Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist at the Whitney Museum of American Art

March 13 – June 28, 2020
99 Gansevoort Street, between Washington St. and 10th Ave
New York City, whitney.org

The exhibition of Agnes Pelton’s inwardly inspired paintings at the Whitney, “Desert Transcendentalist,” will inevitably be compared to the Guggenheim’s record-breaking Hilma af Klint show of last year. Both feminist pioneers were trained landscapists whose calling was mystical abstraction; both were neglected until Maurice Tuchman’s legendary 1986 exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – although the show included only one Pelton, and the fuse of her fame has been, like her paintings, a very slow burn. If you take af Klint at her word, she is simply the medium of the works she is celebrated for, a conundrum of authorship which only adds to her contemporaneity, her moment. Pelton is another matter. Her symbolic abstractions are hard-won and timeless, as impeccably composed and crafted as Renaissance nativities. Georgia O’Keeffe’s equally impeccable paintings have been the usual comparison – to the point of being an eclipsing doppelgänger. Indeed, O’Keeffe trained, a quarter century after Pelton, with the same modestly enlightened American landscapist, Arthur Wesley Dow; both were introduced to the Southwest by Mabel Dodge Luhan and her fabulous entourage, and both thereafter spent their lives painting in the desert – the one to immense popular and critical acclaim, the other in near anonymity.

After seeing the LACMA exhibition, I’d been intrigued by the occasional Pelton sighting in regional museums in the West, often in connection with the Transcendental Painting Group, founded in New Mexico in 1938 (Pelton was by then living in remote Cathedral City, CA, east of Palm Springs). She has been virtually unknown in New York, where she grew up and studied, and where she exhibited in the watershed 1913 Armory Show. The current show and its beautifully designed catalogue originated at the Phoenix Art Museum, where I happened to see it in 2019, increasing my knowledge of Pelton’s corpus by dozens of astonishing works, not a few of them rescued from thrift shops and garages.

Pelton, like many artists of her time (as the LACMA show reminded us), explored every alternative belief system that came her way, chief among them Theosophy, a kind of gateway drug to eastern mysticism and western hermeticism. She copied passages from esoteric texts into her journals and set up a proper meditation room in her studio, in which she seems to have contemplated her own paintings while summoning new visions. Perhaps some of these visions bog down in diagrammatic information, taking occult symbolism almost too literally. The urn which runneth over of Even Song (1934), for example, strikes me as received wisdom rather than firsthand insight, although the ethereal Deco calm of the overflow is transfixing. Memory (1937) has an even more complex schema to work through, albeit a more cryptic one; moreover, as with a number of Pelton’s works, it is almost too skillfully sweet, even cute. With its soft theatrical lighting and choreographic charm, the painting approximates a Disney storyboard. Of course, these qualms are, all the same, full-fledged fascinations.

The earliest and most sugary painting in the exhibition, Room Decoration in Purple and Gray (1917), is the epitome of a transitional work. For a decade, Pelton had been making what she called “imaginative paintings,” inspired by the enervated fin-de-siècle symbolism of Arthur B. Davies and others, in which mysterious, virginal waifs commune with nature. An earlier and murkier such painting, Vine Wood (1913), is reproduced in the catalogue; it was one of her Armory Show works, and the impact of Cubism and Orphism, first seen there by most Americans, is clearly manifest a few years later in the translucent chromatic planes and splintering plant forms of Room Decoration.

In 1921, after her mother’s death, Pelton retreated to a lonely Long Island windmill and painted her first abstractions, dispensing with the waifs while digging deeper into curving, overlapping constructions. With Radiance in 1929 Pelton perfected a fluid, biomorphic shell game in which light and space change places as you look. But with Star Gazer and Divinity Lotus, painted that same year, Pelton found her true voice: serene, tuned in, and heraldic. 

