Agnes Pelton and the Radical Idea That You Don’t Have To Live an Enviable Life

Reading Mari Coates’s The Pelton Papers made me wonder whether we’ve been measuring our artistic lives with the wrong ruler—and whether a life that looks “unsuccessful” from the outside might actually be a beautiful one.

 

By Thea Fiore-Bloom, PhD

What if we artists are measuring our lives with the wrong ruler?

That’s the question I found myself asking while reading Mari Coates’s The Pelton Papers, a beautifully sculpted novel based on the life of American modernist painter Agnes Pelton.

I’m fascinated with Pelton for 3 reasons:

1. Pelton was a daring, sublime painter.
2. Yet her work is still relatively unknown.
3. Pelton did not live what convential society would deem a “successful” life. 

And yet, after I closed the back cover of Coate’s book on Pelton, I thought: what a wonderful way to spend a life.

Pelton devoted her life to following a call.

She followed color.

She followed mystery.

So who was this Agnes Pelton anyway?

So Who Was This Agnes Pelton?

Agnes Pelton was an American modernist painter whose work became increasingly abstract and spiritual over the course of her life. She was born in 1881 in Stuttgart, Germany, grew up in a single-parent household in modest circumstances in NYC, and eventually spent the later decades of her life making her most profound canvases in the desert town of Cathedral City, California.

Pelton is known as a Desert Transcendentalist, in part because she co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a collective of artists based in New Mexico.

Pelton’s paintings, like her oil painting “Winter” (1933; see above), can be difficult to describe in words because they depict the liminal (a sacred threshold state in anthropology and psychology).

Imagine luminous fields of color diving and resurfacing in space.

Glowing orbs, delicate geometric forms, veils of light, celestial shapes, and landscapes that seem to dissolve into shimmering stars and atmospheric horizons.

Cobalt blues, lush violets, glistening golds, glowing pinks, and oranges hover above, rather than sit on, the surface of her canvases.

Her paintings don’t invite you to look at external objects.

Pelton’s paintings invite us instead to look at the mystery of creation, of being, and the rare heady moments when we ourselves are connected to spirit.

 

Agnes Pelton and the 1913 Armory Show

One reason I find Pelton’s story so compelling is that she wasn’t a completely unknown artist.

She exhibited at the legendary 1913 Armory Show in New York, the exhibition that introduced much of America to European modernism.

Pelton was in that room.

She had been seen.

She had entered the conversation.

And yet, when I look at the work she made post-NYC, in the desert, I see something different.

Her later work became more luminous, more brilliant.

Some aperture on the top of her mental planetarium popped open for Pelton in the desert.

The degree of worldly inner and outer exploration evidenced in her later works is off the charts. 

Pelton needed to let go of NYC to access her true genius.

 

Agnes Pelton Shows Artists Retreat Can Be a Path to Victory

This is something I think about constantly as an artist and a writer.

Sometimes the environment in which we become visible is not the environment in which we become ourselves.

I hope undiscovered or “unsuccessful” artists and writers hear what I say next:

The artists we view as “successful”, accepted and lauded, may still be searching for a deeper connection that has evaded them.

The very thing an “unsuccessful” artist may already be in touch with.

You can be “successful” and exhibited and still not have found your deepest voice.

You can have people telling you that you’re good and still know somewhere down in your bones that you haven’t gotten to the thing yet.

Pelton eventually went west to chase and eventually embraced that very thing.

She went to the desert—to somewhere quieter, stranger, and more spacious.

And there, her work opened. 

I believe she didn’t leave New York because she wasn’t a mega success there.

I think she bravely left behind a certain idea of who NY said she was supposed to be.

And perhaps that is what allowed her to become who she actually was.

A sublime painter. Or you could say a painter of the sublime.

Her brilliant, later life work was never recognized by New York dealers.

Pelton didn’t seem to care.

She missed her best work when it was off her wall, being shopped around the big cities.

Perhaps part of her was glad the pieces most important to her didn’t sell, so she could be reunited with them.

Can you relate? I can.

The Pelton Papers is an amazing book because it shines a loving light not just on what Pelton did, but what Pelton didn’t do. 

 

Agnes Pelton Is My Hero Because of What She Didn’t Do 

• For example, Agnes Pelton never had children.
• She never got married.
• And actually, Pelton may never even have had a physically consummated sexual relationship -with anyone -her entire life.

And yet Coates respectfully depicts Pelton as living a life bursting with purpose.

Coates understood that for many successful women artists, not having children gives them advantages that art history rarely acknowledges: the advantages of time, solitude, mobility, and an enormous amount of psychic and creative freedom.

I cheer Coates as an author because so many biographies or biographical novels of famous women artists frame childlessness as evidence of an incomplete life rather than considering what that freedom made possible.

Coates took 20 patient years to research and write a book that respects Pelton and sees her as heroic for living a life lit by a sacred pas de deux with her own art.

The author’s respect for the artist’s personal story, along with the artist’s spiritual focus, sat well with me and may garner your respect as well.

So let’s look at that spiritual focus now.

 

Agnes Pelton and the Spiritual Life of Art

In the desert, Pelton decided to pursue an inward focus: a focus which led her to improving how she could express the spirit in nature and the nature of spirit on canvas.

Whereas I find I struggle and get mired for too long in an outward focus, a focus in which I compare myself to everyone else there.

This is why I can’t be on social media.

If I were on Instagram today, I would be looking at everyone’s social proof of their beauty, thinness, and success, and I would do no creative work.

