Agnes Pelton

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Agnes Pelton and Georgia O’Keeffe:The Window and the Wall

Michael Zakian

In 1929 Agnes Pelton painted Incarnation (fig. 39), an iconic image of a floating

red flower. It was created as a knowing and unusual response to the work of

her younger contemporary Georgia O’Keeffe. Pelton had begun painting her

nature-based, transcendental abstractions only a few years earlier—in the

winter of 1926—while living in relative seclusion in a historic windmill in the

Hamptons.1 Her compositions arose from unconscious sources, usually from dreams

or meditative states that she referred to as “waking visions.” Not one to work in

series or produce variations on a theme, she conceived of each painting as a unique

embodiment of an independent mental image. Drawing inspiration from an interior

source, she almost never made paintings in conscious response to the work of

other artists.

O’Keeffe had introduced her enlarged flowers to the public in a 1925 group

exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in New York, curated by Alfred Stieglitz.2 The

fact that Pelton responded quickly and so uncharacteristically to the art underscores

the curious and provocative parallels that ran through the two artists’ lives. Differing

in age by only six years, they moved in nearly overlapping circles, shared friends

(such as arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan), and may have known of each other but

probably never met. Both studied with Arthur Wesley Dow and, for a short period

of time around 1920, both had studios in Manhattan.

Most notably, when both women were in middle age, they decided to leave

the East Coast and make the desert their home and source of creative inspiration.

In 1929 O’Keeffe made her first trip to northern New Mexico. She would eventually

be hailed as an icon of American culture for her independent, pioneering spirit. In

January 1932 Pelton left New York and moved permanently to Cathedral City, a small

hamlet in the California desert just outside Palm Springs. For nearly thirty years,

until her death, she worked without accolade or fanfare, known only to small

Fig. 39Agnes Pelton, Incarnation, 1929

Oil on canvas, 26 x 22 in. (66 x 55.9 cm)

Collection of LeighAnne Stainer, Freemont, California

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handfuls of admirers, including the much younger Florence Miller Pierce and her

colleagues in the Transcendental Painting Group in New Mexico.3 When Pelton died

in 1961, all but forgotten and unknown, her heirs were offered paintings from her

studio as keepsakes. No one chose her abstractions.4

In Pelton’s Incarnation, a disembodied red bloom radiates heat and light as it

floats in the center of a bright-yellow sky. Curtains on either side have just opened,

revealing a miraculous vision. At the bottom stand blue icebergs. For Pelton the

flower symbolized a life-giving force that descends from above, providing warmth

to the cold earth below. It is not simply a plant but a veritable sun. As with all her

abstractions, this painting is about process, becoming, and a vital, nurturing spirit

that animates all of reality.

As one might expect, Pelton was critical of O’Keeffe’s flowers, which she

saw as one-dimensional, materialist, and decorative. In her journals from the time,

she recorded a rare comment on the work of another artist, noting that O’Keeffe

Fig. 40Georgia O’Keeffe

Lake George Window (Farmhouse

Window and Door), 1929Oil on canvas

40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the

Richard D. Brixley Bequest

Fig. 41Georgia O’KeeffeLight Coming on the Plains III,

1917Watercolor on newsprint117/8 x 87/8 in. (30.1 x 22.5 cm)

Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas

was too concerned with external appearance. She complimented O’Keeffe for

painting “enlarged flowers—this way the soul of a flower can possess the whole

heart of one gazing at it”—but criticized her for creating only a formal solution:

“She sees first outside . . . then with charming effort makes a decorative canvas

of it.”5

Pelton may not have been fair in emphasizing the decorative, but she

was correct to note that O’Keeffe had an obsession with physical matter and

material form. As seen in Yellow Cactus (1929; fig. 59), O’Keeffe conceived and

rendered her flowers as solid and massive, looming and confrontational. Filling the

entire canvas, squeezing out excess space, these forms force themselves into

the face of the viewer. Even in an example of modest proportions, such as

Poppies (1926; fig. 8), the visual impact is bold, assertive, and uncompromising.

O’Keeffe’s flowers exist as emphatic, organic matter, dominating and consuming

space until they become one with the solid picture plane.

