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.
Personal Life and Education
Agnes Pelton was born on August 22, 1881 in Stuttgart, Germany to American parents. After the death of her father, she moved with her mother to Brooklyn, NY in 1890. Her mother, Florence, operated the Pelton School of Music and home schooled Agnes who suffered from poor health as a child. [1]
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 (later 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 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 in the California 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 read the Key to Theosophy early on.[2] She was also influenced by the writings of Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911).
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 - Beginning in 1926, she started to work on nature based abstractions. Her thoughts on life and spiritual issues were captured in notebooks which have been digitized at the Smithsonian. [3]
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/
Notes
1 Women Artists of the American West, Agnes Pelton and Florence Miller-Pierce, The Two Women in the Transcendental Painting Group, Biographies by Tiska Blankenship.
2 See Agnes Pelton papers, 1885-1989. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
