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Lot Essay
“The underappreciated but inimitable art of the American painter Agnes Pelton (1881-1961)…offers a reminder that the history of modernist abstraction and women’s contribution to it is still being written.” - Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 2020
As for many women artists of her era, Agnes Pelton’s daring paintings from the 1920s and 30s have only recently been widely recognized as pioneering work of 20th Century Modernism. Pelton first explored abstraction in 1925, and now, a century later, the artist is finally having her moment. The Whitney Museum of American Art and Phoenix Art Museum toured a revelatory retrospective Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist in 2020, in which the present work was notably included, and her work has recently been acquired by several major institutions across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among several others. Incarnation of 1929 epitomizes the imagination and individuality that define the poetic power of Pelton’s best work. Employing her unique spiritual symbology and surrealist juxtaposition, Pelton elevates the classic still-life subject of a rose onto a celestial stage, compelling the viewer alongside her into an ethereal realm.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1881 to American parents, Pelton moved as a child to Brooklyn, New York. She enrolled in the Pratt Institute from 1895-1900 and studied under the notable arts educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who eventually also taught Georgia O’Keeffe. She further studied at the British Academy of Arts in Rome in 1910. In 1913, she showed two of her early figurative “Imaginative Paintings” in the Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced Modern art to America. In 1919, she traveled to the burgeoning art colony of Taos, New Mexico, before settling in 1921 in the historical Hayground Windmill in Water Mill on Long Island, New York, where she would stay for the next 11 years. Here, as she explored concepts of astrology and theosophy, she dramatically shifted her artistic style in her earliest abstract paintings: The Ray Serene (1925, Collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick); Being (circa 1923-26, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine); Meadowlark’s Song, Winter (1926, Private Collection); and The Fountains (1926, Museum of Modern Art, New York).
“These pictures are like little windows, opening to…an inner realm, rather than an outer landscape…what might be called a symbolic vision...” - Agnes Pelton, 1929
Pelton created Incarnation during this initial important wave of experimentation. The work was painted while on her first visit from October 1928 to July 1929 to Southern California, where she would permanently move in 1932. Invited to stay with a friend who had moved to Los Angeles, Pelton soon found her own studio in South Pasadena nearby a community known as the “Glass Hive” that proved pivotal to the development of both her spirituality and her art. Elizabeth Armstrong explains, “The Theosophy society had set up a center there, and the charismatic writer Will Levington Comfort headed up a study group of artists, writers, and spiritual seekers, including his daughter Jane, who became a close friend to Pelton. In Pasadena, Pelton deepened her interest in Theosophical doctrines, Buddhism, Hinduism, meditation, and the fusion of ideas of spirituality and transcendence that she had been exploring since early adulthood” (Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 59).
Incarnation is a deeply personal work from this period, inspired by and painted for Jane Levington Comfort and remaining in Jane’s collection until the 1980s. As recorded in the artist’s notebook, the initial drawing was conceived on December 6, 1928 when she noted “J[ane] – Here – 10:30pm” alongside the painting’s original title “The Rose of Love – Incarnation” (Notebook/Sketchbook IV, circa 1917-29, Agnes Pelton Papers, Archives of American Art.) Pelton viewed flowers not only as symbols of love, but also as metaphors for the benevolence of nature and the passage of time, tying into the concept of incarnation referenced in her titling of the work.
“golden heart felt rather than seen” - Agnes Pelton in her notebook entry for Incarnation
With the floral subject of Incarnation, Pelton additionally places her work in context with another woman artist who became notorious for her flower paintings in the mid-1920s—Georgia O’Keeffe. Indeed, Pelton praised O’Keeffe for painting “enlarged flowers—this way the soul of a flower can possess the whole heart of one gazing at it.” (Michael Zakian, “Agnes Pelton and Georgia O’Keeffe: The Window and the Wall,” 2009, p. 69) Similarly, on her diary page for Incarnation, Pelton labels her own flower as a “golden heart felt rather than seen.” Yet, with this notation, she also underscores her more internalized approach to painting, as opposed to O’Keeffe who Pelton said “sees first outside.”
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“...this way the soul of a flower can possess the whole heart of one gazing at it...” - Agnes Pelton about Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings
Supporting Pelton’s assertion of her own more intellectual approach to the flower, Incarnation also draws comparisons with the work of the Surrealists. Susan L. Alberth notes parallels with the female Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo: “Like Pelton, their primary muse was nature, which they viewed as steeped in hidden forces and alive with mysterious energies one could align oneself with magically….abstraction entered their work in subtle ways, especially in the use of sacred geometry and esoteric symbols” (Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 182). Incarnation specifically anticipates similar rose motifs employed by René Magritte and Salvador Dalí in the 1940s and 50s, where they also placed the flower in the position of the sun within an otherworldly landscape. Indeed, Magritte wrote in 1951, “for about two months I have been looking for a solution to what I call ‘the problem of the rose,” discovering an inner truth present in the subject, a “kind of knowledge, which seems to be organic and doesn't rise to the level of consciousness…’” (as quoted in D. Sylvester, S. Whitfield, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, III: Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-1967, London, 1993, pp. 196-97).