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Fig. 42Georgia O’Keeffe

Music, Pink and Blue No. 2,1918

Oil on canvas 35 x 291/8 in. (88.9 x 74 cm)

Whitney Museum of AmericanArt, New York, Gift of Emily FisherLandau in honor of Tom Armstrong

Fig. 43Agnes Pelton, Meadowlark’s Song, Winter, 1926

Oil on canvas, 25 x 20 in. (63.5 x 50.8 cm)

Collection of Maurine St. Gaudens, Pasadena, California

By contrast, Pelton thought of her paintings as views through a window

Like all her abstractions, Incarnation is conceived as a stage set and provides a

glimpse into a fictional space. When she had her first one-person exhibition of

abstractions at the Montross Gallery in New York City in November 1929, Pelton

explained, “These 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.”6 Through these windows Pelton imagines and creates entire worlds,

offering access to an ideal place just beyond our own. When O’Keeffe depicted a

window that very year, in Lake George Window (Farmhouse Window and Door) (1929;

fig. 40), she focused on the solid architectural frame. Instead of showing the glass as

transparent, she rendered it as opaque, making it as dense and impenetrable as the

surrounding wall. The metaphor of the window and the wall provides an intriguing

foil for understanding the deeper relationships between Pelton and O’Keeffe, artists

who shared biographical details but maintained distinct and diverging world views.

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slivers of color look like cuts or fissures within the flat plane of the paper. This

conception dominates her otherwise ethereal and transcendent Light Coming on the

Plains III (1917; fig. 41), which depicts the morning sun just before it breaks the

horizon.8 Although the image hints at sublime distance and nature’s powers of

transformation, O’Keeffe frames the event within an abstract arch. The effect is one

of viewing the scene through a parabolic opening in an implied wall.

Pelton saw the world as too complex and multidimensional ever to be resolved

successfully into a single flat plane. One of her first abstractions is Meadowlark’s

Song, Winter (1926; fig. 43), a recently rediscovered work that provides fruitful

comparison with O’Keeffe’s Music, Pink and Blue No. 2.9 In this powerfully

synaesthetic painting, Pelton used spiraling vertical ribbons to depict the song of

a bird. These upright arabesques turn and twist dynamically—an expansive,

generative force that enlivens the air and space around it.10 Blue sky appears broken

into a series of distinct arcs and facets. These breaks and discontinuities—a spiritual

rethinking of formal Cubism—represent differing forces, moments, or dimensions

of reality. More than just a painting of sound, this lush and luxuriant work conveys

the complex pulses and burgeoning energies that drive the natural world.

Time

Because Pelton conceived of her paintings as offering a window on to another

world, they involve time. As seen in Ecstasy (1928; fig. 68), she conveyed

time by depicting a process, such as growth or transformation. She explained

that this composition represents a yellow lily that had experienced a burst

of growth so vigorous and ecstatic that it could no longer support itself and had

begun to collapse and die.11 In one static image Pelton represents an entire span

of life and death, merging Sigmund Freud’s opposing concepts of Eros and Thanatos

into a single composition that is celebratory as well as mournful.

Time and transformation are also the subjects of Wells of Jade (1931; fig. 35),

in which floating, balloonlike forms represent evaporating water vapor. On the left,

droplets have condensed on a smaller bubble and drip back into the pond or lake

below, symbolized by parallel bands of wavy horizontal lines. This painting

represents the entire cycle of water, from liquid to gas to liquid once again. In Future

(1941; fig. 12), Pelton depicts heaven—a time beyond mortal time on earth. Heavy

stone gates mark the passage beyond the physical world.12 Glowing rectangles of

colored light float in the sky, offering a comforting message that everyone has

a place in paradise. Just as Ecstasy and Wells of Jade represent the life cycle of a

flower and water, respectively, Future represents the life—and afterlife—of a human

being. For Pelton, time was a dynamic, cyclical process that is continually unfolding

and never ending.

Various critics have commented on the connection between O’Keeffe’s

paintings and the wall. Carter Ratcliff noted that O’Keeffe “is an artist of surfaces.”

Achille Bonito Oliva wrote that the strength of her work arises from “the

constructive force of a sort of organic architecture.”7 Although she broke with rigid,

rectilinear geometry by introducing gently cursive feminine and synaesthetic

shapes, her strongly tactile art celebrated external form and asserted the elemental

power of the critical two-dimensional picture plane.

