1 Agnes Pelton Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, microfilm, roll 3427, frame 0053. (Pelton will be referred to as AP and the Archives of American Art as AAA in subsequent notes.)

2 AP Papers, clippings, AAA, roll 3427, frames 0233, 0494, 0587.

3 The terms occult and mysticism need careful definition as they apply to art and artists. As Maurice Tuchman notes in The Spiritual in Art (1986), “ . . .art historians and artists use these terms differently than do theologians or sociologists. In the present context mysticism refers to the search for the state of oneness with ultimate reality. Occultism depends upon secret, concealed phenomena that are accessible only to those who have been appropriately initiated. The occult is mysterious and is not readily available to ordinary understanding or scientific reasoning.” The occult includes Pelton's general notions of cabalism, alchemy, and other religious precepts and her use of specific colors, geometric shapes, and other “hidden meanings.” For Pelton, the occult images suggest life-giving forces, as well as cosmic and earthly elements in her abstractions. Despite negative connotations of the occult that may exist today, the symbolism Pelton employed resulted in positive statements about the individual’s power to create and to search for knowledge and truth.

4 AP letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan (hereafter referred to as MDL), 15 October 1929, MDL Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, YCAL, ZA Luhan, Correspondence Box P-Rem, Folder Agnes Pelton.

5 Pelton met Hamilton Easter Field when she studied at the British Academy in Rome in 1911. He invited her to teach at his art school in Ogunquit, Maine, during several subsequent summer sessions. Field supported modernism and exhibited Pelton’s work in Ogunquit and at his Ardsley House Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Field’s professional acquaintance with Walter Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies was the impetus for Pelton’s inclusion in the Armory Show.

6 AP Papers, AAA, roll 3426, frame 0549.

7 Agni Yoga developed first in Russia from writings and teachings of Helena Roerich and her husband, artist Nicholas Roerich. When the Roerichs visited the United States in the 1920s, the Agni Yoga Society was established in New York City.

8 Helena Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy was the core of the Theosophical movement in America during the first decades of the 1900s. Pelton copied passages from this text into her journals in the 1920s. The Theosophical Society had headquarters in New York and in Pasadena, California, when Pelton became interested in its teachings.

9 This term implies one known to have extra-sensory perceptions. Pelton recorded her dreams and imaginings in detail, often seeking confirmation of actions from others, like Rudhyar and Jane Comfort. In a letter to Comfort in 1930, Pelton described a vision she recently experienced and asked Comfort to confirm it. She said, “ I’m asking this and writing in detail--because lately I’ve seen a number of things that have turned out correctly and I want to know if is imagination or a faculty developing.” AP letter to Jane Levington Comfort (hereafter referred to as JLC), 26 February 1930, JLC Letters, AAA. Comfort discussed Pelton’s special gifts in a letter she wrote to mutual friend Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1943. She said that Pelton had warned the Comforts that the land around their home was not conducive to her work. She said: “Agnes says force collects in the valleys all around and pours up over the rounded tops of the hills and all over us and that it’s too exciting and too stimulating and she thinks it isn’t good for us.” Comfort added: “She is very fragile and very potent--much more so than she knows anything about or would dream of believing if you told her.” JLC letter to MDL, 15 November 1943, Beinecke Library, Yale University, YCAL, ZA Luhan, Correspondence Collier-Dd.

10 AP Papers, AAA, roll 3426, frame 0482.

11 L.W. Rogers, The Elementary Theosophy (Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Press, 1929): 20.

12 Comfort selected this name because he was always fascinated with the community work of the bees. As he explained in The Glass Hive in May 1927, the analogy is appropriate: “The hive gives us an intimation of the process--the clustering of bees together for hours in a kind of heated silence--the wax forming in their midst. In time each group will be such a center of contact between the pattern and the production.” Comfort believed the publication would extend to “various vortices of force throughout the country--small dynamic groups already in the process of formation before our written work is sent out.” Comfort, The Glass Hive issue 2 (May 1927): 17. The Glass Hive, vols. I and II, and some correspondence and papers of Will L. Comfort are located at UCLA, Special Collections.