The artist was exhibiting in New York and elsewhere when, in 1931, she chose to move permanently to a village in the California desert, in near isolation from the art world, although closer to West Coast centers of eclecticism like Pasadena and Ojai. Her life among the locals in Cathedral City seems to have been about as passably sociable as O’Keeffe’s in Abiquiu, NM, although in more scorched and humble surroundings. As the last of her family money dried up, she sold landscapes and portraits to support herself (mostly uninspired, even dull, it must be said), while continuing to work on her soaring inward visions. 

As for that family money, it leads us to events before Pelton’s birth – a sensational prologue that might have been scripted by Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson. In prosperous, 1855 Brooklyn Heights, Agnes’s grandparents, the Tiltons, were joined in wedlock by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. Theodore Tilton was an editor and worked closely with Beecher, a spellbinding orator of national prominence, in the abolitionist cause, and after the Civil War in support of women’s suffrage. In 1870, Elizabeth Tilton confirmed to her spouse that she had been having an affair with the charismatic Beecher. Theodore reported the confession to the “free love” Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull, with whom he had been having his own affair, and she publicized the behavior to call attention to Beecher’s hypocritical support of traditional marriage, with its legal and financial bondage of women. The scandal detonated in the burgeoning national press and burned continuously for years with endless claims and counterclaims.

Pelton’s grandparents got much the worst of it. Theodore lost a suit of adultery and exiled himself to Paris (eventually, he was buried next to the painter Jean-François Millet), while Elizabeth, shunned by society, raised their daughter, Florence, in genteel poverty. Florence, who had betrayed her mother’s affair to her father, was later sent to Germany to study music, where she married Mr. William Pelton. After moving around the continent for some years, the couple split, Florence rejoining her mother in Brooklyn with young Agnes in order to support the family by opening a music school. Mr. Pelton remained behind and died of a morphine overdose. Agnes was then nine. 

At age 14, Agnes, always described as quiet, enrolled in the study of art at Pratt Institute. The silent, solitary vocation she fixed upon and followed thereafter was a refuge from the whirlpool of politics, religion, and sex that had swallowed up her ancestors –– among whom we should reckon Beecher and Woodhull. His was an ecstatic, Transcendentalist version of Christianity; she was a practicing clairvoyant who summoned the dead. Thus, spirituality and spiritualism, forces writ large in the era, were particularly mingled in Pelton’s cultural DNA (and perhaps not just cultural, considering that Beecher was rumored to have fathered more than one of his congregants’ children). One last vignette from this prologue: in 1875, the same year as the adultery trial, Madame Helena Blavatsky founded, in New York, a mystical, post-Christian sect she called Theosophy, or divine knowledge. It was a syncretic, inward road map past the gross matter of the here and now, beyond mental shackles like Heaven and Hell, and it was destined to preside at the birth of modernist abstraction.

Pelton’s deeply moving 1933 painting The Primal Wing seems intended to answer the call of one indispensable Theosophist text, Thought-Forms. An illustrated tract by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater first published in 1901, the book asserts that thoughts can be seen by trained clairvoyants. Despite some silly and prudish moments, Thought-Forms opens the door for synesthetic speculations – especially with an epilogue of clouds visualizing the music of Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn. (Pelton’s 1950 premonition of a Lisa Yuskavage painting, Lost Music II, not on view but reproduced in the catalogue, is surely up this alley.) The pamphlet includes a color chart of auras, as well as illustrations of particular thought vibrations. Greed for drink is a grasping brown blob with cartoonish claws wrapping around an absent bottle – and fledgling Theosophists are warned to imagine how lustful thoughts would appear to advanced lodge members. 

With perhaps equal credulity, peace and protection appears as a pair of rose-colored wings, and Pelton’s The Primal Wing must have been suggested by this image – keeping in mind that the authors of Thought-Forms openly invited artistic license by acknowledging their illustrations’ limits. In Pelton’s unforgettable interpretation, peace and protection is a single incandescent rosy wing hovering over a slumbering gray landscape with the tragic grace of a Fra Angelico angel at a Crucifixion. 

