Skip to content

CART

Your cart is empty

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist

Sale price$50.00 Member Price
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist will be the first survey of this under recognized American painter in over 22 years. Her distinctive paintings could be described as metaphysical landscapes rooted in the California desert near Cathedral City. Pelton chiefly drew on her own inspirations, superstitions, and beliefs to exemplify emotional states.

The publication seeks to clarify the artist’s significance and role within the cannon of American Modernism but also against the legacy of European abstraction. It contextualizes her work against her contemporaries, Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe, and their distinct versions of American spiritual modernism. Pelton’s highly symbolic paintings were inspired by religious sources ranging from Theosophy and Agni Yoga to the spiritual teachings of Dane Rudhyar and Will Levington Comfort. Over three decades she devoted herself to painting spiritual abstractions, which conveyed her “light message to the world.”

Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is organized by the Phoenix Art Museum in Phoenix, AZ and will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Spring 2020. Agnes Pelton is a Whitney Collection artist with 2 pieces in the Collection.
Front cover of the Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist exhibition catalogue
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist Sale price$50.00 Member Price