Floating World: The Influence of Japanese Printmaking
W e s t e r n L i g h t, E c s tat i c L a n d s c a p es Sun Valley Center for the Arts June 6–August 16, 2014
W e s t e r n L i g h t, E c s tat i c L a n d s c a p es Sun Valley Center for the Arts June 6–August 16, 2014 Lee Mullican, Untitled, 1949, oil on canvas, collection of the Lucid Art Foundation, courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican and Marc Selwyn Fine Art
In 1993 art historian Paul Karlstrom asked painter Lee Mullican about the impact of the Southwest on his painting. Mullican—who was born in Oklahoma, had lived for decades in California and was then spending much of his time in Taos, New Mexico—answered, “A lot of it has to do with nature, and a lot of it has to do with just an atmosphere that exists there…it’s a way of living with…something as simple as open skies. So that all during the day you have this great open three- hundred-and-sixty-degree sky, within which color and light and cloud and rainbow and rain…cannot help but be a spiritual influence.”1
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hose of us who have spent time in the American West understand the spiritual influence of which Mullican speaks. The peculiar quality of Western light has exerted a magnetic pull on generations of artists who have tried to capture it on canvas or paper. While the official history of American art tends to focus on New York, there was an impressive migration of artists westward during the mid-20th century. Western Light, Ecstatic Landscapes presents artworks made between the 1930s and 1980s that endow the landscape of the American West with a spiritual quality. Few of the paintings in this exhibition look like traditional landscapes; almost all, however, start with the idea of the land as the basis for works that transcend the material in search of the metaphysical. The exhibition consists of three bodies of work: paintings by artists associated with the Transcendental Painting Group, based in New Mexico in the late 1930s and early 1940s; work by the artists of the Dynaton, a movement that emerged out of Surrealism in Northern California in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and paintings by Frederick S. Wight, whose career as a painter flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, only after his retirement from a long career as a curator and museum director at UCLA. The paintings in the exhibition range widely in terms of aesthetic. Yet the work is connected by a shared desire to convey spiritual or metaphysical ideas grounded in the light and landscape of the American West. The Transcendental Painting Group
Founded in New Mexico in 1938 by painters Emil Bisttram and Raymond Jonson, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) included nine additional artists: Lawren Harris, Stuart Walker, Ed Garman, Horace Towner Pierce, Florence Miller Pierce, William Lumpkins, Robert
ibbroek, Dane Rudhyar and Agnes Pelton G (who participated from Cathedral City, California).2 Aesthetically, the TPG united around abstraction; in 1940 the group announced its interest in “various types of non-representational painting; painting that finds its source in the creative imagination and does not depend upon the objective approach.”3 But beyond mere formal concerns, the artists affiliated with the TPG sought to
Raymond Jonson, No.16, 1938, watercolor and gouache on paper mounted to board, private collection
Emil Bisttram, Circles and Triangles, 1941, mixed media on paper, courtesy Broschofsky Galleries, Ketchum
Emil Bisttram, Geometric (Untitled), 1940s, mixed media on paper, courtesy Broschofsky Galleries, Ketchum
“carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.”4 Interested in ideas drawn from Theosophy and Zen Buddhism, the TPG artists made paintings that synthesized abstraction and mysticism in an attempt to transcend material reality. Some scholars have interpreted this interest in abstraction and metaphysical content as a rejection of the New Mexico landscape that surrounded them.5 Instead, I would argue, the desert landscape remained a fundamental starting point for the TPG’s images and spiritual explorations. Raymond Jonson (1891–1982) was born in Portland, Oregon, where he took painting classes at the Portland Art Museum before continuing his studies in Chicago.6 He first visited Santa Fe in 1921, deciding to settle there in 1924. Jonson arrived in New Mexico armed with knowledge of the latest developments in modern art as well as a deep familiarity with Wassily Kandinsky’s text Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the ideas
of Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich, both of whom, in turn, were indebted to Theosophy.7 Theosophy, introduced to the United States by the mystic Helena Blavatsky with the 1875 founding of the Theosophical Society in New York, is a system of thought uniting religion, science and philosophy in an attempt to understand the mysteries of the universe. Theosophy also seeks “a universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color.”8 Synthesizing Western esoteric thought with Eastern philosophical and religious ideas, Theosophy draws on teachings of all of the world’s major religions and had a significant impact on 20th-century art and music. Its egalitarian nature and emphasis on each individual finding his or her own spiritual path appealed to many artists and composers. Additionally, some of its tenets naturally inspired modernist developments. Theosophy presents the universe as a system of vibrations—of light, sound, even brain molecules.9 Within this system, different colors and sounds vibrate at varying frequencies, which led composers to experiment with new tonal systems and artists to create color charts that assigned symbolic meanings to specific hues. Theosophists also believed the visual arts and music were linked; tones were tied to particular colors and visual artists frequently referred to music.10 This was true of Jonson, who made artwork that synthesized music with the New Mexico landscape. During the 1920s, he produced Earth Rhythms, a series of eleven paintings inspired by the desert that culminated in Grand Canyon Trilogy: three panels he designated First, Second and Third Movements.11 Made as variations on a theme, these dynamic paintings draw on Cubism in their angular depiction of mesas and cliff dwellings animated by a vibrant palette and dramatic use of light. Jonson used mathematical formulas based on proportions found in nature, seeking “harmony of the spheres” in his paintings.12 The son of a Baptist preacher, he had ecstatic religious
visions beginning at age 11. These experiences led him away from organized religion toward a career aimed at conveying the mystical in two dimensions.13 Jonson likely thought of the rhythmic structures of his paintings as equivalents to the vibrations of Theosophy. As a member of the TPG, his work became more abstract. But even No.16 (1938) seems inspired by the light, colors and forms of the desert landscape. The work consists of multiple layers starting with a reddish orange background the color of sand or rock. Against this background, Jonson places a tilted rectangle of glowing light that hums with different hues: green, blue, pink, orange and yellow. Four squares of solid
color float in the center of the image and are reminiscent of Jonson’s early images of cliff dwellings. Beams of orange and white light cut vertically through the work. Despite its abstraction, the work’s palette, structure and use of light tie it closely to the place it was made. Born in Hungary, Emil Bisttram (1895–1976) grew up in the tenements of New York before becoming an illustrator for an advertising agency. While working in advertising, he took painting lessons, making impressionistic landscapes before experimenting with Cubism and later geometric abstraction. He eventually settled in New Mexico, where he focused on painting and
Emil Bisttram, Evening Drama, 1958, watercolor on paper, courtesy Broschofsky Galleries, Ketchum
Florence Miller Pierce, Untitled, 1950s, ink on p aper, courtesy the estate of the artist and Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe
teaching art. Bistram believed, according to Dane Rudhyar, “The artist is…a seeker of truth.…He is a priest, a magician.”14 He saw painting as a spiritual activity that reconciled religion with science. Like Jonson, he relied on mathematical formulas in his compositions. The paintings he made while part of the TPG, such as Circles and Triangles (1941) and Geometric (Untitled) (1940s), mark his most abstract period. These carefully structured images appear at first unrelated to the idea of landscape. Yet both feature elements that suggest glowing suns, moons and towering mountains, all reduced to their essential geometric forms. Flat areas of color alternate with textures that resemble rock or dirt. Rather than depict New Mexico’s landscape, these works evoke it. Bisttram was preoccupied with light, placing a glowing orb at the center of Geometric (Untitled). Evening Drama (1958) captures the dramatic reds, yellows and oranges of a desert sunset—a landscape that consists almost entirely of light. Light plays a dual role in Bisttram’s paintings, conveying the tremendous impact of New Mexico’s open skies and the spiritual role of light in his studies of Theosophy.15