The specific form of Pelton’s rose in Incarnation has been connected by Susan L. Alberth with “the symbol for the Rosicrucian Order, a movement experiencing a surge of popularity in the United States in the 1920s. The original drawing for this symbol was made by English physician Robert Fludd and printed in 1629 in Frankfurt; the Latin phrase above it translates as ‘the rose gives honey to the bees,’ with bees symbolizing the soul feeding on the nectar of spiritual knowledge” (Anges Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 183). With this connection, Incarnation is not only a gift of Pelton’s visualized love for her friend but also her appreciation for her new California community and their role in her spiritual enlightenment.
Furthering this symbolism of the artist’s friend as her guiding light, Pelton positions the rose in Incarnation acts as a blazing sun, radiating heat and light over sharp, icy blue forms that suggest a mountainous landscape. In her sketch for the painting, Pelton denotes “rays of divinity focused to project rose” above the “future material world.” Michael Zakian explains, “For Pelton the flower symbolized a life giving force that descends from above, providing warmth to the cold earth below. It is not simply a plant but a veritable sun. As with all her abstractions, this painting is about process, becoming and a vital, nurturing spirit that animates all of reality” (“Agnes Pelton and Georgia O’Keeffe: The Window and the Wall,” 2009, p. 69). With the flower as sun, the work relates to the cosmic imagery that propagated in much of Pelton’s work of these years, often featuring a bright light as a north star at the center of a symmetrical sky.
Works of art like those of Miss Pelton are very much like the flowering of an individual life. In practically all her works we witness the victory of light over darkness…” - Dane Rudhyar, 193
In Incarnation, two curtain-like forms bracket the abstracted landscape on each side and above, creating almost a stage set for the central composition. Pelton’s sense of theatricality puts a spotlight on the flower, much like Florine Stettheimer (who was a playwright and stage designer, as well as a painter) sets many of the floral arrangements in her paintings beneath a canopy. Pelton labels these border areas on her drawing as “eternity,” “mystery” and “celestial realm,” and described in the catalogue for her first showing of the work at Montross Gallery in 1929: “These pictures are like little windows, opening to the view of a region not yet much visited consciously or by intention—an inner realm, rather than an outer landscape…what might be called a symbolic vision.” (“Abstractions in Color,” Exhibition of Paintings: Abstractions by Agnes Pelton, New York, 1929, n.p.) It is distinctive that Pelton chooses to ground her otherworldly abstracted landscape with a tangible connection for viewers to follow from the world’s stage; as Zakian explains, “Mainstream modernism sought to negate the picture plane as an illusionistic opening, but Pelton wanted to retain this quality. Looking into other worlds was the ultimate power of the imagination…” (Michael Zakian, Poet of Nature, p. 53).
This philosophical underpinning of Pelton’s abstractions parallels the work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, whose mystical large-scale paintings are considered some of the first abstractions in Western art history. Michael Duncan explains, “Like the paintings of Hilma af Klint, Pelton’s work imbues form with metaphysical meaning—but Pelton’s ties to nature offer a transcendental experience beyond metaphysical theories, one based on the activated experience of earth, sky, light” (“Agnes Pelton: 1881-1961,” Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021, p. 72). Both painters drew from the esoteric teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who lectured on the connection between spirituality and visual arts in the late nineteenth century, and Alberth specifically compares af Klint’s 1907 painting No. 2, Childhood, Group IV, which “utilizes blue, orange, and pink tones with floral imagery in a spirit similar to Pelton's Incarnation” (Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 185).
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“Like the paintings of Hilma af Klint, Pelton's work imbues form with metaphysical meaning.” - Michael Duncan
In the 1930s, Pelton joined a likeminded group of artists interested in theosophical spirituality in The Transcendental Painting Group (TPG). Founded by Raymond Jonson in 1938 in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, the group aimed to produce art which furthered spirituality and enlightenment and was recently celebrated with the 2022-23 exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Beyond renewed curatorial interest in Pelton’s work, her approach to abstraction also resonates with artists of following generations, including Agnes Martin and Loie Hollowell. A foremother of 20th Century abstraction, Agnes Pelton employed an extraordinary combination of the spiritual and the surreal in her most accomplished compositions, as exemplified by Incarnation.
