Agnes Pelton’s Streams of Thought

A “Mystical” Studio

The artist Agnes Pelton, when she is known at all, is known as a “desert transcendentalist.”¹ After earlier visits to Taos, New Mexico, and Pasadena, California, she moved to Cathedral City, just outside of Palm Springs, in 1932. The physical features and esoteric energies of the southwestern landscape perfectly suited her spiritual beliefs, which included Theosophy and its offshoot, Agni Yoga.² In the desert, she ultimately found the “abstract beauty of the inner vision, which would be kindled by the inspiration of these rare and solitary places.”³

Yet Pelton was born in Germany, raised in Brooklyn, and spent the early part of her career in New York, first in a downtown Manhattan studio, and then in a more unusual space on Long Island. Starting in 1921, she lived and worked in the Hayground Windmill, in Water Mill, which she considered “a mystical house.”⁴ It was here that she pushed her practice from the Symbolist-inflected figuration of what she christened her “Imaginative Paintings” of the 1910s—examples of which were included in the 1913 Armory Show—toward the elemental form of her work in the 1920s and beyond. “Finally, during the winter of 1926, in the quiet of my windmill studio, I began to work on some pure abstractions,” she wrote.⁵

Think Spray

Though Pelton executed The Fountains in 1926, she seems to have envisioned it, to a strikingly precise extent, considerably earlier.⁶ As she did for multiple paintings, she sketched its composition in a notebook, appending its different zones with a system of numbers and letters that correspond to her notes. Instead of purely formal indications—for example, the kinds of color notes that artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe commonly used—here Pelton created a more meditative map, assigning vivid descriptions to each area.

Beginning with the number “1,” Pelton designates the orb at the lower center of the painting as a “clear space,” and then points to the “light” of the larger yellow circle above (“2”). She then moves on to pay special attention to the myriad potential qualities of water, describing one area as an “opal mist” (“3”) and another as “spray falling” (“5”); indicating “a flat lake like surface” as “glassy” (“6”); and specifying “curved ripples toward edge” (“7”). The final numbered annotation—“9”—assigns the burbling jet at the very center of the painting the particularly evocative moniker “think spray.”⁷ This phrase recalls the title of one of Theosophy’s key texts, suggesting its influence on Pelton: Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbetter’s Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation (1905), which proposes that ideas, emotions, and experiences exist in concrete, visual ways.

The artist’s first New York solo exhibition, at the Montross Gallery in 1929, was titled Abstractions by Agnes Pelton, and The Fountains appeared on the catalogue’s cover. Inside, a text by Pelton declared her desire to seek, through these paintings, “a beauty not for the eye alone, but of a more comprehensive nature, carrying a more direct impact on our newly developing perception….”⁸ Nearly a century later, her work is still challenging our sense of perception, offering us her streams of thought in iridescent, transcendent form.