Florence Miller Pierce (1918–2007) was the youngest member of the TPG. Born in Washington, DC, she began her art education at the Phillips Memorial Gallery (now The Phillips Collection). She traveled to New Mexico in the summer of 1936 to study at Bisttram’s Taos School of Art. Continuing her studies at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, she worked with Auriel Bessimer and his wife, who had trained with Annie Besant, a well known Theosophist and disciple of Helena Blavatsky. She returned to Taos in 1937 and wound up staying, joining the TPG and marrying fellow artist Horace Towner Pierce. Pierce drew on ideas from Theosophy, particularly the spiritual role of light, as well as Surrealism.16 Her TPG era paintings present abstracted desert images in which biomorphic forms cut across empty landscapes. By the 1950s, she was making spare works on paper in which she denoted elements of landscape using simple strokes of sumi ink in calligraphic compositions. An untitled piece from the 1950s seems simultaneously an aerial view of the desert floor and a view to the horizon. In 1970 she created a series of works by laying rice paper over dampened stones, tracing their patterns with different colors of sumi ink in automatist experiments.17 These works incorporate the landscape itself into their making. She devoted the end of her career to working with resin, pouring it over mirrors in pieces that were experiments in form and light. Unlike the other members of the TPG, William Lumpkins (1909–2000) was a New Mexico native. He studied painting at the University of New Mexico, completing his undergraduate work in architecture at the University of Southern California. Returning to Santa Fe, he encountered Raymond Jonson, who encouraged him to continue making the abstract paintings he had begun as a student and invited him to the first meeting of the TPG in June 1938 in Bisttram’s studio.18 Like Pierce, Lumpkins was drawn to automatism, saying of his process, “I try never to plan a painting. I
do not begin with a preconceived format or layout or idea. I merely lay down a color and begin construction.” He rooted his abstractions in the New Mexico landscape and in his studies of Zen Buddhism. “My paintings are all developed through quiet meditation, following the reading of Zen koans which I have been writing for the past fifty years.… What joy I’ve found creating light from darkness!”19 More than any of the other TPG artists, Lumpkins approached the landscape from a geological point of view. As in an untitled work from 1940, he often worked in a rich palette dominated by blues, ochres and deep reds, making layered images that evoke caves, rock formations, and the strata beneath the earth’s surface. Trained as a pilot, he later made paintings that seem to be aerial views of the land. In the s himmering Levy (1992), Lumpkins used gold paint, depicting geological forms that glow with light. While Florence Miller Pierce was the youngest member of the TPG, Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) was the oldest as well as the most established. Born to American parents in Stuttgart, Germany, she spent most of her childhood in Brooklyn, New York. Among
William Lumpkins, Untitled, 1940, watercolor on paper, courtesy Broschofsky Galleries, Ketchum
William Lumpkins, Levy, 1992, acrylic on paper, courtesy Broschofsky Galleries, Ketchum
our hectic materialism, is burning within us all.”20 By 1932 Pelton had to leave the windmill. Debating whether to return to New York, she wrote: It is not necessary to go to N.Y. Another way will be found— The way of Peace & Quietness— Light shining through The Higher Light / dispelling darkness21
Agnes Pelton, Radiance, c. 1929, oil on canvas, Jeri L. Wolfson Collection
her teachers was Arthur Wesley Dow, whose ideas about composition influenced a generation of artists. Her early works, which she called Imaginatives, usually featured contemplative women in symbolist nature scenes, two of which were included in the landmark 1913 Armory Show. In 1921 she moved to Long Island, where she lived in a windmill and supported herself by painting portraits. Working in relative isolation, she began making her first abstract paintings. In 1919 she traveled to visit Mabel Dodge Luhan in New Mexico and to Los Angeles in 1928. Following her 1929 return to New York, she had an exhibition at the Montross Gallery that was visited by Dane Rudhyar. Rudhyar, a composer and astrologer who would go on to be an active member of the TPG, became a strong proponent of her work, describing each of her paintings as “a living voice, a voice vibrant with the quest for this ultimate reality which, underneath
Pelton found the peace, quiet and higher light she sought in Cathedral City, California, a tiny town near Palm Springs, where she remained for the rest of her life. There, she divided her time between making traditional landscape paintings that provided her income and the abstractions that were the visual manifestations of her spiritual life. Raised in a strict Christian home, Pelton’s spirituality synthesized Christianity with Theosophy, Agni Yoga (an offshoot of Theosophy) and other Eastern traditions. She had read Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy (1889) as a young woman and incorporated its emphasis on light into her work throughout her life.22 Beyond ideas about light and spirit, Theosophy’s emphasis on universal brotherhood regardless of sex must have appealed to Pelton as an independent woman. And it seems likely that the American West drew her for the same reasons: not only its light, but also the promise it offered of freedom from the social strictures of the East. While Pelton worked independently in California, through Rudhyar she became acquainted with the painters who would go on to form the TPG. Rudhyar shared her work with Raymond Jonson, with whom Pelton developed a long friendship and correspondence. Jonson and Bisttram invited her to join the TPG and to serve as its honorary president. Jonson visited her in California, and she seems to have been an enthusiastic member of the group: In 1947 Jonson wrote to say that only she and Ed Garman were still paying dues, and he was afraid the group really had come to an end.23 Despite her