I would suddenly remember, Oh God, I was going to be thin, and be thin in every country in the world before I died.

Why haven’t I seen every country in the world and been thin in each one?

Why are my clavicles not jutting out in Prague as we speak?

Or I flip the other way and let go of the physical but focus on the mental achievements to torture myself.

Oh yeah, why haven’t I authored a New York Times bestseller yet?

Or why didn’t I become a senator?

Or a big-wig translator at the UN?

I can get this without social media. Imagine?

But then, thank god,  I snap out of it when I focus on the biography of someone like Agnes Pelton.

Who most likely never even had one consummated romantic relationship, never mind the BranGalina love match of all time. 

Yet Pelton lived a beautiful, purposeful, meaning-rich life anyway.

That sobers me;  I stop my levitating madness and float back down to the sweet brown earth.

The Love Affair Instagram Can Never Photograph

If you’re a heart-centered artist, you already have a heady love affair that Instagram can never photograph.

You have a love affair with mystery.

With color.

With shape.

With nature.

With ideas.

With beauty.

With spirit.

With that little voice that suddenly says:

Look at this.

Look at that stag beetle.

Look at this hand of Buddha lemon tree.

Look at the way that cobalt is sitting next to that emerald green.

Look at this strange thought I’ve had all my life.

Look at this thing nobody else seems to notice.

How am I going to express that on the page or on a canvas?

That is a life.

A real life.

And perhaps it is a much richer life than the one we’re constantly being encouraged to display.

Coate’s book had me asking myself, what is success anyway?

 

What Is Success for an Artist or Writer Anyway?

I don’t want to tell you to forget about success.

That’s too easy.

Recognition can be wonderful.

Money can be wonderful.

Exhibitions can be wonderful.

Kids and family and clavicles in Prague can be wonderful.

But if you’re an artist, none of those things can tell you whether you’ve found your genius.

Only the work can begin to tell you that.

Only that feeling when something you’ve made suddenly feels more alive than you knew you were capable of making.

And sometimes finding that thing requires us to walk away from the place, the people, the ambitions—or even the version of ourselves—that everyone else thought was working perfectly well.

Pelton had already been recognized.

And she still had to go find more of her painter-self.

 

 

What if a life that looks “unsuccessful” from the outside is actually an extraordinary life?

Pelton may have never had a single love affair or intimate encounter in her life.

She never sold many of her best paintings.

So what? Who is counting? 

Besides social media or Wikipedia?

There is so much I haven’t done either.

How about you?

Maybe you left a career.

Maybe you didn’t make as much money as you could have.

Maybe you disappointed somebody.

Maybe you didn’t become what everyone thought you would become.

Maybe you chose art.

Maybe you chose solitude.

Maybe you chose a strange life.

Maybe you chose the thing you couldn’t explain.

Because perhaps the thing you did or didn’t do that you think makes you look unsuccessful is actually the evidence that you were listening to some important part of yourself that others don’t hear.

Which reminds me of the wisdom we can encounter when we stay in the physical landscape of the desert, so before I end, let’s talk about the desert for a minute.

 

The Desert, Agnes Pelton, and Finding Your Own Mystery

I love the desert in Pelton’s story.

Before I ever heard of Pelton, I used to stay for long periods of time in Desert Hot Springs, which is only a few miles from Cathedral City.

The desert there strips things down.

There is space.

Light.

Silence.

Heat.

Distance.

And suddenly you can see.

Perhaps something similar happens when we strip away all the social and ego armor.

When we stop asking:

Am I impressive enough?

Am I beautiful enough?

Am I successful enough?

Am I loved enough?

Am I doing enough?

And instead ask:

What do I actually see?

What do I love?

What wants to be made through me?

What is real to me?

That’s the ticket.

And that is why Agnes Pelton feels so alive to me.

Her life reminds us that a meaningful life doesn’t necessarily look spectacular from the outside.

It can look quiet.

It can look eccentric.

It can look lonely.

It can look like you’ve wandered off into the desert.

And then you make the greatest, most luminous, meaningful work of your life.

 

Agnes Pelton Teaches Us We Don’t Have to Live an Enviable Life

Agnes Pelton’s life says something beautiful to me:

You don’t have to live an enviable life.

You have to live a life that is yours.

And if that life leads you toward art, toward nature, toward spirit, toward mystery, toward the miracle of the senses—perhaps you are not failing at life at all.

Perhaps you’ve found it.

So go stand in front of a Pelton.

And then go back to your studio.

Look closely.

Listen for what only you can see.

And remember to:

Keep painting your own mystery.

Had you heard of Pelton before this post?

Tell me in the comments below.

Further Resources 

If Agnes Pelton intrigues you, read The Pelton Papers, find out more about The Pelton House, or consider joining the Agnes Pelton Society.

Do you live near the  Phoenix Art Museum? They have a few of Pelton’s later works in their permanent collection.

As do the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas.

The Palm Springs Art Museum is also an important place for Pelton, particularly because of her connection to Pelton’s earlier landscape paintings of the desert and Cathedral City.

If you like Pelton’s work, look at the art of Hilma af Klint, another deeply spiritual artist whose radical abstract paintings were largely unseen for decades.

Have you read Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art? It’s the artist’s exploration of the spiritual possibilities of color, form, and abstraction.

Read Rudolf Arnheim’s 1969 classic, Visual Thinking.

Or check out Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin, which offers another fascinating way to think about how we perceive images, shape, color, movement, and visual relationships.