As for many women artists of her era, Agnes Pelton’s daring paintings from the 1920s and 30s have only recently been widely recognized as pioneering work of 20th Century Modernism. Pelton first explored abstraction in 1925, and now, a century later, the artist is finally having her moment. The Whitney Museum of American Art and Phoenix Art Museum toured a revelatory retrospective Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist in 2020, in which the present work was notably included, and her work has recently been acquired by several major institutions across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among several others. Incarnation of 1929 epitomizes the imagination and individuality that define the poetic power of Pelton’s best work. Employing her unique spiritual symbology and surrealist juxtaposition, Pelton elevates the classic still-life subject of a rose onto a celestial stage, compelling the viewer alongside her into an ethereal realm.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1881 to American parents, Pelton moved as a child to Brooklyn, New York. She enrolled in the Pratt Institute from 1895-1900 and studied under the notable arts educator Arthur Wesley Dow, who eventually also taught Georgia O’Keeffe. She further studied at the British Academy of Arts in Rome in 1910. In 1913, she showed two of her early figurative “Imaginative Paintings” in the Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced Modern art to America. In 1919, she traveled to the burgeoning art colony of Taos, New Mexico, before settling in 1921 in the historical Hayground Windmill in Water Mill on Long Island, New York, where she would stay for the next 11 years. Here, as she explored concepts of astrology and theosophy, she dramatically shifted her artistic style in her earliest abstract paintings: The Ray Serene (1925, Collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick); Being (circa 1923-26, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine); Meadowlark’s Song, Winter (1926, Private Collection); and The Fountains (1926, Museum of Modern Art, New York).
“These pictures are like little windows, opening to…an inner realm, rather than an outer landscape…what might be called a symbolic vision...” - Agnes Pelton, 1929
Pelton created Incarnation during this initial important wave of experimentation. The work was painted while on her first visit from October 1928 to July 1929 to Southern California, where she would permanently move in 1932. Invited to stay with a friend who had moved to Los Angeles, Pelton soon found her own studio in South Pasadena nearby a community known as the “Glass Hive” that proved pivotal to the development of both her spirituality and her art. Elizabeth Armstrong explains, “The Theosophy society had set up a center there, and the charismatic writer Will Levington Comfort headed up a study group of artists, writers, and spiritual seekers, including his daughter Jane, who became a close friend to Pelton. In Pasadena, Pelton deepened her interest in Theosophical doctrines, Buddhism, Hinduism, meditation, and the fusion of ideas of spirituality and transcendence that she had been exploring since early adulthood” (Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 59).
Incarnation is a deeply personal work from this period, inspired by and painted for Jane Levington Comfort and remaining in Jane’s collection until the 1980s. As recorded in the artist’s notebook, the initial drawing was conceived on December 6, 1928 when she noted “J[ane] – Here – 10:30pm” alongside the painting’s original title “The Rose of Love – Incarnation” (Notebook/Sketchbook IV, circa 1917-29, Agnes Pelton Papers, Archives of American Art.) Pelton viewed flowers not only as symbols of love, but also as metaphors for the benevolence of nature and the passage of time, tying into the concept of incarnation referenced in her titling of the work.
“golden heart felt rather than seen” - Agnes Pelton in her notebook entry for Incarnation
With the floral subject of Incarnation, Pelton additionally places her work in context with another woman artist who became notorious for her flower paintings in the mid-1920s—Georgia O’Keeffe. Indeed, Pelton praised O’Keeffe for painting “enlarged flowers—this way the soul of a flower can possess the whole heart of one gazing at it.” (Michael Zakian, “Agnes Pelton and Georgia O’Keeffe: The Window and the Wall,” 2009, p. 69) Similarly, on her diary page for Incarnation, Pelton labels her own flower as a “golden heart felt rather than seen.” Yet, with this notation, she also underscores her more internalized approach to painting, as opposed to O’Keeffe who Pelton said “sees first outside.”
SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT
“...this way the soul of a flower can possess the whole heart of one gazing at it...” - Agnes Pelton about Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings
Supporting Pelton’s assertion of her own more intellectual approach to the flower, Incarnation also draws comparisons with the work of the Surrealists. Susan L. Alberth notes parallels with the female Surrealists Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo: “Like Pelton, their primary muse was nature, which they viewed as steeped in hidden forces and alive with mysterious energies one could align oneself with magically….abstraction entered their work in subtle ways, especially in the use of sacred geometry and esoteric symbols” (Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 182). Incarnation specifically anticipates similar rose motifs employed by René Magritte and Salvador Dalí in the 1940s and 50s, where they also placed the flower in the position of the sun within an otherworldly landscape. Indeed, Magritte wrote in 1951, “for about two months I have been looking for a solution to what I call ‘the problem of the rose,” discovering an inner truth present in the subject, a “kind of knowledge, which seems to be organic and doesn't rise to the level of consciousness…’” (as quoted in D. Sylvester, S. Whitfield, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, III: Oil Paintings, Objects and Bronzes, 1949-1967, London, 1993, pp. 196-97).