membership in the group, her paintings were always quite distinctively her own. Radiance (c. 1929), for example, was surely inspired by her studies of Agni Yoga, which celebrates fire as the universe’s vital element. The painting features a glowing orb of blue and white light at the center of the canvas, encircled by undulating red, orange and yellow flames. The image represents both astral light and the inner light of the individual. She wrote of her fire-themed paintings, “These pictures are conceptions of light—the essence of fire, not as we see it in the material world, but as the radiance of the inner being.”24 Drawing on Theosophy’s belief in the link between color and sound, Pelton tried to capture not just the light and color of fire, but also “the delicate experience of sounds seen as well as heard—the yellow snap of sparks, the soft sound of flame and its combined upward rush.”25 In Radiance delicate lines of blue, purple and yellow loop around the central light, suggesting the idea of sound radiating from the image. The daughter of a piano teacher, Pelton incorporated music and sound into many of her works, including Voyaging (1931), which anticipates her move to Cathedral City. Pelton wrote a poem accompanying the painting, which describes the scene as “High noon above the sea.” Below, soft waves undulate around an oval vessel or passage. The poem describes “lines of power downward weaving,” four ribbons of color like those in Radiance—green, purple, blue and gold— that curve through the upper part of the canvas, from which springs a looping golden chain. (Curiously, Helena Blavatsky referred to a golden chain that should bind humanity in universal brotherhood in The Key to Theosophy). A ringing bell appears in the upper right corner of the image, its sounds made visible in the form of the ribbons of color (or lines of power) that arc through the image, each color corresponding to a different tone. In her poem, Pelton wrote of the golden bell sounding a change; her painting suggests both a voyage to another plane of existence
Agnes Pelton, Voyaging, 1931, oil on canvas, Jeri L. Wolfson Collection
Agnes Pelton, Idyll, 1952, oil on canvas, Jeri L. Wolfson Collection
and Pelton’s own upcoming journey to Southern California. In Idyll (1952) Pelton made her belief in the transformative power of the Western landscape explicit. The painting marries the realistic style she used to make the desert landscapes that were her livelihood with the spiritual abstraction that gave her work personal meaning. Like Voyaging, Idyll features an enormous blue sky, opening above the dry red and brown mountains of the desert. Two arcs of light, one red and one green, emerge out of the desert floor. Below them, a cloud of white light rises from the ground, while red, blue and yellow flowers dot the foreground. Unlike either Pelton’s traditional landscape paintings or her mystical abstractions, this painting is unique in its depiction
of the Southern California desert as a very real place in which land and light converge in a moment of divine transcendence. The Dynaton In 1951, the year before Agnes Pelton painted Idyll, the artists of the Dynaton presented their work in a major exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art. The Dynaton came together in 1949, just over ten years after the formation of the Transcendental Painting Group, and included Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican. Based in San Francisco, the group took their name from the Greek word for “the possible” and shared some essential ideas with their TPG predecessors. They believed in the power of painting to explore the spiritual and the mystical, seeking to depict what they referred to as the “inner worlds.” Born out of ideas Paalen began exploring in the journal Dyn, which he published while living in Mexico City during the 1940s, the Dynaton drew on elements of Surrealism, such as an interest in automatism, but also Eastern philosophies including Zen Buddhism. And, like the Transcendental Painting Group artists, the Dynaton artists used light as the tool with which they crafted their images of the inner worlds. Though their subject matter emerged from the recesses of their minds, the movement was very much the product of the American West and the effects of its light. Born into an upper class family in Vienna, Wolfgang Paalen (1905–1959) settled in Paris as a young man. He studied painting with Fernand Léger before joining the Surrealist movement, embracing André Breton’s theories about creating artwork out of the unconscious through automatism. He invented the “fumage” technique, moving a lit candle below a canvas, leaving patterns of smoke on its surface that he then worked over with paint to create fantastic, totemic images. In 1939, following a trip through British Columbia and Alaska, he
