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Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
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Sheley, Nancy Strow. "Bringing Light to Life: The Art of Agnes Pelton (1881-1961)," University of Kansas, December 2000.
This study places the life and works of American painter Agnes Pelton within a cultural and historical framework, emphasizing her ceaseless efforts to support herself solely with art. Despite the forces-internal and external-which impeded her success, Pelton produced a quality oeuvre in multiple styles. Focusing on imaginative paintings, portraiture, floral designs, abstractions, and desert landscapes, this work examines Pelton’s representations of gender, sexuality, place, class, ethnicity, and religion, as well as delineates the issues which affected the inception, creation, and reception of her art. For example, Pelton refigured the nineteenth-century metaphor, women is a flower, into the floral symbol as eros, an internal creative force. Pelton exhibited in the Amory show in 1913, was a student of Arthur Dow and Hamilton Easter Field, a contemporary of Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, and active in New York City’s avant-garde arts community in the 1910s. She belonged to the transcendental Painting Group of New Mexico, was a friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan, knew Mary Austin, and participated in Will Comfort’s Glass Hive in Pasedena. Pelton was one of the earliest abstractionists in California, creating Lotus for Lida there in 1929. She also devised a visual representation of movement, a trajectus sursum, in her spiritually focused abstractions, and she constructed an iconography which appealed to a limited audience “enlightened” by Theosophy and Agni Yoga. Because Pelton promoted her work without a long-term patron or support group, her diminished acclaim resulted, in part, from limited exposure in major galleries after 1932, her dedication to spiritual themes, and her decision to dislocate from the mainstream, city art world. Through all, Pelton’s life can be read as a series of displacements, initiated, for the most part, by her own willful choices. At fifty, Pelton moved to the California desert and spent her last years painting realistic landscapes to sell to tourists and luminous, spiritual abstractions to meet her “life’s goal.” Not only does this dissertation bring Pelton’s life to light, it also illumines the spiritualized light she projected through her art. Moreover, it provides a glimpse of that elusive spotlight of fame and exposes the difficulties a highly competent, single woman artist faced in the first half of the twentieth century, as she struggled to bring her “especial light messages to the world.”
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