An interest in walls and in solid planar surfaces runs throughout O’Keeffe’s

career. Her first mature works were motivated by a desire to render the aural, the

fluid, and the organic, but the idea of the flat wall dominates. Early abstractions,

such as Music, Pink and Blue No. 2 (1918; fig. 42), use lyrical, rhythmic patterning

to convey musical sounds. But the even-handed dispersal of forms across the

painting suggests mere inflections within a dominant planar surface. In other works

of her formative years, such as Blue Lines X (1916; fig. 44), the thin and fragile

Fig. 44Georgia O’KeeffeBlue Lines X, 1916

Watercolor and graphite on paper 25 x 19 in. (63.5 x 48.3 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz

Collection, 1969

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While Pelton favored representing grand, epic sequences within one canvas,

O’Keeffe painted only single moments in time. Her tendency was to freeze and

suspend time, turning the temporal into the eternal. In the mid- to late 1920s she

produced a series of works showing the skunk cabbage.13 Because it is the first to

appear after the winter, this plant is seen as a symbol of spring and the annual

renewal of life. Each work in the series captured a distinct stage in the life cycle. All

were conceived and rendered as separate moments in time. The six canvases in

O’Keeffe’s Jack-in-Pulpit series (see No.1; fig. 60), produced in March 1930, represent

different approaches to treating artistic form, ranging from realism to almost pure

abstraction. Although the jack-in-the-pulpit plant has an intriguing life cycle

and bears bright-scarlet berries at the end of the season, O’Keeffe gave prime

importance to formal and pictorial concerns, focusing on the ways one can make

this plant conform to the strict logic of the picture plane.

Aspiration

O’Keeffe was fascinated by novel forms—by the innovative, modern forms

of avant-garde art as well as by the striking and inspiring shapes of the

modern, vertical city. From 1925 to 1929 she produced a series of New

York City landscapes that celebrated the impact and power of the

new, focusing on skyscrapers, as seen in City Night (fig. 45) and Shelton Hotel,

N.Y. No. 1, both from 1926.14 O’Keeffe rendered her buildings as solid geometric slabs

and towering walls, climbing upward to reach new extremes of height. Adhering

to the ethos behind the 1920s search for the “Great American Thing,” she thought

of achievement in terms of worldly accomplishment and material monumentality.15

Pelton also addressed the theme of heights in the late 1920s but focused on

spiritual desire rather than physical achievement. The Guide (1929; fig. 46) is a

visionary, theatrical composition. An abstract scaffolding of arching lines represents

curtains that unfold in successive layers to reveal a solitary star, the otherworldly

messenger or guide promised in the title. The composition was inspired by Joseph

Stella’s depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge, painted over a period of twenty years,

but instead of celebrating human feats of engineering and technology, Pelton

focused on the star as a beacon of hope. In Illumination (1930; fig. 1), she painted

not man-made skyscrapers but reaching, mountainous shapes that yearn to go

beyond the everyday world. By contrast, she identified the horizontal, sinuous

forms at the bottom of the composition as earthbound, lethargic, and negative. After

completing the painting, Pelton repainted and greatly enlarged the star in order to

emphasize a transcendental message.16

Pelton developed this dualistic symbolism further in Orbits (1934; fig. 73),

which depicts Mount San Jacinto, the mountain above Palm Springs, floating in a

state of mystical freedom. The low, black, triangular hill on the horizon symbolizes

an earthly and negative “dark, sharp mountain of striving.”17 For Pelton, actual

sublimity took place in a spiritual realm, free from practical concerns. She embraced

and avidly followed an array of spiritual disciplines, ranging from Helena Blavatsky’s

theosophy to Agni Yoga, a more obscure doctrine advocated by the Russian émigré

painter Nicholas Roerich. The title Illumination reflects her belief in a cosmic

consciousness, a source of a-rational insight that comes from a higher plane.18

Desert

The contrast between these two artists appears most pointedly in the desert

paintings that they produced after moving to the West. Pelton’s Sand Storm

(1932; fig. 71) is probably her first desert abstraction and features a sun that

has been obliterated by swirling gusts of sand. As she explained in her

notebooks, the storm is passing, and the air is beginning to clear.19 The sky responds

by sending forth a rainbow, a reassuring sign reflecting Pelton’s conviction that

the world is essentially good and benevolent. Although a sandstorm is harsh and

unpleasant, her interpretation is exuberant and optimistic. Even Pelton’s realist

desert landscapes, such as San Gorgonio in Spring (1932; fig. 10) and Seeds of Date

(1935; fig. 74), reflect her distinctive world view, for they focus on moments when

the desert is blooming, flourishing, and procreative.