settled in Mexico City. Mexico was home to a number of Surrealist exiles during World War II, but Paalen broke with the movement in 1942, announcing his farewell in the pages of Dyn.26 Dyn’s first issue included an essay, “The New Image,” in which he argued that a true modern art should be “prefigurative,” that it should guide us toward the future rather than depict the present, writing, “The possible does not have to be justified by the known.”27 As Paalen wrote in “The New Image,” he believed art, science and religion all sprang from the same source; in his own painting, making prefigurative work meant synthesizing science with a search for universal truth. Long fascinated by p hysics, he began to view it with horror following the development of the atomic bomb. In a play he wrote after the end of World War II, The Beam in the Balance, he used characters like Prometheus and Faust to comment on the dangers of the human exploitation of science. The play also featured three C osmogons, “personifications of the great cosmic forces.”28 The Cosmogons were spiritual messengers, sent to warn humankind about the future. These figures appeared in highly abstracted form in his
paintings, which he continued to make after his move to San Francisco in 1949, where, with Onslow Ford and Mullican, he formed the Dynaton. In Messengers des trois pôles (Messengers from the Three Poles) (1949), he depicted one of his Cosmogons hovering against a golden background. Structured through a series of geometric patterns, the figure draws on Paalen’s interest in Native American art; it appears winged and seems to radiate light and vibrate with energy. Sun, moon and planets float around the figure, as do the outlines of other messengers. While clearly not a landscape painting, Messengers des trois pôles does reflect the impact of California’s (and likely Mexico’s) night skies on Paalen’s work. Gordon Onslow Ford (1912–2003), was born in England but, like Paalen, settled in Paris where he, too, studied with Léger before joining the Surrealist group. With the outbreak of World War II, he moved to New York where he delivered a series of lectures at the New School for Social Research that introduced Surrealism to some of the artists who would go on to develop Abstract Expressionism. After a year in New York, he followed Paalen to Mexico City, eventually moving to a village in Michoacán. In 1947 Onslow Ford and his wife, Jacqueline Johnson, moved to San Francisco. While Paalen was the primary theorist of the Dynaton, Onslow Ford was its organizer, inviting Paalen to join him in California and recruiting Mullican to participate in the group. In Mexico, Onslow Ford made paintings that married biomorphic forms with geometric abstraction, full of diagrammatic lines and schematic references to lakes, mountains and other landscape elements. After his move to California, he began to refine his visual language. In Forest Go Round (1951), for example, he used a system of circles, dots and lines to create images that offer viewers a glimpse into the reaches of the universe. Working in Mill Valley and later Inverness, Onslow Ford surely experienced night skies full of stars, translat-
Wolfgang Paalen, Messengers des trois pôles (Messengers from the Three Poles), 1949, oil on canvas, collection of the Lucid Art Foundation
Gordon Onslow Ford, Forest Go Round, 1951, casein on paper, collection of the Lucid Art Foundation
Gordon Onslow Ford, Sky High Hay, 1960, Parle’s paint on paper, collection of the Lucid Art Foundation; Lee Mullican, Santos, 1953, oil on canvas, private collection, courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican and Marc Selwyn Fine Art
ing that experience into visual imagery. In Forest Go Round, rays of light pulsate from the center of blue, yellow and white discs, giving the work an astral energy. Inspired by his studies of Zen Buddhism and Chinese calligraphy, he formalized his vocabulary of circles, dots and lines, which he believed were the building blocks of nature as well as the tools that would allow him to explore the inner worlds. Sky High Hay (1960) marks another reductive step in Onslow Ford’s work; limiting himself to black and white and to the strict use of circles, dots and lines, he creates an image that swallows the viewer into the cosmos. While Onslow Ford and Paalen found inspiration in the night skies, Lee Mullican (1919–1998) made paintings that radiated the sunlight of the American West. Born in Oklahoma, Mullican encountered Paalen’s ideas while