Agnes Pelton Georgia O'keeffe
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Agnes Pelton Ecstasy, 1928 Oil on canvas Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collection, Des Moines Art Center’s Louise Noun Collection of Art by Women through bequest Georgia O’Keeffe Yellow Cactus, 1929 Oil on canvas Dallas Museum of Art, the Patsy Lacy Griffith Collection, Bequest of Patsy Lacy Griffith In O’Keeffe’s Yellow Cactus, a bright desert bloom bursts toward the picture plane, encompassing the entire frame. Typical of Georgia’s O’Keeffe’s flowers from this period this close-range image reflects the influence of modern photography on her paintings. In the winter of 1926 Agnes Pelton painted her first abstractions, including Ecstasy, which shows a yellow lily bursting open into an array of angular forms. A diffuse light emanates from within, permeating the background. Pelton’s flower evokes an atmospheric interiority, while O’Keeffe’s is more concrete and externalized. Although both artists understood the Victorian associations between flowers and female sexuality and reproduction, they rejected erotic readings and instead embraced associations with beauty, growth, and creative potential. Georgia O’Keeffe Soft Grey Alcalde Hill, 1929/30 Oil on canvas Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972 Purple Hills, 1935 Oil on canvas San Diego Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Norton S. Walbridge Part of the Cliffs, 1937 Oil on canvas Private collection; courtesy Irene Drori, Inc., Los Angeles Agnes Pelton San Gorgonio in Spring, 1932 Oil on canvas The Buck Collection, Laguna Beach, California In 1929 Georgia O’Keeffe first traveled to New Mexico with artist Rebecca Strand and began to spend her summers there annually. Her landscapes of hills and canyons have palettes ranging from the pale hues of Soft Grey Alcalde Hill to the stronger rust and violet tones of Purple Hills and warm earth tones of Part of the Cliffs. While these landscapes of the 1930s initially appear realistic, they are more abstract when compared with Agnes Pelton’s painting San Gorgonio in Spring, an example of the desert landscapes she sold commercially. Although Pelton preferred to paint visionary, luminous abstractions, it was imperative for her to sell paintings to tourists, while O’Keeffe was able to pursue her work without economic pressure. Georgia O’Keeffe Waterfall, No. III, Iao Valley, 1939 Oil on canvas Honolulu Academy of Arts, Gift of Susan Crawford Tracy, 1996 Waterfall, End of Road, Iao Valley, 1939 Oil on canvas Honolulu Academy of Arts, Purchase, Allerton, Prisanlee and General Acquisition Funds, Gift of Honolulu Advertiser, 1989 Agnes Pelton Hawaii Green Mountain Landscape, 1923-24 Pastel on paper Collection of LeighAnne Stainer, Fremont, California Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to the Hawaiian Islands in 1939, where she painted tropical landscapes such as Waterfall, End of Road, Iao Valley, showing a verdant mountain peak, and Waterfall, No. III, Iao Valley, that presents a cloud-filled, V-shaped canyon with equally dramatic contrasts of light and dark. These paintings are seen in comparison to Agnes Pelton’s Hawaii Green Mountain Landscape, a pastel drawing of a lush island hillside that she made when she traveled to the Islands in 1923-24. Additionally, while in Hawaii Pelton also made Tall Ginger, a flower that evidences a close-range focus and abstraction that parallels O’Keeffe’s contemporaneous floral paintings and plant studies such as Leaf Motif, No. 1 and Leaf Motif, No. 2, all located to the right. Both artists render these subjects in a highly schematized manner, using faceted patterns of overlapping elements, yet their images retain a semblance of recognizable forms. Agnes Pelton Sea Change, 1931 Oil on canvas Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Emily Fisher Landau in honor of Tom Armstrong Georgia O’Keeffe From the River Light Blue (On the River), 1964 Oil on canvas New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, Gift of the Estate of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1987 As part of her interest in universal connections, Agnes Pelton often chose to represent the four elements—air, earth, fire, and water in her paintings. In Sea Change one sees an ambiguous biomorphic form inhabiting a mysterious underwater world. O’Keeffe also had an interest in representing water, beginning with her early Lake George landscapes and culminating with her later works that depict the Chama River near her house in Abiquiu. Her painting From the River Light Blue (On the River) is a vertical view of fluvial forms as seen from above. Both Pelton and O’Keeffe make brighty-hued, aqueous works that hover between abstraction and representation. Agnes Pelton Light Center, 1960-61 Oil on canvas Euphrat Museum of Art, De Anza College, Cupertino, California; Gift of Cornelia Sussman and Irving Sussman Georgia O’Keeffe From a Day With Juan I, 1976/77 Oil on canvas Collection of Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton