What you get ultimately from a work of art depends upon how open you are to what the work offers. If you look at a Chardin still life only long enough or with only enough attention to see merely a pheasant and some oranges on a table, you will not experience it as a meditation on life, death, sustenance, and spirituality. The same is true of a Mondrian – which, though it is made up entirely of black lines and white rectangles, can take you as deep and as far as a Chardin.

Great works of art keep giving – exponentially so – as long as you are willing to take them in. It is not a matter of how many things or details are in an artwork but of how those forms, no matter how few or subtle, add up, open up; how they unfold and are realized, brought to fruition in relationship to one another.

It is often said by critics of Minimalism that Minimalist works do not offer us enough to look at; that they are often too reductive, understated, and impersonal to be engaging. I do not find this to be true of all works – Donald Judd’s art, for instance, is an exception – but this criticism at times is certainly just in the case of Agnes Martin. Her colorless, atmospheric, veil-like canvases, which seem to hover at the brink of intangibility, offer very little to hold on to.

Martin (1912-2004) is an icon and a cornerstone of Minimalism. A practitioner of the “less is more” school of reductionism, she is also a cornerstone of Dia: Beacon, where galleries have been devoted to her work since the satellite museum opened in May 2003. “Unknown Territory: Agnes Martin’s Paintings from the 1960s” is the second installment of a five-part retrospective of the artist’s work at Dia: Beacon.

This show gives us a chance to see her early Minimalist works in a setting that is about as favorable as it gets. The 300,000-square-foot Dia:Beacon, a former box-printing factory situated on the Hudson River, is the Mecca of Minimalism. It is probably one of the best places to view Martin’s austere, cool grids and pale bands of color, lit almost entirely by natural light, and in the company of Minimalists Judd, Dan Flavin, and Walter De Maria.

Dia:Beacon’s manicured spaces – the well-worn, bleached wood floors, punctuated by deep gouges and satin silver nails, and complimented by rusted I-beams and pristine white walls – enrich the experience of Martin’s paintings, as the paintings, in turn, enrich the experience of the museum. Martin’s quivering, finely drawn graphite lines, expansive grids, bleached off-whites, and delicate shifts in scale and tone speak to the wood grain, the constantly changing natural light, and the behemoth space within the galleries.

“Unknown Territory” includes 21 paintings completed between 1957 and 1967, the formative years of Martin’s signature work and of Minimalism. The show also marks the year in which, in response to Ad Reinhardt’s death, Martin moved to New Mexico and for a time gave up painting. Inspired by the New Mexico desert and the writings of Taoists Lao Tse and Chuang Tzu, Martin’s weightless, whispered-on paintings fall endlessly away.

Most of the works in the Dia:Beacon show are six feet square. Human in scale yet just big enough to expand beyond our grasp, the canvases are too open-ended, immaterial, nonspecific, and imprecise to ground us. Supposedly, this is, in part, the egoless and impersonal effect Martin desired – a disengagement with the rectangle. Yet I cannot imagine why, when painting can offer so much, an artist would want to produce something so formless, lifeless, and without tension – something so willfully desiccated and barren.

“My paintings have neither objects nor space nor time nor anything – no forms,” Martin said, in 1966 – and she is dead right. In Martin’s works, line is emasculated, as are space, color, and shape. Movement is halted, restricted to mere pattern and texture. In Martin, line (which, for other artists, is movement, growth, energy, and measure – a metaphor for life itself) has no power, no intention.

Likewise for Martin, the rectangle – a closed form made up of opposing forces – is diffused. By diffusing the rectangle, she weakened the plane – the force against which every mark on the canvas depends. Martin neutered the very energies, forms, and properties that give art life. And, oddly, she did it willingly.

The show at Dia:Beacon begins with “Wheat” (1957), a painting that, through its soft palette of light yellow, cream, and gray-green, speaks vaguely to the qualities of waving wheat. But the shapes and colors of the canvas’s rectangles feel so muted and removed from any source – so watered down and without formal tension – that the forms cancel each other out, just as the paintings do, one to the next, throughout the exhibition.

Martin had sensibility but could not (or would not) draw. She knew how to reduce a painting to the experience of the ephemeral and the accidental, to make us notice the uneven nub of the canvas, or to become as much aware of the subtle shifts in reflection on the silver frame surrounding the painting as of the way light plays across a white surface.

Martin showed how the interplay between art and life, between the space within and the space beyond the rectangle, are dependent and interrelated. The problem is that her canvases ignore the expansive power of art. After her paintings have made you aware of those general connections, they begin to close down.

“Garden” (1964), a grid of nearly overlapping red and green lines that create vertical rectangles, is darker and cooler in hue than “Field” (1963), which is also made of thin and wobbly drawn rectangles. But “Peach” (1964), which is definitely cooler than the warm, almost hazy pink, red-lined rectangles in “Red Bird” (1964), is probably cooler than “Garden,” yet not as dark and gray as the horizontal-rectangles in the off-white “Leaf” (1965).

Martin’s Minimalism, which evolved as a counter to the heavy-handed “I” of abstract expressionism and the soulless banality of pop art, is often said to take us to the extreme reaches of purity, to a mindless state equivalent to that experienced during meditation. This is not the experience I have ever had with meditation (which, as with art, grounds the self within the self). Nor is it the experience I have felt with Martin’s paintings, in which “less” engenders less and less.

When I want to experience what a pure line can do within a rectangle, I will return not to Martin, whose works make me drowsy, but to Mondrian, whose paintings make my heart leap.

Until November 17 (3 Beekman Street, Beacon, N.Y., 845-440-0100).