Symbolism Well Rooted in Nature

In March 1995, the Palm Springs Desert Museum opened a retrospective exhibition of an early American Modernist painter known to only a relatively small coterie of admirers. “Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature” turned out to be the sleeper hit of the Southern California museum season.

Now the show is back. The survey has arrived in Malibu after a yearlong tour of small museums in New Jersey, New York and Utah, and it will wind up its journey at the Oakland Museum in August. If you missed it in Palm Springs, Pepperdine University’s Weisman Museum of Art offers a welcome second chance.

Pelton (1881-1961) was one of a number of American artists who absorbed the influential legacy of European Symbolist painting and made it all their own. Mystical and often erotic in bearing, Symbolism is characterized by a commitment to the primacy of subjective experience. It was instrumental at the turn of the century in setting aside conventional demands for faithful depictions of nature in art.

Some artists followed Symbolism’s lead into the revolutionary field of total abstraction, firm in the conviction that they could create a universal artistic language. Others--Pelton among them--used it as a scaffold on which to build highly personal, idiosyncratic visions.

A lesbian who lived alone in the tiny town of Cathedral City, just outside Palm Springs, from 1932 until her death, Pelton was one of a very few women to have been included in the American section of New York’s landmark Armory Show. The 1913 exhibition introduced European Modernist art to the United States in a big way.

Pelton was already painting in a Symbolist manner when the Armory Show exploded on the New York art scene. (At Pepperdine, two small pictures portray women in archaic dress in mysterious, primeval forest settings; one of them, titled “Vine Wood,” was included in the Armory Show.) But her commitment to a less traditional, more abstract visual language didn’t begin to develop until about 1925.

By the time she left New York for California, the direction of her work as an artist was firmly set. In the desert, it blossomed into full maturity.

The exhibition at Pepperdine is slightly different than it was at Palm Springs. Pelton’s early formative work is still there, as is a generous selection of the often remarkable realist landscape paintings of the California desert that she produced for the tourist trade in order to survive. Happily, though, something has been added to the show.

Pelton’s wonderfully eccentric abstractions have been joined by six previously unknown paintings, which came out of the woodwork once the touring retrospective began to garner attention. The earliest--”Lotus for Lida (Egyptian Dawn)”--dates from 1930, two years after Pelton first visited Los Angeles, while another picture is undated (it appears to be unfinished).

The remaining four were made after Pelton’s permanent move to California. Two are extraordinary inventions, exquisitely painted.

“Messengers” (1932) is a darkly beautiful picture in which an iconic vessel of radiant light, crowned by six golden palm fronds, hovers beneath a stylized aurora borealis and over a rocky nighttime desert. A big blue orb rises on the horizon.

“Day” (1935) is a very simple composition, painted principally in glazed tones of blue and brown. Floating beneath a single star that hovers high in the sky is a window-like rectangle, from which flutters a stylized “curtain” that cascades into dancing arcs of light.

“Messengers” is like an abstract vision of the goddess of dawn. “Day” is a dreamy meditation on languorous sunlight.

Pelton never fully abandoned a degree of immediately recognizable imagery in her abstract paintings, which is one reason her reputation languished. Symbolism’s other path, which sought a pure abstraction without recognizable referents, came to be regarded in postwar America as the highest achievement in 20th century art.

Now that such dreams of pure abstraction have themselves been usurped, though, forgotten artists are being reconsidered. Perhaps some day we’ll see an exhibition devoted to the array of provocative painters who developed a distinctly American brand of Symbolist abstraction. In the meantime, “Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature” has made a very good start on a very good painter.

* Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu, (310) 456-4851, through July 7. Closed Mondays.