Pelton consulted many doctrines, from the Agni Yoga promoted by Nicholas Roerich (whose phantasmal Tibetan landscapes seem to have influenced her dawn-and-dusk palette), to the aphorisms of Carl Jung (who might have noticed Pelton’s early paintings when he attended the Armory Show). Most of Pelton’s symbolism was so fundamental as to be beyond dogma; of stars, vessels, luminous orbs, and fire she was a seer on her own terms. Messengers (1932), with its buoyant, precision-tooled mystery can contend with any O’Keeffe steer skull or af Klint temple painting, any Kazimir Malevich or Piet Mondrian, any Arthur Dove or Charles Burchfield or Marsden Hartley, or indeed any other spiritualist Twentieth Century work of art. I can say the same for Orbits (1934), Alchemy (1937-1939) and The Blest (1941) – as well as The Voice (1930) and White Fire (1930), two incredible paintings that are sorely missed in the exhibition (again, consult the catalogue). In each of these centered, delicately refined compositions Pelton presents us with something very like an icon for a new religion.

This religion has a distinctly feminist lineage – mysticism in the West being re-introduced by lionhearts like Woodhull, Madame Blavatsky and Besant, and patronized by trend-setters like Luhan. The feminine principle, as a Theosophist might say, had long been suppressed but was now re-emerging, and Pelton, for one, perfectly captures and distills it in works of devotion such as Messengers and Orbits. What makes these softly radiant visions unique is that they are actually chipped from diamond-hard philosopher’s stone. Her painterly sleight-of-hand transforms colored earth into sheer light and space. A gossamer 1931 work, Translation, is in every way the antipode of Jess’s alchemical Translations of the 1960s – those impossibly thick, yet precise paintings that seem imprinted by occult, perhaps demonic dimensions. But if Pelton’s beatific vision is not as literally thick as Jess’s, it is, in all its passionate naiveté, equally potent. The two artists might be halves of a whole, yin and yang, the good cop/bad cop of American visionaries.

The post Desert Rose: Agnes Pelton at the Whitney appeared first on artcritical.

Hilma af Klint: ‘Painting the Unseen’ at the Serpentine Gallery, London until May 15, 2016

A hundred years after they were made, the paintings of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) are dazzling viewers and perplexing historians. Convinced they were too far ahead of their time to be understood, af Klint stipulated that her work should be kept secret for twenty years after her death. As well as thousands of pages of notes and texts, 1,200 paintings – many of them enormous – hibernated for decades in an attic but have reappeared looking fresh and new, and perfectly at home in the 21st Century.

Predating the pioneers of abstraction by at least ten years, af Klint’s geometric structures and floating forms seem closely related to Kandinsky, Malevich, Miró, Mondrian, both Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Klee and others, none of whom knew of her. But the physical size and eclecticism of her work, and somehow its artlessness – the flat, chalky surface of the paint, the impersonal line drawing – make it appear more contemporaneous than theirs. A precursor also of Surrealism, af Klint brings in figures, diagrams, symbols and automatic writing. It is as if her paintings have leapfrogged Modernism and landed neatly in front of today’s receptive audience.

The difficulty for art historians and curators is where to position this hitherto unknown, who never exhibited, taught, or wrote manifestos, and therefore had no influence on her peers. Was she the inventor of the most important movement in modern art? Or was she an outsider artist whose work is out of the mainstream and therefore, in art history terms, too weird to take seriously and essentially irrelevant? But as a painter who loves looking at painting, the question is of little concern to me.

Af Klint was very much a child of her generation at a time when evidence of the unseen was popping up everywhere, with the discovery of x-rays, electromagnetic waves, and evolution; and in the fashion for conducting séances. Like Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, she was influenced by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical movement, and by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, where meeting points between spiritualism, symbolism and geometry led to new ways of thinking about painting. But according to her own records, it was direct dealings with the occult that impelled the five-foot-high Swedish spinster with piercing blue eyes to make the extraordinary body of work she has left us.