O’Keeffe and Pelton continued to paint their respective desert environments into their final years. At the end of her life Pelton revisited her earlier interests in rays of light. In Light Center, one of her last paintings (possibly an unfinished canvas, as indicated by the artist’s own pencil marks), a glowing orb is suspended in a vertical ray of light, a visual evocation of the heavens. This compares closely with O’Keeffe’s own late painting, From a Day With Juan I, where a trapezoidal swath of light beams upward into the blue sky. Agnes Pelton The Toilet, 1911 Oil on canvas The Buck Collection, Laguna Beach, California Briany Beach, c. 1911 Oil on canvas The Buck Collection, Laguna Beach, California Labor, c. 1913-15 Oil on canvas The Buck Collection, Laguna Beach, California In 1910 Agnes Pelton spent a year in Italy studying classical paintings and life drawing with Pratt instructor Hamilton Easter Field. She then began her “Imaginative paintings,” the three works on view here that depict highly illuminated female figures inhabiting dark landscapes. As Pelton scholar Michael Zakian has noted, these works belong to the larger tradition of American symbolism that flourished from 1885 to 1917, as artists such as Albert Pinkham Ryder and Louis Eilshemius turned to the imagination to combat rationalism, and used classical forms to convey romantic and mystical ideas. Agnes Pelton The Fountains, 1926 Oil on canvas Collection of Georgia Riley de Havenon Two balanced forces Rising from a pool To play in harmony Like water – fountain music The golden disc of day irradiating Fires and lights their movement Opposite, yet side by side Felicity mounts upward To fall, and rise again And from this confluence Descends a sphere Lucent as the dawn Agnes Pelton Meadowlark’s Song, Winter, 1926 Oil on canvas Collection of Maurine St. Gaudens, Pasadena, California Sunlight of winter morning From wintery earth With crusts of snow Arises toward the clear bright light A song of aspiration Though close to earth Through cloudy barriers Pieces of the bright beyond This ecstasy of yearning. Agnes Pelton Ecstasy, 1928 Oil on canvas Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collection, Des Moines Art Center’s Louise Noun Collection of Art by Women through bequest A flower bursts open in rush of ecstasy to meet the Day Before, unknown Its petals bent So sudden its release Soft gray shapes that pressed Harassed the once blind bud. When from below there pushed (An) In ugly hook of darkness, The life force gathered And swift and free It opened, to the light. Agnes Pelton Illumination, 1930 Oil on canvas Collection of Ruth and Ben Hammett, Palo Alto, California From frozen wastes Through shrouding dark Rise peaks of aspiration A great star answering. Agnes Pelton Voyaging, 1931 Oil on canvas Jeri L. Waxenberg Collection High noon above the sea Looking upward, blue, empowering blue, Lines of power downward weaving From which there springs A chain of light. Links of the past, illuminated, Or of the days to come? Airy brightness of the moment Held, in time suspended. Till above The Deep The golden bell, Shall sound a consummation Or a change. Agnes Pelton Sand Storm, 1932 Oil on canvas Private collection; courtesy Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York Dense clouds that push and loom Too early, darkening the day. Above the streaming palms Bent low to earth Sharp points of blowing sand converge Are poised beneath the sky’s light blue In balanced conformation. Below this flowering, remote, serene Behold the movement luminous – A rainbow in the dust. Agnes Pelton Even Song, 1934 Oil on canvas Collection of LeighAnne Stainer, Fremont, California The evening stars glow softly down Above a flowing urn Days overflow that disappears Within the sunsets turn A tear, a pearl, a flower white A memory upon the night Within the urn the fires are banked Conserved and glowing While underground the deep streams flow Endlessly renewing. Agnes Pelton Orbits, 1934 Oil on canvas The Oakland Museum, Gift of Concours d’Antiques, Art Guild, Oakland Museum Association Sharp pointed summit of the earth And then above, amorphous, moving, A mountain of release Three stars arise in orbit And a fourth, poised on the summit Joins those floating higher – Seven stars in all, with orbits interwoven Rising interplay of each to each Their motion making song The highest balancing Achieves a sharp bright wheel of light Which cuts blue darkness, deep and soundless A funnel of eternity let down Through fading evening light. Florence Miller Pierce Untitled, 1942 Oil on canvas board Jonson Gallery, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, Gift of the artist Agnes Martin The Bluebird, 1954 Oil on canvas New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, Gift of the Estate of Georgia O’Keeffe, 1987 When Agnes Martin returned to New York in the early 1950s, her paintings of this period were primarily abstract, influenced by the younger generation of abstract expressionists with whom she shared a studio.