Monday Muse: Agnes Pelton
On Friday I went up to LA for an art trip. More about that here. I had quite the list of art exhibits to check out at the Hammer Museum, Spring Break LA, and the LACMA. At the top of my list was an exhibit on the Transcendentalist Painting Group (TPG) that featured the paintings of Agnes Pelton. Last year there had been a Pelton retrospective at the Palm Springs Art Museum and I missed it, so I definitely wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass me by.
Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) was a German immigrant who moved to the US as a young child. She studied art at the Pratt Institute and studied Modernism, landscape art, and Chinese and Japanese art. This was where she first began to experiment with the idea of creating abstract “landscapes” that documented her inner world and imagination.
She originally exhibited work in Maine and New York before traveling to Taos, New Mexico where her work took a drastic change. She was inspired by the desert landscape and the Pueblo people who lived there. It was in Taos that she met and worked with the Transcendentalist Painting Group, a group of artists working in abstraction and studying spiritual themes like theosophy and spiritualism. In 1932 she moved permanently to Cathedral City, California, just outside of Palm Springs. She was inspired by the desert saying, “The vibration of this light, the spaciousness of these skies enthralled me. I knew there was a spirit in nature as in everything else, but here in the desert it was an especially bright spirit.”
I learned about Pelton’s work online and was immediately drawn to it. The colors, the shapes, and especially how she captured light in her paintings drew me in. I love the desert and I resonated with the way Pelton describes the desert as a spiritual place. It is harsh, dry, and cruel but also bursting with life. Seeing her work in person at the LACMA was delightful. It’s amazing that these paintings, that feel so thoroughly timeless, were painted almost 100 years ago. They’re soft and easy to look at while also being powerful and arresting. You feel the reverence that Pelton has for her subject matter and the land that inspired it.
My favorite piece from the LACMA exhibition was the one above called Nurturing. I spent several minutes looking at the work, just enjoying the colors and round forms. I noticed that the larger, glowing form seems to be encouraging the little flourishes of color. Helping them to grow or perhaps encouraging them to fly or express themselves. I laughed when I read the title of the work because that is immediately the feeling I sensed from the work too. It’s amazing how a few abstract forms can convey such a strong feeling, especially over 100 years of time.
I left the TPG exhibit feeling cleansed emotionally and spiritually. In today’s world where a lot of art is cynical or about the ugliness of humanity, it was so wonderful to look at art that was not only aesthetically beautiful but celebratory of humanity’s divine relationship to nature. After all, nature is around us to support us, delight us, offer a connection to god, and to awe us. I am reminded of this when I look at Pelton’s work.