After a solid academic art education in Stockholm, af Klint set herself up as a painter of conventional landscapes, portraits and botanical watercolors. Increasingly, however, she was taken over by what was happening in the séances she ran with a group of women calling themselves The Five. Af Klint never exhibited the work that she said was made under the guidance of spirits. Describing her most important series, “The Paintings for the Temple” (193 abstract works made between 1906 and 1915), she wrote: “The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict: nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”

Af Klint died penniless at the age of 81, on a farm outside Stockholm, leaving her estate to a nephew Erik af Klint, whose son Johan has inherited it. It took them longer than the stipulated twenty years, but after the work was eventually shown for the first time in 1986, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, interest started developing in other parts of the world. Af Klint was shown at London’s Camden Art Center, the Pompidou in Paris, and at PS1 and the Drawing Center in New York, but significantly excluded from “Inventing Abstraction, 1910 – 1925” at MoMa in 2012 on the grounds of her isolation from the avant-garde. It was in 2013 that, appropriately, the Stockholm Moderna Museet mounted a blockbuster survey of af Klint entitled “Pioneer of Abstraction”, which reportedly had viewers weeping with emotion, and established her as an artist of international importance.

Af Klint’s influence is beginning to be seen and acknowledged by a new generation of artists, some interested in the underlying geometry of the work, others attracted by its spiritual, mystical and occult dimensions: both turning away, perhaps, from postmodernist irony and cynicism and finding in her something fresh and authentic. For the New York painter Suzan Frecon, seeing Hilma af Klint at PS1 in 1989 was a turning point. “It helped give me the guts to return (to geometric painting) and go further.” The Swedish artist Fredrik Soderberg, who uses geometric symbols with a magical purpose in mind, and the Polish painter and photographer Agnieszka Brzezanska, whose aim in her work is to “draw back the veils on unseen worlds”.

But, as yet unencumbered by knowledge of the back-story, when I walked into the Serpentine exhibition, I was free simply to feel the impact and enjoy the grave beauty of the three monumental works in the first gallery. How much can you tell about a painting just by looking? They did seem strange, as well as strangely familiar, these imposing abstract compositions, glowing with pastel colors and offset by black. Before reading the titles – Altarpiece 1, 2 and 3 –something ritualistic and liturgical could be intuited. Each has a complex and detailed geometrical structure, with ever-finer details to be discovered, but the complexities fit together so elegantly that the result seems simple.

I was with fellow painter Ansel Krut who said admiringly, when we first arrived, “If a spirit told me to do this, I’d do it.”

Further paintings contain bulbous flower and butterfly shapes in oranges and pinks; strange words in curly writing and decorative curlicues that might be snails; Leonardo-style humans within diagrams; swans and dogs, discs, chains of what we might now think of as DNA, and the word “evolution”. A study of af Klint’s many volumes of tightly written notes may – or may not – explain everything, but the task would be formidable.

As we made our way through the exhibition, our amazement continued but the enthusiasm began to wane. Something pedantic in the work was irritating, we agreed, and something silly about the orange balloons; there was a certain kind of hollowness, a feeling that something was missing.

At a large retrospective, you expect to get a sense of an artist, through seeing what she is grappling with and how she develops over time. Here, nothing is grappled with, the work is serenely presented. Indeed, the artist declares herself absent. So many artists report the feeling that something else takes over when they are at work. For af Klint, it was a specific personage from “the other side” called Amaliel who told her what to do. But looking at a large collection of her work, I felt the same sense of absence as with de Kooning’s late paintings, when he was suffering from dementia. For me, that missing human or rational element turns out to be exactly what I hope to find in a painting.

The post “If a spirit told me to do this, I’d do it”: Painters Respond to Hilma af Klint appeared first on artcritical.

