Agnes Pelton Went to the Desert in Search of Solace. Her Paintings at the Whitney Show She Found Something Magical There

Consider two paintings.

One is Mother of
Silence (1933), by the early 20th century
spiritual-abstractionist painter Agnes Pelton. She is the star of a
show that has just arrived at the Whitney Museum, part
of a wave of recent interest
in experimental art by previously unsung or undersung female
artists working in esoteric or occult traditions, a vogue that is
currently rewriting how museums
approach the history of modern art.

Mother of
Silence centers on a cluster of numinous blobs in pale
lavender, pink, and turquoise pastels, set off against a red and
black background and wreathed by precisely organized whorls of
energy. It suggests the form of a seated Buddha.

Now consider a painting not in the
show, Mother of the
World (1924), by the Russian painter, set designer, adventurer, and
mystic
Nikolai Roerich. In rich tones and flattened perspective, it
depicts the veiled figure of the ultimate female goddess in
Roerich’s occult system, seated on her mountain throne and framed
by divine halos.

Look at the two together and you get
a clear sense of the kind of archetypal image that Pelton is
adumbrating in her abstraction. I have no idea if Pelton is
referencing this exact image. However, she and her art both were
deeply inspired by Agni Yoga, the doctrine that Roerich and his
wife Helena dreamed up in the 1920s, claiming to be channeling
Eastern wisdom through spiritual séances.

Indeed, one of the rare figurative
works in the Whitney show—and a slightly unsettling beat in its
otherwise serenely otherworldly
atmosphere—is Intimation (1933). This is Pelton’s
portrait of Nikolai Roerich, rendered in gauzy, unearthly colors
and full guru style, his beady-eyed gaze transfixing the
viewer.

“Agni Yoga” meant “Path to the
Divine Fire.” The Roerichs’ doctrine celebrated fire as the symbol
of the energy animating all fixed things and all forms of wisdom,
“the essence of the entire life, all-embracing, evading nought.”
The veiled goddess-of-goddesses shown in Nikolai’s painting was
conceived as his ultimate unifying symbol of the divine light,
whose energy, he preached, would be at last unveiled when the
coming “Age of Fire” dawned. Then, as the Handbook of the
Theosophical Current explains, “fiery energies will
move toward the sphere of the Earth to purify it from a surrounding
heavy atmosphere caused by the crimes committed by
humans.”

In any case, the comparison merits two linked comments, one
formal, one symbolic.

Roarich’s painting clearly draws on Russian orthodox icon
depictions of the Virgin, given a fanciful Buddhist-accent
makeover. This mash-up makes sense, since Agni Yoga’s ideas were
syncretic, promising to reveal the common secret wisdom at the root
of all religions. Pictorially, however, it takes us towards
devotional cliché.

The modernist vortex of Pelton’s Mother of Silence, on
the other hand, makes for a quietly more awesome spin on the
subject.

And consequently, Pelton’s Mother better fits what I
take to be both works’ underlying idea: a spiritual presence who
incarnates the protean energy at the root of all earthly things.
The miasmic, dreamy character of the Pelton painting is far more
evocative of that idea than the deliberately stiff, folk art style
of the Roerisch one.

The student surpasses the master here, or the acolyte outshines
the guru.

***

“Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist,” which began at the
Phoenix Art Museum, features 40-odd paintings by Pelton, of the
only 100 or so abstractions she made during her life. She made
figurative art too, tourist-friendly California landscapes (she
actually called them “Tourist Paintings”) that she sold to support
herself when money got tight, but none are here. Her more modernist
works are what she considered to be her calling.

“Always do ‘this’ work first, others only when these do not call
you,” Pelton advised herself in her diary, writing of the abstract
works. She arrived at their forms via extensive meditation and
trance, creating exact sketches of the seemingly aleatory
constellations of forms and symbols that came to her in her
notebooks before rendering them to canvas.

