Agnes is still making waves!
This Article originally appeared in the Desert Sun, Published Mar 26, 2023
By: Tracy Conrad
History: Desert Transcendentalist Agnes Pelton and her spiritual awakening in Cathedral City.
Agnes Pelton with several of her desert landscape paintings. Courtesy Historical Society Of Palm Desert. Shadow Mountain Collection
In the depths of the Great Depression, at a time of physical insecurity and want, a small group of avantgarde artists tried to create something truly new. Called Transcendental Painting by its adherents, the form was striving to develop non-representational paintings sourced in pure imagination, attending to the spiritual in a time of deprivation.
A brochure for a group exhibition in 1939 explained, “The word Transcendental has been chosen as a name for the group because it best expresses its aim, which is to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual. The work does not concern itself with political, economic and other social problems.”
The 1939 brochure continued, “The Transcendental Painting Group is no coterie, no accidental group of friends. The members are convinced that focal points in terms of group activity are necessary to present an art transcending the objective and expressing the cultural development of our time.”
“Methods may vary. Some approach their plastic problems by a scientific balancing of the elements involved; others rely upon the initial emotion produced by the creative urge itself; still others are impelled by a metaphysical motivation.”
The group assembled a variety of paintings and organized exhibitions to promote understanding of the new form. In 1939, a show in San Francisco enumerated the offerings and included a painting by female artist from Cathedral City, California.
“Agnes Pelton’s Orbits is a masterly work that presents a serious of dotted orbits with occasional stars. There is no hint of esoteric symbolism. One section of the canvas, the lower, is a starling achievement of purely flesh-like forms, and the rising to the more spiritual elements is a logical culmination to an arrangement of a definite transcendental view of plastic problems.” > Read the full article here. >
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