13 Will Levington Comfort, Midstream: A Chronicle at Halfway (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1914): 198-199. On another occasion, Comfort stated that his “love for the Bible today and for the Sacred Writings of the Farther East, as well as the uncommon inner tendency of my work as a modern American novelist are all directly traceable to that first little book of Mrs. Besant’s Thought-Power, my greatest reading experience.” Quoted in “Will Levington Comfort,” Theosophical Year Book, 1937 on page 196. Information provided by Lakshmi Narayan, Krotona Library, Ojai, California, in letter to author, 11 April 2000.

14 Dane Rudyhar (1895-1985), born Daniel Chenneviere, was a musician, author, astrologist, screenwriter, artist, entrepreneur, and philosopher. Active in the avant-garde music-artistic circles of Paris in the 1920s, he moved to America and established himself in Hollywood as a composer and screenwriter. Rudyhar chose his name, he claimed, because it was derived from the Sanskrit root-word for red and referred to the process of contradiction and resolution. It also represented his birth sign under the red planet, Mars. <http://shift.merriweb.com.au/Rudhyar/index.html>. Rudhyar supported Theosophical ideas, introduced Pelton to Agni Yoga, and encouraged her in her varied philosophies. Rudyhar championed Pelton’s work, suggesting to Raymond Jonson that he include her abstractions in his 1933 Fiesta Exhibition in Santa Fe. He also furthered the cause of the Transcendental Painting Group. Rudyhar and Pelton corresponded for many years, and he visited her in Cathedral City with both of his wives, first Maya and then Leyla. Rudhyar drew Pelton’s astrological chart and questioned her in depth about events in her life in letters in 1934.

15 In 1942, Pelton noted that Star Gazer was in Emma Newton’s possession. This is significant, as Newton appears to be the friend who most encouraged Pelton to visit the Comfort compound and to pursue the exploration of spirituality in her art in the 1920s. Pelton and Newton (later Winchell) were friends for years. Newton was a piano student of Florence Pelton and lived in New York City before her move to California in the 1920s. Pelton completed her portrait in 1921. According to Pelton’s list locating her art, Newton also owned Pelton’s Divinity in Lotus, 1928; Alumine in Egypt, 1930; and Resurgence, 1931. AP Papers, notes, 1942, AAA, roll 3426, frame 0578.

16 AP Papers, news clippings, Los Angeles Herald, 8 April 1929, and Pasadena Star News, 10 April 1929. Same quote in The Christian Science Monitor, LA Edition, 6 May 1929, AAA, roll 3427, frame 0377.

17 AP letter to MDL, 15 October 1929, MDL Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

18 Comfort, Midstream: 298. Taken in context, Comfort’s text divides the sexes, according to nineteenth-century separate spheres, saying this “gift” is woman’s power, her inspiration to better the race of men. Every man, according to Comfort, should revere motherhood as it is a “vocation, illumination--that white, irresistible flood of the spirit, the very vitality of God, breaking through the consciousness of men, inspiring the utterance. . .driving its fire ahead as far into the eternity of the future, signalizing [sic] the man, a prophet, and the woman a mother of the world.”

19 Comfort, Midstream: 252.

20 Schroeder was a lawyer, active in the Free Speech League in New York in the 1910s. He interpreted Freud’s work and used analysis to discredit religion and to shock his audiences. According to biographers, Schroeder had a “relentless need to talk about the ‘obscenity of religion.’” Heller and Rudnick, 1915: The Cultural Moment (News Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991): 140-141.

21 Mary Austin (hereafter referred to as MA) letter to Theodore Schroeder (hereafter referred to as TS), 10 March 1919, MA Papers, Huntington Library, Box 60/AU 1235.

22 MA letter to TS, 23 January 1919, MA Papers, Huntington Library, Box 60/AU 1216.

23 MA letter to TS, 22 May 1919, MA Papers, Box 60/AU 1221. Schroeder was not easily convinced and continued to join the two--the erotic with the spiritual experience. By 5 December 1919, Austin was infuriated and wrote: “You are the most persistently wrong-headed man I ever met!” MA Papers, Huntington Library, Box 60/AU1226.

24 The hook is an important symbol, as its interpretations range from energy to craving. According to Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (p. 34), “curving hooks are signs of strong craving for personal possession.” Perhaps Pelton used “an ugly hook of darkness” as the impetus to move away from the personal and the physical toward the light of spiritual ecstasy.

25 “Ecstasy,” a poem by Agnes Pelton: “A flower bursts open/in rush of ecstasy to meet the Day/Before, unknown/Its petals bent/So sudden its release/ Soft gray shapes that pressed/An ugly hook of darkness,/The life force gathered/And swift and free/It opened, to the light.”