Without knowing anything about Agnes Pelton’s story, you would
likely guess something about these paintings’ subject matter:
solitude (by dint of their evocations of empty landscapes); healing
(because of their gentle, nourishing color palette); and mysticism
(because of their many occult symbols: evening stars, floating
portals, roses, swans, lotus flowers, magic mountains, holy
deserts, “windows of illumination” opening in space, and flares of
the divine Roerichian fire breaking into reality).

Still, it’s worth knowing a bit about Pelton’s life story. Born
in 1881, her life was vividly shaped by family events that happened
before she was even born: 19th-century Brooklyn’s most infamous sex
scandal, the Beecher–Tilton Affair. Her
grandmother, Elizabeth Tilton, had been exposed as having an affair
with liberal preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Her grandfather, once a
Beecher acolyte, sued for “alienation of affection.” Doubling his
humiliation, he lost in court, and was estranged from the church
and from New York society.

Of her family’s heritance of infamy, Pelton would remember that
“it cramped our whole life and it also cramped mine…. [it] overshadowed me.” Her mother (who had been the one to report the
infidelity) married a wealthy but troubled man from a Louisiana
sugar empire. He died of morphine overdose in 1891. Young Agnes
grew up “inclined to melancholy and tears,” surrounded by “deeply
religious and perhaps unnecessarily serious people.” She was
diagnosed with “neurotic fever” at 19, and may have had an eating
disorder.

Pelton would find comfort in two things. One was art, which she
studied at Pratt starting as a teenager, going on to paint
portraits for money, and Symbolist-inspired canvasses out of
passion. She would show at the 1913 Armory Show, the sensational
survey that introduced ideas of modern art to still-provincial USA
(Marcel Duchamp’s Cubistic Nude Descending a Staircase was
the big succès de scandale). There, Pelton’s work appeared
alongside future heroes of the art history textbooks like Charles
Sheeler and Marsden Hartley.

The Whitney’s show features just one introductory example that
gives a taste of Pelton’s early mode of the 1910s, her “Imaginative
Paintings.” It’s a large canvas—her largest, actually a painting
for a mural—featuring a woman walking amid a secluded garden
landscape that has a swirling, animate character. It skirts
Symbolist kitsch (her own later judgment on these early works,
according to the show catalgoue, is that they were “insincere” and
“not real”).

Nevertheless, the idea of the solo female seeker in communion
with natural and cosmic forces was the foundation of all the more
experimental work Pelton did—though a theme she would elaborate in
less and less literal ways.

***

Pelton’s other comfort was alternative spirituality. In the
1920s, in her 40s, her mother died and she left New York to live in
a windmill house on Long Island. She also developed an interest in
Theosophy, the epiphanic slurry of pan-religious beliefs pioneered
by Russian émigré and occult entrepreneur Helena Blavatsky. It was
under the influence of Theosophical ideas about accessing an
abstract “Divine Reality” at the root of all reality and thought
that Pelton began her experiments in abstraction, such as the
The Ray Supreme (1925) and Being (1926), which
suggest images of spiritual vibrations.

Her best works, however, are from a little later. In 1930,
through an acquaintance with composer and “transpersonal
astrologer” Dane Rudhyar, Pelton would
discover the Roerichs’s Agni Yoga doctrine, a heretical elaboration
of Theosophy that, in addition to spinning pages of alluring hokum
out of the transcultural significance of fire, stressed self-help
and moral improvement through spiritual living.

The Roerichs’ tome, Leaves of Moyra’s
Garden, advised the reader: “In creation realize the
happiness of life, and unto the desert turn thine eye.” In 1932,
Pelton complied literally, moving West to Cathedral City,
California, near Desert Hot Springs, where she found both the
solitude in which she had always longed to work, as well as the
community of others with similar esoteric interests.

After her arrival, a painting like Sand Storm can be
read as symbolizing her literally “turning her eye” to the desert
to find happiness: The canvas shows a floriform window of divine
light, piercing through a sandstorm, conjuring a hardy, healing
rainbow.

How to look at these paintings, with their wonky, hieratic
quality? Part of their appeal is their exotic sense of marshaling
secret totems and magical signs, but a lot of their esoteric
symbolism remains remote. I also think the search for a master code
might miss the point of the imagery for Pelton herself.

