At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism
May 7, 2022–Feb 26, 2023
Agnes Pelton
17
Born 1881 in Stuttgart, Germany
Died 1961 in Cathedral City, CA
Agnes Pelton was born in Germany to American parents. As a teenager, she studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Her artistic breakthrough came in the mid-1920s in a series of abstract paintings depicting incorporeal subject matter such as air, light, water, and sound. In the decades that followed, as she began to immerse herself in the study of esoteric and occult philosophies, her imagery evolved. She paired the emotive power of ethereal abstract forms with mystical symbols such as stars, mountains, and fire to represent the union with “Divine Reality” that she experienced in dreams and meditation. Pelton was among those artists who believed color could speak directly to the soul. She constructed her compositions out of multiple layers of smooth, thin glazes of paint that created delicate, shimmering veils of color. Living away from the mainstream art world for most of her career, Pelton received little encouragement for her abstract paintings. Her greatest support came between 1938 and 1942 from artists in the short-lived Transcendental Painting Group of New Mexico who shared her beliefs. Not until the 1980s did her efforts to depict “windows of illumination” onto the spiritual world posthumously receive the wider art world’s attention.
Sea Change, 1931
Agnes Pelton, Sea Change, 1931. Oil on canvas, overall: 20 1/8 × 28 3/8 in. (51.1 × 72.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Lois and Irvin Cohen 99.64
Artists
- Richmond Barthé
- Ben Benn
- Albert Bloch
- Oscar Bluemner
- Patrick Henry Bruce
- Charles Burchfield
- Arthur B. Carles
- John Covert
- E.E. Cummings
- Imogen Cunningham
- James Daugherty
- Arthur B. Davies
- Stuart Davis
- Manierre Dawson
- Charles Demuth
- Isami Doi
- Aaron Douglas
- Arthur Dove
- Charles Duncan
- Yun Gee
- Marsden Hartley
- Rebecca Salsbury James
- Loïs Mailou Jones
- Taizo Kato
- Gaston Lachaise
- Blanche Lazzell
- Stanton Macdonald-Wright
- Man Ray
- John Marin
- Elie Nadelman
- Louise Nevelson
- Carl Newman
- Isamu Noguchi
- Chiura Obata
- Georgia O'Keeffe
- Walter Pach
- Agnes Pelton
- Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
- Henry Lyman Sayen
- Charles G. Shaw
- Harry Shigeta
- Henrietta Shore
- Pamela Colman Smith
- Joseph Stella
- Florine Stettheimer
- John Storrs
- Henry Fitch Taylor
- Helen Torr
- Jay Van Everen
- Adele Watson
- Max Weber
- Edith Clifford Williams
- Marguerite Zorach
- William Zorach