serving in the army during World War II; posted in Honolulu, he eagerly read copies of Dyn at the Honolulu Academy of Fine Art. Following the war, he settled in San Francisco, where, by coincidence, Gordon Onslow Ford saw one of Mullican’s paintings and decided that he had to meet him.29 While Mullican was the least theoretical of the Dynaton artists, he shared their interest in making paintings that accessed inner worlds. Like Paalen, he also felt Native American art was an important source, and some of his works refer directly to native culture.30 An untitled painting from 1949, for example, contains exploding blue and white striations organized in dense patterns similar to those in Navajo sand paintings. In another untitled painting from the same year, he worked with an entirely different palette, creating a web of golden beams of light or exploding stars against a red background. In Santos (1950) Mullican’s palette is more muted; an orb of glowing light hovers against a background of golden striations. The title, which translates literally to “saints,” also refers to small statues of saints popular throughout the Southwest. Mullican spoke of painting “guardians,” and
the simple outlined forms in this painting suggest holy figures bathed in a spiritual light. By 1952 the Dynaton more or less disbanded and Mullican soon left Northern California—spending much of the rest of his life in Southern California, where he taught at UCLA—and in Taos, using the landscape and cultures of the Southwest as the basis for luminous images made in his signature, striated style. Looking back on his career in 1980, he wrote, “I explored inner-space, outer-space. There were walks in landscapes that appeared from the depths of the mind.… There was an energy that moved from canvas to canvas and drawing to drawing.”31 Frederick S. Wight While Mullican was teaching at UCLA, Frederick Wight (1902–1986), the director of the art gallery at the university, was among his close friends. In fact, Wight curated an exhibition of Mullican’s paintings in 1969.32 And although Wight was also a painter, he is better known for his work as a curator and museum director. He began painting early in life, took landscape lessons during his youth in Massachusetts and studied painting at the University of Virginia and later the highly traditional Académie Julien in Paris. He returned to Massachusetts in 1925 where, like Agnes Pelton, he made his living painting portraits. In 1936 he married an English woman, Joan Bingham, and traveled with her to Europe, where he experimented with Surrealism. In 1938 they returned to Chatham, Massachusetts, where Wight began writing and publishing novels and short stories. He served in the Navy in World War II and on his return, used the GI Bill to enroll in Paul Sach’s renowned museum course at Harvard. The course marked the beginning of a successful museum career, first at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art and then at UCLA, where he became the first director of their art gallery (later named the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery) in 1953.33
After two decades producing exhibitions of and writing about American modernists like Arthur Dove, Morris Graves, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Marsden Hartley and John Marin as well as Los Angeles Light and Space artists Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman, Wight retired in 1973.34 With retirement, he dedicated himself full time to painting, making a series of vibrant, shimmering images of Southern California’s deserts and coastline. In his paintings Wight reveals his affinities with the artists he presented. Like those of Dove, Graves and Hartley, his landscapes move between abstraction and representation. Michael Duncan has written of the connection between Wight’s work and Agnes Pelton’s and Raymond Jonson’s depictions of an “ecstatic nature.”35 His work is unique, though, in that most of his paintings feature multiple suns or moons, suffusing them with light and lending his work an animated, metaphysical quality. Some of Wight’s late paintings, like Sky Event (1969), verge on total abstraction. It presents a close view of a comet streaking across a sky dotted with stars, its
tail widening in an arc of yellow, orange and red. The painting could easily have been made thirty years earlier by one of the TPG artists, as could Trace (1981), a canvas dominated by three radiant suns flanked by lines of energy. In other works, like Two Moons (1984) and Moon Descending beyond Date Palms (1984), Wight created fairly standard landscape compositions featuring palm trees and ocean; yet these images defy tradition through their depiction of the moon’s movement across the sky. Tame Palms (1982) and Image of an Hour (1979) present tightly cropped views of bright blue skies. Truncated palm trees cut across or intrude at the edges of these paintings; their real focus is the bright California sun, which Wight depicts in motion. The pulsing rays of sunlight in these paintings illustrate Wight’s admiration for Mullican’s paintings and their striated light. Wight’s real subject was not so much landscape, but the passage of time in both quotidian and cosmic terms. Writing about the work of John Marin, he commented, “Marin understood the element of time in art which makes for greatness. For the rhythm and swell of time in the world