The specific form of Pelton’s rose in Incarnation has been connected by Susan L. Alberth with “the symbol for the Rosicrucian Order, a movement experiencing a surge of popularity in the United States in the 1920s. The original drawing for this symbol was made by English physician Robert Fludd and printed in 1629 in Frankfurt; the Latin phrase above it translates as ‘the rose gives honey to the bees,’ with bees symbolizing the soul feeding on the nectar of spiritual knowledge” (Anges Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 183). With this connection, Incarnation is not only a gift of Pelton’s visualized love for her friend but also her appreciation for her new California community and their role in her spiritual enlightenment.
Furthering this symbolism of the artist’s friend as her guiding light, Pelton positions the rose in Incarnation acts as a blazing sun, radiating heat and light over sharp, icy blue forms that suggest a mountainous landscape. In her sketch for the painting, Pelton denotes “rays of divinity focused to project rose” above the “future material world.” Michael Zakian explains, “For Pelton the flower symbolized a life giving force that descends from above, providing warmth to the cold earth below. It is not simply a plant but a veritable sun. As with all her abstractions, this painting is about process, becoming and a vital, nurturing spirit that animates all of reality” (“Agnes Pelton and Georgia O’Keeffe: The Window and the Wall,” 2009, p. 69). With the flower as sun, the work relates to the cosmic imagery that propagated in much of Pelton’s work of these years, often featuring a bright light as a north star at the center of a symmetrical sky.
Works of art like those of Miss Pelton are very much like the flowering of an individual life. In practically all her works we witness the victory of light over darkness…” - Dane Rudhyar, 193
In Incarnation, two curtain-like forms bracket the abstracted landscape on each side and above, creating almost a stage set for the central composition. Pelton’s sense of theatricality puts a spotlight on the flower, much like Florine Stettheimer (who was a playwright and stage designer, as well as a painter) sets many of the floral arrangements in her paintings beneath a canopy. Pelton labels these border areas on her drawing as “eternity,” “mystery” and “celestial realm,” and described in the catalogue for her first showing of the work at Montross Gallery in 1929: “These pictures are like little windows, opening to the view of a region not yet much visited consciously or by intention—an inner realm, rather than an outer landscape…what might be called a symbolic vision.” (“Abstractions in Color,” Exhibition of Paintings: Abstractions by Agnes Pelton, New York, 1929, n.p.) It is distinctive that Pelton chooses to ground her otherworldly abstracted landscape with a tangible connection for viewers to follow from the world’s stage; as Zakian explains, “Mainstream modernism sought to negate the picture plane as an illusionistic opening, but Pelton wanted to retain this quality. Looking into other worlds was the ultimate power of the imagination…” (Michael Zakian, Poet of Nature, p. 53).
This philosophical underpinning of Pelton’s abstractions parallels the work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint, whose mystical large-scale paintings are considered some of the first abstractions in Western art history. Michael Duncan explains, “Like the paintings of Hilma af Klint, Pelton’s work imbues form with metaphysical meaning—but Pelton’s ties to nature offer a transcendental experience beyond metaphysical theories, one based on the activated experience of earth, sky, light” (“Agnes Pelton: 1881-1961,” Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021, p. 72). Both painters drew from the esoteric teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who lectured on the connection between spirituality and visual arts in the late nineteenth century, and Alberth specifically compares af Klint’s 1907 painting No. 2, Childhood, Group IV, which “utilizes blue, orange, and pink tones with floral imagery in a spirit similar to Pelton's Incarnation” (Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, p. 185).
SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT
“Like the paintings of Hilma af Klint, Pelton's work imbues form with metaphysical meaning.” - Michael Duncan
In the 1930s, Pelton joined a likeminded group of artists interested in theosophical spirituality in The Transcendental Painting Group (TPG). Founded by Raymond Jonson in 1938 in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, the group aimed to produce art which furthered spirituality and enlightenment and was recently celebrated with the 2022-23 exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. Beyond renewed curatorial interest in Pelton’s work, her approach to abstraction also resonates with artists of following generations, including Agnes Martin and Loie Hollowell. A foremother of 20th Century abstraction, Agnes Pelton employed an extraordinary combination of the spiritual and the surreal in her most accomplished compositions, as exemplified by Incarnation.