This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Agnes Pelton.
Born: 22 August 1881, Germany
Died: 13 March 1961
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Visionary artist Agnes Pelton found her greatest muse in nature, a sanctuary where the painter enjoyed bouts of meditative silence and communion with the world. Interested in the higher consciousness beyond the mere appearances, she strove to express this relationship between observer and observed through work rich in ethereal Symbolism. Her visual vocabulary of fluid form, allegorical iconography, and luminescence were central elements in what would become known as Transcendental Painting.
Childhood
Agnes Pelton was born in 1881 in Stuttgart, Germany to American parents Florence and William Pelton. Her earliest years were spent traveling around Europe and visiting America with her mother. In 1888, Agnes and her mother settled in Brooklyn, New York, where they lived with Agnes’ grandmother Elizabeth. William Pelton did not settle in America with his family, preferring instead to continue traveling throughout Europe, and only occasionally visiting his wife and daughter. William suffered from several psychological issues, and experienced intense mood swings, melancholy, and insomnia. In 1891, when Agnes was just nine years old, he died of a morphine overdose in his brother’s home in Louisiana. His death had a huge impact on Agnes, and she withdrew into herself, becoming quiet and private. When a friend mentioned her father Agnes sternly told her, “My beautiful tragic father is not to be talked about.”
This impulse to keep personal matters private is something which Pelton grew up with. Her grandmother Elizabeth Tilton had been involved in a national scandal in the 1870s, one which hung over the family for many years to come. Elizabeth Tilton and her husband Theodore had been extremely well known and respected figures in both the suffrage and antislavery movements. When Elizabeth confessed to having had an affair with Henry Ward Beecher – “one of the country’s most respected clergymen,” a stigma fell upon the family. Theodore Tilton sued Henry Beecher for $100,000 in damages through a trial that lasted six months, became regular national news, and which Theodore ultimately lost. Shame, scarred the Tilton and Pelton families for many years to come. Agnes recalls that she was “brought up never to speak of it” and that the scandal “overshadowed” her.
As a result of this shame, and the loss of her father, Agnes Pelton was, in her early life, a sad and brooding young woman. Her mother, having no financial support, opened a music school in their home, where she taught piano and occasionally tutored English. Elizabeth Tilton lived with them until she died when Agnes was sixteen years old. Pelton stated that: “from the time of puberty at age thirteen I was much inclined to melancholy and tears which was probably aggravated by being the only child in a household of deeply religious and perhaps unnecessarily serious people.”
Education and Early Training
One of Pelton’s early “Imaginative Paintings”: Room Decoration in Purple and Gray, Oil on canvas, 1917
Pelton attended the Pratt Institute from 1895 to 1900, where she studied painting with Arthur Wesley Dow. After graduating, Pelton fell seriously ill for six weeks, coming quite close to death at one point. She reflected that this illness “seemed to stop the creative impulse in painting,” and so for the first seven years of the 20th century she entered a period of relative stagnation. During this time, she taught students in her mother’s music school, and she fell in love with one of her mother’s female pupils. Pelton spent many hours at home, waiting hopefully for the young woman to show up. Unfortunately, it was an unrequited love, and caused Agnes a great deal of heartache.
In 1907 Pelton began to paint again, and in 1910 she undertook a trip to Italy, where she was greatly inspired by the unity and vision of Renaissance paintings. From 1911 to 1914 she studied with Hamilton Easter Field in Ogunquit, Maine. Her first original works were created during this time – a series of paintings Pelton called her “Imaginative Paintings.” The work was heavily symbolic, and often featured lone women in natural settings. Two of these paintings were exhibited in the pivotal exhibition of modern art in America – the 1913 Armory Show.
In 1921 Pelton moved into an unused windmill near Southampton, Long Island. Here, she hoped to develop her own practice, while also making an income painting portraits of wealthy summer residents. She lived there in relative happiness for 10 years, undertaking contemplative studies of nature and developing her abstract style. For Pelton, each aspect of nature which she studied – whether plant, season, weather, or mountain – was indicative of the wider systems of the world, and the harmonious unity of all. This understanding of the world around her became central to her abstract visions, the first of which she created in 1926. During this time Pelton developed a body of abstract images which would recur throughout her career, including mountains, spheres, fire, urns, and orbs. This connected her work with the Symbolist movement, in which artists represented absolute truths symbolically and allegorically through metaphorical images, in opposition to naturalism and realism.
