On June 7, 1938, a handful of artists in New Mexico, all but one of them having landed there from elsewhere, gathered in Santa Fe at the home of abstract painter Raymond Jonson. Abstraction was then still unusual in American art, when the Great Depression encouraged an embrace of Social Realism and American Scene regionalism among artists, with New Deal government support of same via the Works Progress Administration. Abstraction, with its air of European intellectualism and bohemianism, felt out of step with breadlines, Dust Bowl displacement and the plight of working class Americans.
But the artists gathered in Santa Fe, men and women of disparate ages and backgrounds, felt otherwise. As Jonson had written in a letter the previous year, “I am not interested in telling the farmer and politician about our country but rather in telling about the wonders of a richer and deeper land – the world of peace – love and human relations projected through pure form.” A land, in other words, that lay beyond the American landscape. The artists gathered at Jonson’s house were united in their desire to depict another world, one indescribable via traditional western pictorial means. They would instead utilize form, color and distilled feeling to describe the spiritual world as they perceived it.
Soon organizing under the name the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), at their second meeting days later the New Mexico artists elected fellow spiritually-minded painter Agnes Pelton as their Honorary President. Pelton, living and working in her own desert town of Cathedral City, California, accepted. Of their chosen name, Jonson wrote Pelton, “As your non-objective work is a fine example of what I have in mind I should like to know what you think of using the word transcendental to designate it instead of abstract or non-objective … Does this word seem to you to cover the aim of our work insofar as the objective departure and the hope for spiritual content are concerned?”
It did, and a still-underknown movement was born. Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group is a lavishly illustrated overview of the TPG and its artists, accompanying an exhibition eight years in the making that recently opened at the Albuquerque Museum and will travel to five venues over two years. Pelton is by far the best known of the eleven artists in the catalogue and show, though even she is not so well-known, having mostly come to wider attention in just the past few years. It’s easy to agree with Michael Duncan, who ushered the exhibition through many years and who contributed the introductory essay and artist biographies to the book, that “the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti.” According to Duncan, the exhibition/book explicitly “aims to address this slight.”
The notion of “a secret known only to cognoscenti” might apply equally to Theosophy, the spiritual engine behind much of the TPG’s work, and also behind the development of modernist abstraction generally. I first heard of Theosophy in the late 1980s, in an art history graduate seminar on Kazimir Malevich – long credited as a pioneer of abstraction (see Black Square) along with fellow Russian, Wassily Kandinsky – when our professor stopped mid-phrase and said, quite abruptly, something about Theosophy being “a secret key” to 20th century art, if you knew where to look. I never forgot what she said and was soon looking for Theosophy, and finding it, everywhere. It was sometimes easy to locate, for example, in the explicit Theosophical impulse of Piet Mondrian’s paintings, while in other places it was more tenuous, like Picasso and Braque incorporating the fourth dimension (time), a great Theosophical preoccupation, in their Cubist works. Later, teaching art history in a Waldorf high school, I discovered the work of Hilma af Klint many years before her recent celebrity via the blockbuster Guggenheim show that opened in late 2018. Recently credited with creating some of the first modernist abstract paintings, af Klint was a follower of Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian philosopher who founded Waldorf schools based on the principles of Anthoposophy, which he developed out of Theosophy.
So it’s maybe both unsurprising and a little odd that a small group of painters in the American desert would, decades after the advent of European abstraction, dedicate themselves to Theosophical aims in painting. Which is not to say that all TPG members took up its rigorous study. As Catherine Whitney succinctly describes in her essay, “Theosophy combined Eastern philosophies, Christian morality, cosmologies, and European occult traditions.” In other words, a person might spend a lifetime exploring Theosophical principles, but fortunately the TPG were artists, not theorists. Florence Miller Pierce, the youngest member of the group, said decades later, “We were caught up in the language we were exposed to, and the phrase ‘fourth dimension’ was bandied about quite a bit – even though we had no idea what it meant.”
While Theosophical ideas can quickly get wild and woolly, the theorist of the group, Dane Rudhyar, was enviably accessible in his explication of what the TPG sought to do: “They wanted to show that, in the western part of the United States at least, there was a group of painters who were carrying more the tradition of not religious but spiritually inclined work, inspired feeling.” Rudhyar was born in France (given name, Daniel Chenneviére) and one of the revelations of Another World is discovering that this band of desert mystics – remote and mostly forgotten for a time – were well-connected to the art world of their day. From Rudhyar having worked as Rodin’s secretary in Paris, to Pelton showing at the 1913 Armory Show, ground zero for the development of American modernism, these were artists eminently in touch with the art of their time. Not dabblers who somehow struck on something trippy and cool in a far-flung backwater, but educated and aware American artists delving into the same stream of modernist thought as af Klint, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and many others.
How their work stacks up against such giants is difficult to assess in reproduction. Some of it is clearly wonderful, even in reproduction – Pelton, Miller Pierce and William Lumpkins are immediately appealing – while others are, at least on the printed page, uneven. Though Emil Bisttram’s The Flaming One looks as inspired – and vaginal – as anything by medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen or feminist artist Judy Chicago, it’s difficult to imagine his Lord Maitreya gaining gravitas – or much interest – with immediacy and scale. But I could be wrong. Paintings, particularly such spiritually-infused ones, need to be experienced in person. I look forward to it.
In 1929, Pelton said of her work, “The pictures are like little windows, opening to the view of a region not yet much visited consciously or by intention – an inner realm, rather than an outer landscape.” Not yet are the operative words here, even now. What Another World offers is a rich vein for further exploration, research, inspiration, for artists, writers, historians, poets and anyone else. A window into what’s still possible and where we might go next.
[Published on July 6, 2021 by DelMonico Books/Crocker Art Museum, 240 pages, $53.00 hardcover. Edited with text by Michael Duncan, text by Scott Shields, MaLin Wilson Powell, Catherine Whitney, Ilene Susan Fort, Dane Rudhyar]
Images shown above and below:
Agnes Pelton, “Nurture,” 1940, oil on canvas, 34 3/8 x 32 1/2 inches. Collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University
Lawren Harris, “Painting No. 4,” c. 1939, oil on canvas, 51 x 36 5/8 inches, Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
Florence Pierce, “Blue Forms,” 1942, oil on canvas, 29 3/4 x 34 inches, Georgia & Michael de Havenon, New York
