Agnes Pelton

Agnes Lawrence Pelton

UNDER CONSTRUCTION UNDER CONSTRUCTION

About the Artist

Agnes Lawrence Pelton was an American modernist painter known for her desert landscapes and abstract compositions.

Agnes Pelton in her studio

Personal Life and Education

Agnes Pelton was born on August 22, 1881 in Stuttgart, Germany to American parents. She moved with her mother to Brooklyn, NY in 1888. Her mother, Florence, operated the Pelton School of Music and home schooled Agnes due to her poor health.

Agnes first learned piano, and then added art classes at the Pratt Institute, graduating in 1900 at the age of 19. She continued to study landscape painting under instructor Arthur Wesley Dow, who later taught Georgia O’Keeffe. She also studied in Italy in 1910 under another Pratt instructor, Hamilton Easter Field, focusing on daily life drawing and Italian painters.

She set up a studio in Greenwich Village. In 1919, she visited Mabel Dodge Sterne Luhan, a patron of the arts, in Taos, NM and began to focus on portraits and landscape oil paintings. After the death of her mother in 1921, she moved to Long Island to be closer to nature in 1921 and lived in a wind mill. She created her first abstract works in 1926, inspired by light, water, and wind. She traveled to Hawaii, New Hampshire, Beiruit, Syria, Georgia, and Pasadena. In 1931, she moved to Cathedral City, CA in the desert where she lived until her death in 1961.

Involvement with Theosophy

Though not a formal member of the Theosophical Society, she was influenced by the works of Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. She was also influenced by the writings of Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

She had a close friendship with astrologist and theosophist Dane Rudhyar. In 1930, he introduced her to Agni Yoga which was founded by theosophists Helena and Nicholas Roerich in 1920. Several of her paintings, including Fires in Space, included fiery elements that were central to Agni Yoga and self-realization.

She also developed a lifelong friendship with modernist Southwest painter Raymond Jonson, one of the founders of the Transcendental Painting Group in New Mexico. Agnes Pelton, the oldest member of the group, was voted in as a member in absentia even though she was living in Cathedral City, CA.

Artistic Style

Early Imaginative Paintings - From 1911 to 1917, Pelton produced symbolist compositions based on dreams and pastoral surroundings. She exhibited two of her “imaginative” paintings, Vine Wood and Stone Age, in the groundbreaking 1913 Armory Show.

American Southwest landscapes and people - Influenced by her surroundings during her visit to Taos, NM in 1919, she started to paint desert landscapes and portraits of Native Americans using oils and pastels.

Abstract Art - She started to work on nature based abstractions in the mid-1920s

Exhibitions and Museum Collections

Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature - Palm Springs Museum of Art,1995

Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce - Whitney Museum of American Art, 2009

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist Exhibit - Phoenix Museum of Art, March 9 to September 8, 2019 (also traveled to New Mexico Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art, and Palm Springs Art Museum)

Additional Resources (articles, websites, videos)

Agnes Pelton papers, 1885-1989. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

National Association of Women Artists, https://thenawa.org/nawa-luminaries-agnes-lawrence-pelton/