Florine Stettheimer and Agnes Pelton

‘Messengers’ by Agnes Pelton, courtesy Phoenix Art Museum

The somewhat overheated public and critical response to the ‘discovery’ of the extraordinary images of Hilma af Klint at her 2018 Guggenheim Museum exhibition may partly have been due to the ongoing search, especially in America, for female artists of the past whose recovered or reassessed work might influence the conventional narrative of the history of art. Other women artists have since attracted fresh and deserved attention, one of them being the colourful Florine Stettheimer, whose substantial recent biography makes great claims for her stature as a significant artist, poet, and feminist. The painter Agnes Pelton, a more modest and less flamboyant figure, is also being seriously reconsidered.

Born in 1871, in Rochester, New York, Stettheimer was the fourth of five children of a banker who abandoned the family when she was still very young. Financially comfortable, they wandered through Europe with their mother, and there were prolonged halts in Rome and Florence, where Florine, having already decided to become an artist, developed her love of Italian Quattrocento paintings, Botticelli’s in particular. On their return to New York, the two eldest married, but Florine and her sisters Carrie and Ettie never did; the ‘Stetties’, as they were known, lived with their mother, Rosetta, on the Upper West Side and subsequently near Carnegie Hall. Florine also maintained large and sumptuously decorated rooms on Bryant Park, using them as a studio and salon.

Stettheimer had the habits and manners of her class, never having to earn a living. Barbara Bloemink’s biography tries hard to present her as a bohemian and subversive artist, but her originality really lies in her unapologetic acceptance of her own taste and way of life. Stettheimer belonged, quite unashamedly, to a world of privilege, and as a rich woman from the upper tier of German Jewish New York society, she cared little about the business of selling her work, and not much more about how it was received. Interestingly, however, among her acquaintances were Francis Picabia, another artist from a rich background, and she was a close friend of Marcel Duchamp. It would be plausible to regard Stettheimer’s exuberant style as faux-naïf or that of a untutored artist, but this would be far from the truth; she was technically skilled and fully aware of the art world and her role within it. Stettheimer was successful on her own terms; she turned her world of parties, show business, and upmarket department stores into accomplished ornamental pictures of heightened colour that perch on the edges of irony but never quite embrace it, and it comes as little surprise to read that she was one of Andy Warhol’s favourite painters. Many of her images are structured as though a stage is being observed from above; she liked to combine events from different points in time, creating compositions that are neither narratives nor a single moments, and it is said that they reflect the influence of the ideas of Henri Bergson. Her pictures, charming in a camp way, are like expensive sweets, beautifully packaged; one or two are amusingly delicious, but they soon become cloying. Those who think of Stettheimer as an important artist, starting with Linda Nochlin in the late 1970’s, consider that her social awareness makes up for these limitations.

In contrast to Florine Stettheimer, Agnes Pelton painted a world of reduction and comparative austerity. Born in Stuttgart to American parents, she lived in Europe for a few years before returning to Brooklyn, New York, with her family, where her mother opened a music school. Her father, a somewhat puzzling figure, died of a morphine overdose in 1891, and Agnes lived with her mother until the latter’s death in 1920. Pelton was of the first generation of American Modernists, which included Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove, but she was not part of their circle, which owed a great deal to the influence and presence of Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and gallerist who, coincidentally, was also interested in Stettheimer’s work. Pelton and O’Keeffe, six years younger, had much in common. They studied with Arthur Wesley Dow, who encouraged their interest in landscape, as well as in non-Western art and thought; they were drawn to Kandinsky’s treatise ‘On the Spiritual in Art’; and they were both invited to visit Taos and Santa Fe by the patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, where they were deeply affected by the desert. The two women, who had both experienced uneasy childhoods, developed very different temperaments and careers; O’Keeffe had a forceful personality, while Pelton was fragile and introverted.

In 1932 Agnes Pelton moved to the desert town of Cathedral City, California, where she lived for the rest of her life, earning a living from the sale of relatively conventional landscapes but primarily devoted to her otherworldly abstractions, which reflected what she felt was nature’s essential benevolence. Seen through Pelton’s eyes, the cosmos is replete with powerful benign energy; the deserts she loved are full of life. Her images depict distant horizons, stars, and other celestial objects, as well as flames, glowing vessels, plants, flowers, and occasional figures; recalling dreams and visions, they often came to the artist while she slept or meditated, usually, as indicated by sketches in her journal, as complete compositions.

In 2020 a large group of her paintings was shown at the Whitney Museum in New York; the touring exhibition, ‘Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist’, was her first solo show since a retrospective a quarter of a century ago. Pelton was never unknown; her early ‘Imaginative Paintings’, strongly influenced by Symbolism, were exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, she was included in a 1940 Guggenheim Museum exhibition of the work of the ‘Transcendental Painting Group’, based in New Mexico, of which she was a member, and frequent displays of her paintings were held in the Southwest. Until recently, though, she was considered a marginal figure in the history of American art, perhaps because Pelton lived a quiet and isolated existence, finding unconventional spirituality more engaging than the values of the art world. Despite general willingness to recover her work for inclusion in the canon, there here has been a degree of ambivalence in some responses to the exhibition; placed in the context of the work of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keeffe, who were also inspired by the desert landscape of the Southwest, there have been murmured references to the paintings’ occasional resemblances to Walt Disney cartoons and to kitsch, while her interest in Theosophy and other forms of spirituality has been politely passed over as a regrettable fad. Hilma af Klint, once overlooked for comparable reasons, has now been elevated beyond that fate.

For further exploration:

Women’s spiritual art: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/the-other-side-spiritualist-women-artists-jennifer-higgie-review-1234692493/

Linda Nochlin on Florine Stettheimer: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/from-the-archives-florine-stettheimer-rococo-subversive-63262/

A review of the Florine Stettheimer biography: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/bridget-alsdorf/hopscotch-on-a-mondrian (limited access)

A review of Agnes Pelton’s exhibition: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/aia-reviews/agnes-pelton-desert-transcendentalist-whitney-museum-of-american-art-1202683554/

Another review of the Agnes Pelton exhibition: https://www.artforum.com/features/chloe-wyma-on-the-art-of-agnes-pelton-246586/

Image on index page: detail of ‘White Fire’ by Agnes Pelton, courtesy UNMAM

Current listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h1nPXcl2sE

‘Asbury Park South’ by Florine Stettheimer