Cosmic ardor - painting, Agnes Pelton, traveling exhibition

A traveling retrospective directs of recent origin attention to painter Agnes Pelton, who exhibited in the 1913 Armory exhibit The ethereal forms of Pelton's nature abstractions throw back her long fascination with esoteric spirituality.

Abstract paintings inspired by the agency of spiritual, mystical or occult beliefs are completely without of step with today's discourse of art history and theory. nevertheless the fact remains that many of this century's greatest in quantity complex and intriguing painters--including Kandinsky, Mondrian, Hartley, Rothko Newman, Agnes Martin, Bill Jensen and flat Sigmar Polke--have attempted through their art to tap into "higher forces." To reach a wide audience, art with transcendental bring under rule matter has usually depended on charismatic artists and strong dealers; the modernist machine has quite predictably bypassed artists with quieter, more asocial tendencies. greatest in quantity likely as a result of her physical isolation, as well as her withdrawn nature, Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) a painter of luminous abstractions, has sole recently received recognition, thanks to a comprehensive traveling exhibition organized by the agency of Michael Zakian (former curator of the Palm Springs waste Museum, where the show originated; he is now director of the Weisman Museum at Pepperdine University, Malibu).

firing materialed by her theosophical readings and inspired in 1925 by the agency of the nonobjective work of Kandinsky, Pelton broke away from her earlier symbolist landscapes and portraits to begin a series of fair abstractions. Working first in an isolated windmill studio upon Long Island and then, at age 51 moving to the tiny waste town of Cathedral Springs, California, Pelton at no time won a large following. over her career, however, she garnered the praise of cognoscenti of the like kind as Georgia O'Keeffe and Mabel Dodge, and in 1938 she was sought on the outside by New Mexico painter Raymond Jonson to be a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group

Although Pelton's material substance of work is much smaller than O'Keeffe's, it more than grasps its own when compared to O'Keeffe's paintings upon similar themes. With subtle light modulations rarely achieved by dint of O'Keeffe, Pelton precisely captures the hallucinatory aura of the wild sky and landscape; her stylized "cosmic" shapes enjoin solemnly up ethereal dreamscapes. Usually organized around a large central form, Pelton's paintings are theatrical settings for poetic nature vignettes. Incarnation (1929) features a immense stemless red flower hovering center stage; curtainlike cliffs and subtly tinged of gold light set off the radiant efflorescence In Pelton's first desert abstraction, Sand Storm (1932) dust mists part to reveal a dark storm mass charging in before a distant rainbow and a starburst patch of pale sky-colored sky.

Raised in Brooklyn Pelton studied piano at her mother's music academy and painting at the Pratt Institute (her teacher was Arthur Wesley Dow, who also taught Max Weber and O'Keeffe) Pelton's family was haunted by dint of troubles, most notably her grandparents' involvement in a scandalous adultery trial and her father's death through morphine overdose. As Zakian reports in his thorough and eminently readable exhibition catalogue, these traumatic incidents wreaked havoc upon Pelton's childhood; her only protection was in music and art.

Pelton's early pastoral landscapes, execut in the mode of speech of Arthur B. Davies, feature waifish dryads lingering in bucolic settings. sum of two units of these elegantly competent paintings were prefered by Walt Kuhn for inclusion in the 1913 Armory display Exposure to the cutting-edge modernist works in this exhibition, however, did not immediately affect Pelton. Her esthetic breakthrough came as the be derived of a heightened awareness of nature brought about through trips to two dramatic landscapes: the fresh Mexico desert surrounding Mabel Dodge's ranch in Taos (1919) and the volcanoes of Hawaii (1923)

Fascinated by the agency of music, Pelton had already, in the late 'teen experimented with color scales based upon musical notation. In the wake of her travels to novel Mexico and Hawaii, her landscapes became looser and more geometrically stylized. After establishing, at age 40 an independent studio upon Long Island, Pelton was ready to depict nature in paintings that she called "pure abstractions." She conceived of these works in terminuss that were literally poetic, composing line accompaniments to the paintings. For Being (1926) Pelton wrote a piece of poetry that describes how "The will to be takes shape/ Revolving, spiralling the Blue" The painting at hands a swirl of oval, head-like shapes emanating from an ethereal source of pastel fulvid light. Conceived as an abstract portrait of the inner man the loose central form reads as a bust, formed from ultimate parts of water, earth and air. Pelton earned a living at this time from commissioned portraits, and the central forms in greatest in quantity of her abstractions have a figurative scale and drama. She spoke of her abstractions as quotas to her portraiture because "the same ultimate parts are present in both, because what speaks in the individual is the silent or the more intimate mode of building of the other. Abstract beauty is life in creation--the voice; portraiture, life spoken--the word."