O’Keeffe’s Purple Hills (1935; fig. 11) is typical of her New Mexico paintings,

reflecting a very different sensibility. She took special delight in rendering the desert

as empty and arid. Her achievement was to perceive and capture a rare and delicate

beauty in the bleak and barren landscape, creased by stark, waterless arroyos. When

life is present, as in Part of the Cliffs (1937; fig. 62), it appears minimally, as a slight

band of green. As O’Keeffe explained in 1939: “A red hill doesn’t touch everyone’s

heart as it touches mine and I suppose there is no reason why it should. The red

hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands roll away

outside my door—hill after hill—red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that

you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out

there in the many miles of badlands.”20

In earth-color pigments O’Keeffe found a ready identity between her

landscape subjects and the flat surface of her paintings. By using paint in a blunt,

dry, and matter-of-fact manner, she further mimicked the dryness of the scorched

land around her. Pelton preferred to enrich her paint with oil media. Working in

layers and with glazes, she created limpid, translucent, glowing surfaces. Whereas

O’Keeffe made paintings with flat walls of dry, terse color, Pelton used paint in a

lush, sumptuous manner to reinforce the idea of a wondrous window revealing

fantastic scenes.

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Fig. 46Agnes Pelton, The Guide, 1929

Oil on canvas, 301/2 x 201/4 in. (77.5 x 51.4 cm)

Orange County Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided through prior gift of Lois Outerbridge

Fig. 45Georgia O’Keeffe, City Night, 1926


The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of Funds from the Regis Corporation, Mr. and Mrs. W. John Driscoll, the Beim Foundation, the Larsen Fund, and by public subscription

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Conclusion

In comparing the art of Agnes Pelton and Georgia O’Keeffe, one cannot escape

the overwhelming differences in their personalities and perspectives. Pelton

was a shy, withdrawn, romantic spiritualist who preferred to dwell within the

ineffable mysteries of the human mind. O’Keeffe, the pragmatic realist,

favored the hard, factual worlds of matter and culture. She deserves her

considerable fame and reputation as an archetypal American Modernist, who

grasped the achievements of advanced European painting in the opening decades

of the twentieth century and adapted these concepts to distinctly American subjects

and ideals. Employing imagery that was direct, uncomplicated, and accessible,

O’Keeffe created a body of work that fused the soft and sensuous with the tough

and solid. In effecting this balance, she combined two essential currents within the

American character—the hedonistic and the puritanical—in a way that has captured

the public’s imagination and that offers a fascinating window into ourselves and

our culture.

Pelton, for her part, does not deserve the neglect of history. Her mode of

modern art does not fit into ready categories but provides a fascinating parallel and

alternative to the work of the Stieglitz circle.22 Perhaps it is accurate to say that she

was a modern painter who did not embrace Modernism. The rational, critical side

of Modernism tended to encourage pessimism, reductivism, and skepticism,

concepts foreign to her sensibility. Pelton’s art was based on opposing ideals of

optimism, exuberance, and beneficence. In the end, her deeply personal, visionary

paintings are highly eccentric but still belong to a grand tradition within American

culture. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, she was a transcendentalist who perceived the

spirit within nature; like Henry David Thoreau, she was the staunch individualist

who chose a reclusive life in order to define the parameters of her own existence

and work. The paintings she left us continue to offer windows on to new and

unexpected worlds that deserve further exploration.

O’Keeffe preferred the desert when it was devoid of life. This aspect of her

sensibility is captured in remarks she made in 1939 about her interest in bones: “To

me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living

than the animals walking around. . . . The bones seem to cut sharply to the center

of something that is keenly alive on the desert even tho’ it is vast and

empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all its beauty.”21 As seen in

such paintings as Goat’s Horn with Red (1945), or Pedernal – From the Ranch I

(1956; fig. 65), which features a view through a pelvis, these spare yet sensuous,

organic shapes have considerable aesthetic appeal. But when O’Keeffe declared her

preference for the desiccated, lifeless remains of animals to real living creatures, she

revealed herself as startlingly lacking in empathy. She was able to find great solace

in the “vast and empty and untouchable” forms of the arid desert probably because

there was something deep within herself that was equally empty and untouchable.

In contrast, Pelton was a wellspring of empathy. The credibility of her symbols

arose from her willingness to identify completely with her subjects. She not only

observed stars glowing silently in the night sky but also felt a powerful affinity with

them and believed that they shone for her. Her art arose directly from her belief in

human sympathy and compassion—and stands as a polar opposite to the work of

O’Keeffe, who celebrated the desert because it “knows no kindness with all its beauty.”

Vessels

Pelton’s loving sensitivity and unembarrassed empathy are seen in a group

of paintings based on vessels, such as Star Gazer (1929; fig. 47), Even Song

(1934; fig. 48), and Memory (1937; fig. 76). In Star Gazer, a curious hybrid

symbol represents an opening flower bud tightly nestled within a small glass

vase. By conflating the natural and the man-made, Pelton asserts her faith that there

is a higher consciousness within the universe that protects and nurtures emerging

life. She identified the vessel in Even Song as a ceramic jar that had attained a state

of enlightenment and glows with inner illumination as it sends forth flowing waters.

