Here’s one thing you can say about “Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist”: localism has its benefits. A retrospective of a reclusive and little-known painter has arrived in Manhattan, having originated in Phoenix and traveled to Santa Fe, and with Palm Springs set to be its final destination. Though Pelton (1881–1961) was born in Germany and educated in New York, she spent the last thirty years of her life holed up in southern California—Cathedral City, to be exact. No splashy international credentials here, thank you very much. What about auction house hoopla, ideological grandstanding, and post-modernist theorizing? Though anything can be drafted into the service of irksome trends, Pelton’s work, on the whole, proves resistant. Should we be so gauche, then, to consider matters of art? On those terms, “Desert Transcendentalist” succeeds nicely. What possessed the Whitney—an institution not known for placing a premium on aesthetic worth—to host such an understated, serious, and rewarding venture? Curator Barbara Haskell and senior curatorial assistant Sarah Humphreville must have done considerable strong-arming to convince their corporate bosses that Pelton was worth the real estate. Or maybe they mentioned Hilma af Klint.
You remember af Klint: the Swedish painter fêted by the Guggenheim a little over a year ago, and whose oeuvre was quite the smash. Af Klint’s diagrammatic pictographs found an appreciative audience that would otherwise have had little truck with abstraction. The backstory helped: af Klint (1862–1944) was a visionary who communed with the spirit world; she was a woman