Lee Mullican, Untitled, 1949, oil on canvas, collection of the Lucid Art Foundation, courtesy of the Estate of Lee Mullican and Marc Selwyn Fine Art
Frederick S. Wight, Sky Event, 1969, oil on canvas, courtesy the estate of the artist and Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles
Near right: Frederick S. Wight, Two Moons, 1984, oil on canvas, courtesy the estate of the artist and Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles Below: Frederick S. Wight, Trace, 1981, oil on canvas, courtesy the estate of the artist and Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles Far upper right: Frederick S. Wight, Moon Descending beyond Date Palms, 1984, oil on canvas, courtesy the estate of the artist and Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles Far lower right: Frederick S. Wight, Image of an Hour, 1979, oil on canvas, courtesy the estate of the artist and Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles
about us is different from the bounded ripple of time within. There is a tension between the two, once we are aware, and it is out of this tension that art can be made.”36 As Michael Duncan has pointed out, he could have been writing of his own paintings, in which he captured the tension between his personal experience of time and time on a cosmic scale. Stephen Prokopoff has written that these late paintings are “characterized by a growing sense of inwardness, a concentration that focuses the poetic precision on a world where appearances form a thin mantle drawn over the mysterious forces animating nature.”37 While Wight was not a follower of Theosophy, Prokopoff’s language evokes the Theosophists’ veil, which separates us from true understanding of the mechanisms of the universe. And this understanding seems, in part, to be what Wight was seeking as he made these works. The only artist in this exhibition who
was not a member of a larger group, Wight’s metaphysical approach to landscape links him to a long tradition of painters seeking to capture the sharp, crystalline light of the mountains, coasts and deserts of the American West—painters for whom this light held a transformative, spiritual meaning. This exhibition presents Wight’s paintings together with those of the TPG and the Dynaton not as a story of influence but rather as a conversation between artists with shared ideas about art and about place. There is something specifically wonderful about the light of the West. And that quality of wonder has inspired generations of artists not only to depict Western light, but to seek in it the magical and the mystical. Courtney Gilbert, Ph.D. Curator of Visual Arts
1. Oral history interview with Lee Mullican, 1992 May 22–1993 Mar. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 2. James Monte and Anne Glusker, The Transcendental Painting Group: New Mexico, 1938–1941 (Albuquerque: The Albuquerque Museum, 1982), n.p. 3. Alfred Morang, Transcendental Painting (Santa Fe: American Foundation for Transcendental Painting, 1940), as quoted in Monte and Glusker, n.p. 4. Morang, as quoted in Monte & Glusker, n.p. 5. See, for example, John Dorfman, “Mystic Vistas,” Art & Antiques Magazine 36, no. 9 (August 2013): 62-69. 6. Monte and Glusker, n.p. 7. Malin Wilson-Powell, “Earth Rhythms: Hot and Rhythmic and Varied,” in To Form from Air: Music and the Art of Raymond Jonson (Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2010), 19. 8. Sylvia Cranston, The Extraordinary Life & Influence of Helena Blavatsky: Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993), xviii. 9. See William Quan Judge, “Occult Vibrations: A Fragment of a Conversation with H.P.B. in 1888,” as reprinted on www.blavatsky.net. 10. The impact of Theosophy on modernism has recently attracted the attention of an international group of scholars. Their project, Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, Modernism and the Arts, c. 1875–1960, has resulted in several projects and publications including Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape and the American West, an exhibition at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan, Utah (April 14–December 10, 2014), catalogue forthcoming. 11. Wilson-Powell, 16. 12. Wilson-Powell, 19. 13. Wilson-Powell, 23. 14. Dane Rudhyar, The Transcendental Movement in Painting (Taos, 1938, unpublished, copyright by American Foundation for Transcendental Painting, Inc., 1939), as quoted in Monte and Glusker, n.p. 15. Helena Blavatsky often referred to astral light, a light that is simultaneously cosmic and divine, in her writings. See, for example, The Secret Doctrine (1888).
