Lost (and Found) Artist Series: Agnes Pelton

Artland’s Lost (and Found) Artist Series features artists who were originally omitted from the mainstream art canon or largely invisible for most of their careers.
This week, we take a look at Agnes Pelton, the modernist painter who depicted her experience of the spiritual reality she was exploring all her life. Following the recent rediscovery of her contemporary, abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton now joins Modernism’s pantheon.     

Who was Agnes Pelton?

Born in 1881 in Germany to American parents, Agnes Pelton and her family moved back to the United States when she was a child. They lived in Brooklyn, New York, in the family home belonging to Pelton’s grandmother, suffragist Elizabeth Tilton. When her father died of a morphine overdose in 1891, Pelton remained living with her mother and grandmother, while being haunted by the family’s troubled and scandalous past. Elizabeth Tilton had been at the centre of one of the biggest sex-scandals at the time – she had an affair with the well-known pastor and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, who naturally preached celibacy and morality in his sermons. When the affair was made public Tilton’s husband sued for “alienation of affection” but lost in court, doubling his humiliation and estranging him from New York society and the church. This event would cast a shadow over Pelton’s life. In her words, “it cramped our whole life and it also cramped mine.”   

Growing up inclined to bouts of melancholy, the young Pelton found comfort in art and spirituality. She attended the Pratt Institute and studied there under Arthur Wesley Dow, who also taught Georgia O’Keeffe. Dow believed in art being an expression of the artist’s experience as opposed to being illustrative and passed this idea on to his students. Pelton painted portraits for money, but her real passion lay in painting Symbolist-inspired canvases. In her early works, the “Imaginative Paintings” of the 1910s, she painted topics common in Symbolism such as the solitary female figure communing with nature. Later in life, Pelton would discard these works as insincere. In this period of the 1910s, it seemed she was on her way towards a successful art career: her art was showcased in the sensational Armory Show in 1913 – famous for debuting Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase – and she was also part of a Symbolist group supported by the Knoedler Gallery. However, she would make a radical change in 1922.

Moving to Long Island, the Mystical Turn

Pelton’s mother died in 1921, and in 1922, she decided to move into an abandoned windmill on Long Island. In doing so, she retreated deep into herself, was very isolated, and cut ties to the art world. During this period, she developed an interest in Theosophy, the religion developed by Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky which claimed that the purpose of human life is spiritual emancipation. Pelton was also greatly drawn to the philosophy known as Agni Yoga, branching off from Theosophy and based on the idea that fire symbolised life force and the spiritual journey to harmonious divinity.
Influenced by all these ideas about accessing an abstract “Divine Reality” which lay at the root of all perception, Pelton started experimenting with abstraction to depict spiritual vibrations.

By 1925, she had established her artistic vocabulary incorporating symbols that were part of the mystical literature she read, such as stars and mountains. Her work, then, became a combination of abstract forms and recognisable symbols. She was very serious about this work in abstraction, but it was also difficult for her – at times, she could only paint one day a week, when inspiration came. Meanwhile, she made ends meet by painting realistic portraits and landscape paintings to sell to tourists.