Pelton’s family history had been scarred by the rigidity,
coldness, dogma, and moral judgementalism of New York’s Gilded Age
religious society. Aside from offering the spiritual warmth of a
literal fire cult, proto-New Age philosophies like Agni Yoga
appealed because they were notably eclectic—they encouraged
curiosity in the whole panoply of world religions, and you could
take from them what you wanted, in a highly personal way.

Pelton seems to have read deeply and widely and forged her own
synthesis to meet her own devotional needs. As much as Mother
of Silence evokes Roerich’s goddess of divine fire, for
instance, it also seems to have been for the artist an avatar of
her own mother’s spirit as well. In Pelton’s California studio, she
kept the canvas near her, to commune with its spirit for advice on
painting and to give her comfort in times of money woes.

In their day, what made these eclectic occult philosophies so
appealing to so many people in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries was how they triangulated between faith and freedom. They
offered a sense of metaphysical order and higher truth, but also a
modern freedom from old religious rigidities and the ability to
make one’s own path. This delicate balance is coded into the formal
texture and symbolic vocabulary of Pelton’s canvasses: Her art
gives a comfortingly ordered, hieroglyphic form to symbols of
protean, unbounded spiritual potential: holy fire (Mount of
Flame, 1932), swelling oceans (Sea Change, 1931),
rippling atmosphere (Red and Blue, 1938).

And what is true within the canvasses is also true between them:
Pelton’s art embodies a protean spirit in that she never really
repeats an idea.

Pelton’s work, clearly, shows a distinctive mix of abstract
forms, allusions to landscape, and far-out symbolism. But each
composition distinctly introduces a new pictorial idea—and you
can’t help but think that the newness is part of the point, that
what each work symbolizes, in its unique conjugation of forms, is
being in touch with an energy that is ever-changing.

My point is that this particular spiritual disposition is also
an aesthetic asset. Pelton’s restlessly questing imperative is part
of what makes her art a font of pleasant surprises. Just when you
think you’ve got her style figured out, there appears something
like Prelude (1943), with its saffron sky blossoming with
floating gear shapes. Where’d that come from?

It’s like a little revelation.

***

Maybe all this is just to say that, as much as Agnes Pelton’s
art answered a spiritual call and an inner necessity, she also was
a trained artist and brought an artist’s instinct for formal
freshness to her quiet desert studio.

Though she did not experience huge success in her lifetime,
Pelton showed her spiritual-abstract works at such non-arcane
institutions as the San Diego Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, the Crocker Art Museum, and the Santa Barbara Museum
of Art. She certainly seemed to have believed that she was bringing
into the world images with a higher mystical significance, but
unlike more mediumistically inspired artists who merely view
themselves as a vessel, Pelton signed her finished canvasses with
her name, at the bottom corner, like someone who expected to be
recognized for their individual vision.

But there’s a reason to think that Pelton’s perpetually
exploration was more than just artistic competence, that the
continuous evolution had a particular force as the symbolic
lifeforce of her art. Throughout the decades of her oeuvre as seen
at the Whitney, she never repeats herself—except once.

In 1947-48, Pelton made a work called Light Center, a
hovering ovoid of energy suspended between an animate, rippling
earth and a gauzy, serenely agitated sky.

In 1960-61, she repeated the same composition. Charcoal lines
remain on the canvas, where you see her trying to plot how exactly
to tweak the image to make it repeat. The lines remain on the work
because she died before she finished it.

Who knows why Agnes Pelton turned, at that moment, to her own
back catalogue for inspiration. But it is a beautiful thought that
someone who had been looking for wisdom from the beyond, at the
moment when she merged with it, finally let herself take
inspiration from herself.

“Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist” is on view at the
Whitney Museum of American Art, through September 1, 2020.

The post Agnes Pelton Went to the Desert in Search of
Solace. Her Paintings at the Whitney Show She Found Something
Magical There appeared first on artnet News.