26 In The Key to Theosophy (pp. 6-7), ecstasy is defined as “the liberation of the mind from its finite consciousness, becoming one and identified with the infinite.” Enlightenment or ecstasy (digambara) is the highest state reached in Hindu worship. The word ecstasy comes from the Greek ekstasis which mean “standing forth naked.” In Greece, as in ancient India, proper worship was sometimes conducted in a state of physical nakedness to symbolize purification from all distractions, to concentrate on the ecstatic experience. Barbara G. Walker The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francsisco: Harper Collins, Inc., 1983): 269. It is no surprise, then, that the physical and the spiritual are often viewed as one.

27 The colors, from bottom to top, are arranged according to the body’s colored chakras, moving upward from the pelvis to the brain--red, orange, yellow, green blue, indigo, and violet-white. Pelton was familiar with charkas and painted a work entitled Chakras in 1937 after a visit to Ojai, California. Also, through her first experiences in the 1910s and ‘20s with Emma Curtis Hopkins in New York, a well-known healing practitioner, to her mention of the faith healer Avak who was in Palm Springs in 1947, Pelton continued her interest in non-medicated healing throughout her life.

28 Pelton sketched Star Gazer on 19 February 1929. Its first title was Longing. AP Papers, journal, AAA, roll 3426, frame 0566. Pelton’s own description of Star Gazer in 1957 said that it was “an abstraction painted on ‘the hill’ years ago.” At that time, it was owned by her friend Emma Newton. As Pelton described it: “It was an after glow over the hills, with Venus close in the darkening sky--with a cone shaped form reaching upward with pale green chalice about it--holding the star light. It is of an emotional nature.” AP letter to JLC, 16 November 1957, JLC Letters, AAA.

29 Clare Gibson, Signs and Symbols (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996): 91.

30 Trajectus sursum is a term developed by this author to express the visual intent and design of Pelton’s spiritual abstractions. Trajectus means path and sursum, a movement upward. This phrase references, too, the exhortation of sursum corda, “lift up your hearts,” from the liturgies of the Christian Mass. A review in the San Diego Union, December 31, 1933, confirms this sense of motion in Pelton’s abstractions. Reginald H. Poland, Director of the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery commented: “’Fire Sounds’ and ‘Jade’ seem actually to move....and to carry us away to a new region and one which is itself cut off from contact with this mundane sphere.” AP Papers, AAA, roll 3426, frame 0351. In notes introducing Pelton’s exhibition in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1931, Rudhyar describes the images in her abstractions with terms like “upward rush” and “upward aspiration.” AP Papers, AAA, roll 3426, frame 0544. A review in the New York Evening Post, 21 February 1931, noted that Agnes Pelton’s designs “grow upward from the bottom of the canvas, spreading like some delicate growth stretching to the light.” AP Papers, clipping, New York Evening Post, 21 February 1931, roll 3426, frame 0468. Also, in a note to AP, JLC about the “upward movement.” AP Papers, roll 3426, frame 0176.

31 Dane Rudhyar, “Art of Gestures and Art of Patterns,” in Art as the Release of Power: A Series of Seven Essays on the Philosophy of Art (Carmel, California: HAMSA Publications, 1930): 1-5. Rudhyar concludes his text with a summary of many of the ideas he expressed in letters to Pelton over the years: that her work is part of a divine plan. He said: “Work, work. . .noble work, sacrificial, sacramental work; right from the center of the Living Self. . .a perpetual flow of Life, a rhythmical tone of being manifested through heroic doing. . . .Work from which power radiates; power assumed for the sake of the Whole. . .Work through which the Soul can pour and sing and glow earthward. . . Work of Destiny. . .performed ‘for and as the Universal Self’ without attachment to the fruits thereof. Such work is the basis and the test of true spiritual Nobility; the requirement for entering the rank of the Aristocracy of Spiritual Workers which is the Heart of the new Man. It is the work of the Living Civilization.” Rudhyar, “The New Individual and the Work of Civilization,” in Art as the Release of Power:24. Also, AP letter to Dane Rudhyar, 4 September 1939, Dane Rudhyar Papers, Jonson Gallery of Art, University of New Mexico.

Back to Article>>