VOGUE: Agnes Pelton Finally Gets Her Due With a Major New Show at the Whitney
BY JULIA FELSENTHAL, March 10, 2020, Read the full article →
The artist Agnes Pelton was born in 1881, but her paintings—enigmatic abstractions based on her New Age-y spiritual inquiries—make perfect sense in our zodiac, meditation, and yoga-obsessed age. “It’s her moment,” says Barbara Haskell, the Whitney curator overseeing the museum’s installation of Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, the first survey of the artist’s work in more than two decades. When Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist opens in New York this Friday, it will be something of a posthumous homecoming for Pelton, who spent much of her childhood in Brooklyn, a time marked by trauma. Her father died of a morphine overdose when she was nine. And shortly before her birth, her maternal grandfather Theodore Tilton, a high-profile abolitionist newspaperman, unsuccessfully sued his pastor Henry Ward Beecher for “criminal intimacy” with Tilton’s wife—a national scandal that cast a shadow over Pelton’s mother’s life.
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Agnes Pelton, Departure, 1952. Oil on canvas, 24 × 18 in. (61 × 45.7 cm). Collection of Mike Stoller and Corky Hale Stoller. Photograph by Paul Salveson.
