book on such work. On his next visit he saw “a series of grey canvases, each with diluted India ink washes under pencil grids, some with horizontal lines and others with vertical and horizontal lines.” Martin said to him, “Imagine yourself one of those little Chinese men in a brush painting and get into those boxes and look around.”

She did take up color—pastel washes worked into bars and grids, perhaps a reflection of the New Mexico sky and landscape. Still, I find it interesting that towards the end of her life she went back to the monochromatic palette in such important works as “Homage to Life” and “The Sea,” both from 2003, a year before she died.

In the latter, the black is intense, and the composition insistent—it is mostly black, with thin white horizontal lines pulsing across the large, 5-foot-by-5-foot canvas. Something in the slight irregularity of the white lines gives them a sense of movement, of surging rhythm, as of ocean waves that can be ever changing and yet patterned at the same time. It’s true, Martin had long avoided representing the outside world, and was more concerned with the truth within. Still, I do not think she could turn her back to the world completely—she just had to represent the elemental in her own way.

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While visitors to the Louvre are surprised by the petite size of Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, “Whistler’s Mother” may have the opposite effect on visitors to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., where it’s on view until June 22 in the exhibition “Tête-à-tête: Three Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay,” along with Édouard Manet’s Émile Zola (1868) and Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players (1892-1896).

As an intern at the Norton Simon, I’ve found that visitors expect Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 to be fairly small, on a scale to match its domestic subject. It isn’t. Framed, the painting is over six feet tall and almost seven feet wide; Anna McNeill Whistler (1804-1881) is nearly life-size. Hanging on the museum wall, she towers over all but the tallest museum-goers. Her ramrod posture and steady gaze, at once severe and serene, amplify the painting’s already-impressive physical presence.

Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but spent only his early childhood and a few years in his 20s in America. Given the artist’s expatriate status, and the fact that the painting has resided in France since 1891, it is perhaps surprising that Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother has become so well-known in America.

Yet Whistler always identified himself as an American. Although Whistler’s personal style drew upon an eclectic range of European and Asian traditions, the portrait of his mother tethers him to his American roots. The purchase of his Arrangement by the French government was a point of national pride—this was the first painting by an American to enter France’s national collection. Its omnipresence in popular media (from advertisements to Mr. Bean) has cemented its status as an icon.

I was lucky enough to see all three paintings upon their arrival from Paris. Part of my dissertation deals with Whistler’s decorative work, so I made a beeline to examine his most famous artwork before it went up on the museum wall. Magnifying glass in hand, I was especially struck by the delicacy of the paint; close up, it becomes clear that Whistler used very thin oil paints, heavily diluted with turpentine, to create semi-translucent, watercolor-like tinted washes. All across the surface, the coarse weave of the unprimed canvas surface is visible. This medium allowed the artist to achieve the delicate gradations of light and dark in his sitter’s face, framed in a lace cap, the mottled surface of the gray wall, and the patterned fabric (possibly a kimono) hanging on the left.

The subtlety in Whistler’s tones was not always appreciated, however. In 1883, when the painting was first displayed in Paris, French satirists attributed its gray palette to London’s famously foggy, polluted climate.

Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 was also a bold artistic statement, especially to the eyes of Victorian viewers. When the painting was first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy in 1872, audiences were baffled. Compared to the highly finished surfaces and dense, colorful compositions more typical of Academy artworks, Whistler’s portrait is dramatically pared-down. To 19th-century audiences, Whistler’s painting looked unfinished, and the setting seemed impossibly empty. Even today, the room in which Whistler posed his mother is striking in its bareness—and its geometric regularity. It is all straight lines and right angles: striped rug, box-shaped footrest, dark wood paneling, and framed prints (of Whistler’s own etchings) on the walls.

Many years later, this angular quality led Alfred Barr, director of the newly-established Museum of Modern Art in New York City, to describe Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 as a forerunner of modern abstraction. In 1943, he wrote that without Anna, the painting is “a composition of rectangles[…] not very different from the abstract Composition in White, Black, and Red painted by [Piet] Mondrian.”

Alfred Barr was also instrumental in securing a place for “Whistler’s Mother” in the American consciousness. In 1932, in order to raise money for the fledgling MoMa, Barr sent the painting on a yearlong whistle-stop tour of 12 American cities, including 18 days in Los Angeles. By the time the painting returned to Paris, millions of Americans had seen Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1, and extensive press coverage of the tour reached millions more. The U.S. Postal Service even issued a Mother’s Day stamp featuring the painting, though they added two details that Whistler would probably not have appreciated: a caption reading “In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America,” and a vase of flowers in the lower left corner.

Whistler may have intended for the painting’s forceful geometry to stand on its own as a source of formal interest—he first called the painting an Arrangement, after all, rather than a portrait—but the composition also underscores his mother’s strong personality and their close relationship.

A second-generation American of Scottish descent, Anna Whistler’s friends and family remembered her as pious and hard-working. After the early death of her engineer husband in his 40s, Anna never remarried; the black mourning dress she wears in her portrait attests to her widowhood.

Thrifty, industrious, and pious, Anna did not always approve of her son’s bohemian lifestyle in London and Paris, but they lived together in Chelsea quite happily for almost a decade.

He painted the Arrangement during this period; his mother, who was 67 at the time, sat for him to fill in for a tardy model.

The two had always been close: when his contemporaries expressed surprise that such a cosmopolitan artist could have come from rural New England, Whistler explained (with characteristic flippancy) that he grew up in Massachusetts because “I wanted to be near my mother.” When Anna Whistler passed away in 1881, her son added his mother’s maiden name, McNeill, to his own.

Present-day audiences may find Anna Whistler daunting, even cold. It is hard to deny that the artist’s choices of scale, color, and composition make “Whistler’s Mother” come across as an icon that is perhaps more grand than warm. But it is worth remembering that neither Anna nor her son interpreted the portrait in that way. To both son and mother, the artwork was an expression of a son’s respect and love. In a letter to her sister, Anna wrote that while she was posing, she prayed continually for her son’s artistic success: “It was a Mother’s unceasing prayer while being the artist’s model which makes the attractive charm.”

Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother has without question become the success that Anna wanted for her son. That, in itself, makes the exhibit a touching tribute to parenthood—the depiction of a real and loving relationship between a mother and the artist she raised.

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