16. Karen Moss, “Art and Life Illuminated: Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin and Florence Miller Pierce,” in Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce, ed. Karen Moss (London & New York: Merrell and Orange County Museum of Art, 2009), 27, 32. 17. Moss, 33. 18. Walt Wiggins, William Lumpkins: Pioneer Abstract Expressionist (New Mexico: Pintores Press, 1990), 11–14 19. Lumpkins quoted in Wiggins, 17. 20. Michael Zakian, Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature (Palm Springs: Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1995), 11, 63, 64. 21. Agnes Pelton papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll 3426, frame 590, as quoted in Zakian, 64. 22. Moss, 17, 19, 23. 23. Tiska Blankenship, “Agnes Pelton and Florence Miller Pierce: The Two Women Artists in the Transcendental Painting Group (1938–1945)” in Women Artists of the American West, ed. Susan R. Ressler (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). 24. Pelton quoted in Blankenship, 164. 25. Agnes Pelton papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, roll 3427, frame 544, as quoted in Zakian, 56. 26. Published between 1942 and 1944, Dyn appeared in six issues, including a double issue (nos. 4/5) dedicated to what Paalen called “Amerindian” art. 27. Wolfgang Paalen, “The New Image,” trans. Robert Motherwell, Dyn no. 1 (1942), 15. 28. Wolfgang Paalen, The Beam in the Balance, undated ms for 3 act play, Paalen Foundation Archives, Tepoztlán, Mexico. 29. Oral history interview with Lee Mullican, 1992 May 22–1993 Mar. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 30. The 1951 Dynaton exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art actually included an entire gallery of Native American objects. Oral history interview with Lee Mullican, 1992 May 22–1993 Mar. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 31. Lee Mullican, unpublished typescript, July 1980, as quoted in Carol S. Eliel, Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest of Sun (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2005), 9. 32. Oral history interview with Lee Mullican, 1992 May 22–1993 Mar. 4, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Eliel, 131. 33. Stephen S. Prokopoff, “The Art of Frederick S. Wight,” in Sudden Nature: The Art of Frederick S. Wight: 1902–1986 (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, 1991), 13–18. 34. Elizabeth Shepherd, “Introduction,” in Sudden Nature, 8; Michael Duncan, “So There We Are: Frederick Wight’s Late Landscapes,” in Seeing the Light—Postmodern Luminous Landscapes by Frederick S. Wight (Hollywood, CA: Louis Stern Fine Arts, 2008), 9, 13. 35. Duncan, 14. 36. Frederick Wight, “John Marin—Frontiersman,” in John Marin: A Memorial Exhibition (Los Angeles: UCLA Art Galleries, 1955), n.p., as quoted in Duncan, 13. 37. Prokopoff, 20.
Sun Valley Center for the Arts P O Box 656 Sun Valley, ID 83353
The Center gratefully acknowledges the following lenders to the exhibition: Broschofsky Galleries, Ketchum Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles Lucid Art Foundation, Inverness, CA Private Collections Jeri L. Wolfson Collection Cover: Frederick S. Wight, Tame Palms, March 1982, oil on canvas, courtesy the estate of the artist and Louis Stern Fine Arts, Los Angeles
The Center hours & location in Ketchum: M–F 9am–5pm, Sats in Jul & Aug, 11am–5pm 191 Fifth Street East, Ketchum, Idaho 208.726.9491 www.sunvalleycenter.org
Art History Lectures:
Enchanted Modernities: Theosophical Thought in the History of 20th-century Art and Music with Dr. Christopher Scheer Thu, Jun 12, 5:30–7pm The Center, Ketchum $10 / $12 nonmembers Dr. Christopher Scheer, a musicologist at Utah State University and one of the curators of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum’s exhibition Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape and the American West, will address the impact of Theosophy on developments in modern art and music. Founded in New York City in 1875 by a group that included the mystic Helena Blavatsky, the Theosophical Society united Western esoteric thought with Eastern philosophical and religious ideas in an attempt to understand the mysteries of the universe. Among the artists whose work he’ll address are the composers Dane Rudhyar and Henry Cowell, as well as the painters Agnes Pelton, Emil Bisttram, and Raymond Jonson.
From the Dynaton to Light and Space: Metaphysics in California Art with Dr. Courtney Gilbert Thu, Jun 19, 5:30–7pm The Center, Ketchum $10 / $12 nonmembers Courtney Gilbert, Curator of Visual Arts at The Center, will trace the metaphysical use of light in California art. The talk will feature artwork by the Dynaton artists of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Frederick Wight’s landscape paintings from the 1970s and 1980s, and the work of Southern California’s Light and Space artists from the 1960s and 1970s.
Evening Exhibition Tours Thu, Jul 10 and Thu, Aug 14, 5:30pm Free at The Center, Ketchum Enjoy a glass of wine as you tour the exhibition with The Center’s curators and gallery guides.
Gallery Walks Fri, Jul 11 and Fri, Aug 8, 5–7pm Free at the Center, Ketchum Start your Gallery Walk at The Center!