Understanding the origins of artistic genres is tricky. When is the first pure European landscape painting? To answer that question, we might need to exclude the landscapes appearing behind narrative pictures presenting New Testament stories. When is the first still life? To resolve that debate it may be necessary to look beyond Renaissance storytelling scenes in which still life objects are present in the foreground. The creation of a novel artistic form does not merely depend on the development of artistic skill. Piero della Francesca painted landscapes within his narratives — and Raphael showed still life objects within his. But they didn’t make landscape or still life paintings. What matters is when artists created autonomous art form.

Identifying the first abstract painting is also tricky. A great deal of pre-Modern decoration now looks abstract. But if abstraction in painting is identified by the rejection of figuration as artistic goal, then such designs are not really abstractions, even if they look like abstract paintings. An abstract work of art, it would seem has to be made intentionally. Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a Swedish artist who, starting in 1906 and inspired by the theosophical writings of Rudolf Steiner, made many large non-figurative images. She also produced conventional landscapes and portraits, exhibiting as a professional artist. Her will stipulated that her abstract works should not be seen in public for at least 20 years after her death, because she felt that the world was not ready for her spiritual message. Her abstractions were displayed in the group exhibition “On The Spiritual in Art” in 1986 in Los Angeles, and, more recently, in 2005 in the exhibition of three women at the Drawing Center in New York. They were shown in a recent large-scale solo exhibition, “Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction,” which toured in Sweden, Germany and Denmark. This book complements that show, documenting an eponymous symposium. The images are fascinating: biomorphic forms or geometric diagrams connected by curving lines and accompanied by words float on pale-colored backgrounds. Whereas it’s easy to see that Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian’s more-familiar early abstractions are derived from landscapes, it’s not obvious how to interpret these pictures. Steiner is a not a theorist usually read by present day art critics, but his writings, and those of other theosophical figures, were a major influence on early Modernism.

The 19 essays in this book, all clear and all interesting, cover some topics: the early abstractions of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian; J. W. Goethe’s color theory; and the story of Rudolf Steiner’s visual ideas, which are only tangentially related to the theme at hand. And while there are 42 good color plates showing her art (along with many black and white plates, some duplicating those presented in color), we’re not given dimensions of these works, nor information about their location. The real trouble, however, is that the personality of af Klint doesn’t come into focus. Some commentators treat his images as works of art — others disagree. While I can understand the desire of the publisher to present diverse points of view, this presentation, with frequent repetitions of basic information, is simply confusing. It’s not clear how she wanted her images to be understood. Some of the writers call them works of art, while others disagree. She wrote extensively, but most of her notebooks have not yet been studied. Neither are we given a full account of the Swedish art world of her time. And so it is still hard to evaluate these images on her terms. These images have some claim to be the first abstractions, pioneering works by a previously marginalized woman artist. But if they are really diagrams — large, colored versions of the pictures found in spiritualist books — then maybe they are not meant to works of art at all. If in fact the surviving documentation is unlikely to answer these questions, then why not say so in as many words?

Ultimately, of course, these complaints are beside the point: now that her works are well known, we may reasonably hope that they will attract more scholarly attention, as they deserve. In the catalogue for the 2013 Venice Biennale, in which af Klint’s art was presented, Massimiliano Gioni, who was the exhibition’s director, offers an interesting perspective. His show, he writes,

Blurs the line between professional artists and amateurs, insiders and outsiders, reuniting artworks with other forms of figurative expression—both to release art from the prison of its supposed autonomy, and to remind us of its capacity to express a vision of the world.[1]

Perhaps, then, to understand af Klint we need to avoid a rigid distinction between spiritualist diagrams and abstract painting. After all, Renaissance altarpieces, which originally served sacred functions, nowadays are treated as works of art and so placed in museums.

[1] Gioni, Massimiliano. “Is Everything in My Mind?” Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), vol. 1, 23.

Almqvist, Kurt and Louise Belfrage, eds. Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible. (Stockholm, SE: Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation, 2015). ISBN-13: 978-0989890212, 348 pages, $46.50

The post Hilma af Klint and the Spiritual in an Artist appeared first on artcritical.