The New York Times: ‘Agnes of the Desert’ Joins Modernism’s Pantheon
By Roberta Smith, Published March 12, 2020 Updated March 13, 2020, Read the full article →
The first New York museum exhibition on a still-mysterious painter inspired by the abstract beauty of the American
desert.
A few years ago, I interrupted a panel discussion at the Guggenheim as it moved toward the dead-horse question of whether painting was still viable. How, I asked, uninvited, from the audience, could people talk of the end of painting when so many women were just beginning to paint? With hindsight I should have added that we were also still learning about the female painters of the past whose newly recovered works could very well influence the medium. History had in a sense not yet happened to their achievements.
Hindsight arrived one or two years later, when a largely unknown sector of that past was emphatically, unforgettably heard from — at the Guggenheim. This divine noise was the full-rotunda exhibition of the paintings of Hilma af Klint, which drew thousands of visitors and irrevocably altered the understanding of the genesis of abstract painting in the West. It was one of the most revelatory shows of many people’s lifetimes, my own included.
Agnes Pelton’s “Orbits” (1934), at the Whitney Museum of American Art, shows the artist’s arsenal of stars on lariats, vessel shapes and a horizon — a sense of Disney-like animation, Oakland Museum of California.
