The Desert: An Especially Bright Spirit
In January 1932, at the age of fifty, Agnes Pelton made a bold move when she stepped off the train at the Palm Springs station in search of a new home to pursue her art. She soon settled a few miles south in Cathedral City, where she seemed to have found what she was searching for: “The two mountains—San Jacinto and San Gorgonio are so gorgeous. I have a feeling that there is some special reason for being here.”
A life-long student of nature, Pelton responded to the rare beauty of her new environment. Intrigued by flora that could thrive in this arid climate, she painted desert trees and the fruit of date palms as iconic symbols of vitality. Equally inspired by the area’s expansive vistas, majestic mountains, and deep canyons, in a 1957 interview she declared, “The vibrations of this light, the spaciousness of these skies enthrall me. I knew there was a spirit in nature as in everything else, but here in the desert it was an especially bright spirit. I found wonders here.”
Smoke Trees in a Draw, ca. 1950, oil on canvas, 25 × 31 1/2 inches. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Western Art Council, Mary James Memorial Fund, 2008, 31-2008.
“One of my big smoke tree pictures was sold from the Gallery in Palm Springs for a respectable price and there have been several others. . . So now I am concentrating on desert landscapes.”
–Agnes Pelton, 1935
San Gorgonio, Winter, n.d., oil on canvas, 23 7/16 × 29 1/2 inches. Collection of Susan Seymour, L2020.16.
Pelton believed that her desert paintings are best seen in their proper setting—the desert. This included the display of her landscape paintings at local galleries such as Desert Inn in Palm Springs, the Palm Springs Desert Museum (where she had an exhibition in Fall 1949), as well as her studio in Cathedral City, which she opened to the public on Sunday afternoons.
Chuperosa, Palm Canyon Road, early 1950s, oil on canvas, 29 1/4 × 39 inches. Collection of Robert and Kay Hillery, L2020.18.1.
In her 1932 grant application to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Pelton outlined a project to paint “awakening life” in the springtime desert, describing desert flowers as having the brightest light radiance. She was convinced that in her abstract paintings she had developed a method to produce light radiation through the use of pigment and felt that she could capture the luminescence of the desert flowers.