Pelton was greatly inspired by the writings of spiritual leader Helena Blavatsky and the teachings of the New Age faith Theosophy, a movement which drew on elements of Eastern religion and the occult, and whose central belief was in the existence of a singular, divine “Absolute.” Theosophy held that the aim of human life was to achieve spiritual freedom and that human beings held capacity for limitless improvement. This spiritual movement was hugely influential across North America and Europe, becoming central to the work of artists such as Hilma af Klint, Wassilly Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian.
Late Period
California Desert, where Pelton spent her later years.
When Pelton’s landlord decided to sell the Hayground Windmill in 1932, she relocated to the California desert near Palm Springs, where she would spend the next thirty or so years painting. Art historian Erika Doss notes that Time magazine had, two years previously, been reporting “a flourishing of cults, of religious novelties, and new fashions in faiths” in the state, making it an ideal place for an artist like Pelton. Her work during this time was heavily informed by the desert landscape, and by her own spiritual beliefs. She continued to live a life in seclusion yet was by no means a hermit. She believed that her paintings were a mode of communication, and so were essentially meaningless unless seen by others. During this late period, Pelton made numerous friends amongst her neighbors. She hosted multiple studio visits and took part in many art exhibitions. Her impact on those who met her was great – William Lumpkins of the Transcendentalist society said that when one was in her presence, one knew she was “someone special.” Another woman, who Pelton met in passing, felt compelled to write to her and tell her that she was a “beautiful soul.”
In 1938 Pelton became a founding member of the Transcendentalist Painting Group, along with long-time friend and correspondent Raymond Johnson. The group was founded in the 1930s in New Mexico, and consisted of artists who were, according to Pelton, devoted to “carry[ing] painting beyond the appearance of the physical world.” They were creatively inspired by the communion of abstract painting and Theosophy, a branch of Western esoterism based on the idea that there exists one absolute from which all beings are connected and emanate outward from. That same year, Pelton shipped fourteen paintings to an exhibition organized by Johnson in the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Chronic health problems kept Pelton from traveling, but she often shipped works to show across the country.
In 1939, members of the group exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, and then later that year, at the New York World’s Fair. Important exhibitions followed featuring the group’s artists in New York at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation) and at the Museum of Modern Art.
Although the group disbanded in 1941 due to the economical and social consequences of pending war, they were rediscovered in 1979 by New York-based revivalist art dealer Martin Diamond.
Pelton did not achieve grand levels of fame during her lifetime, in large part because she did not strive to promote herself. She spent her many later years creating stunning still lifes and landscapes of her beloved desert home, capturing both its spiritual qualities as well as its luminous light. Present day conversation about her work often compares her to Georgia O’Keeffe, and while there are certainly many similarities between the two, O’Keeffe enjoyed a great deal of fame during her lifetime. Unlike O’Keeffe, Pelton was satisfied by the attention she received from close friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. Her spiritual beliefs meant that she believed in destiny and did not feel the need to actively pursue fame or a more commercially successful career.
The artist would die in the desert in 1961, her ashes buried within the San Jacinto Mountains.
The Legacy of Agnes Pelton
Pelton’s work has experienced a revival in the 21st century. Art historian and Pelton scholar Michael Zakian notes that Pelton’s Modernism was not one of rigid structure and theory, but rather one of occult spirituality, and a profound love of nature. Zakian notes that “Mainstream Modernism in the United States followed a path of theory and geometry, preferring self-reference to revelation.” Pelton believed that “rather than reject reality in favor of nonobjective images … modern painting should be a visual poem that reveals the beauty and mystery of nature.” This idea did not garner a huge following at the time, but today it offers a welcome alternative to the grand narrative of American modernism that prevails.
Pelton perhaps understood that although she would not achieve fame in her lifetime, her work would resonate far into the future. She wrote: “I feel somewhat like the keeper of a little lighthouse, the beam of which goes farther than I know, and illumines for others more than I can see.”