She remarked that this vessel was her own body, a clear association of nature’s

abundance with a feminine, procreative force. In Memory, a thin, narrow vase serves

as a conduit and repository for the experiences of a lifetime.

O’Keeffe addressed the theme of vessels and organic life in Head with

Broken Pot (1943), one of a small series on the subject. Both skull (nature) and pot

(culture) are shattered, and the ceramic olla, shown from an angle that reveals none

of its aesthetic qualities, is incapable of providing comfort to the unfortunate

individual resting within it. Although this painting can be seen as a political

statement about the decimation of Native American culture, it is primarily an

expression of O’Keeffe’s frank and unflinching acceptance of mortality.

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Fig. 47Agnes Pelton, Star Gazer, 1929


Private collection

Fig. 48Agnes Pelton, Even Song, 1934


Collection of LeighAnne Stainer, Fremont, California

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Building’: Gender, Sexuality, Modernism,and Urban Imagery,” Winterthur Portfolio 35(Winter 2000): 269–89.

15.Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing:

Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935

(Berkeley ca: University of California Press,1999). The phrase “Great American Thing”was coined by Georgia O’Keeffe to refer tothe desire among many artists and writersin the 1920s and 1930s to create a new typeof art and literature that would be distinctly and uniquely American.

16.Zakian, Agnes Pelton, 56, 111 n. 38.17. Ibid., 73.18.Pelton read and copied passages from

Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic

Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of

the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Innes &Sons, 1901). Bucke was a Canadian doctorwho supervised a mental institution in the years before Sigmund Freud’s writings.Fascinated by the workings of the mind, he set out to understand humanpsychology, not by probing negativephenomena, such as neuroses, but

by focusing on its positive aspects,specifically on people’s capacity to haveenlightened, mystical experiences.

19.Pelton, quoted in Zakian, Agnes Pelton, 70.20.Georgia O’Keeffe, “About Myself,” in

Georgia O’Keeffe: Exhibition of Oils and

Pastels, exhib. cat. (New York: An AmericanPlace, 1939), reprinted in Lynes, Catalogue

Raisonné, 1099.21. Ibid.22.Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a

photographer, publisher, and art dealer who used his periodicals and galleries topromote young American Modernistpainters. The artists in his circle—includingMarsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin,and Charles Demuth, in addition toStieglitz’s wife, Georgia O’Keeffe—allproduced abstractions inspired by nature. See Sarah Greenough, Modern Art

and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His

New York Galleries (Washington, D.C.:National Gallery of Art; Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2000).

Notes

1.Agnes Pelton lived in the HaygroundWindmill in Water Mill, near Bridgehampton,Long Island, New York, from October 1921until the summer of 1931. For details aboutthe artist’s life, see Michael Zakian, Agnes

Pelton: Poet of Nature, exhib. cat. (PalmSprings ca: Palm Springs Desert Museum,1995). Her journals, notebooks, andcorrespondence have been preserved as theAgnes Pelton Papers 1881–1961, Archives ofAmerican Art, Smithsonian Institution,Washington, D.C., reels 3426–27.

2.Barbara Buhler Lynes, Georgia O’Keeffe:

Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven ct: YaleUniversity Press; Washington, D.C.: NationalGallery of Art; Abiquiu nm: GeorgiaO’Keeffe Foundation, 1999), vol. 2, 1143.

3.Agnes Pelton and New Mexico ModernistRaymond Jonson learned of each other in1933 through the Modernist composer,astrologer, and artist Dane Rudhyar. Theybegan a correspondence that lasted fordecades. When Jonson founded theTranscendental Painting Group (TPG) in NewMexico in 1938, Pelton was elected its firsthonorary president. Pelton had journeyedfrom New York to Taos in 1919 as a guest ofMabel Dodge Luhan (then known as MabelDodge Sterne)—a full decade beforeO’Keeffe’s first visit—but most probably shedid not return to participate in the activitiesof the TPG. Pelton never learned to drive.During the height of the TPG she was nearlysixty years old and did not like to travel,especially over long distances. She stayed intouch with Jonson and the TPG by post.

4.Nancy Strow Sheley, “Bringing Light to Life:The Art of Agnes Pelton (1881–1961)” (PhDdiss., University of Kansas, 2000), 265.

5.Pelton, quoted in Zakian, Agnes Pelton, 53.Sheley, “Bringing Light to Life” (95, n. 182),comments that Pelton’s notebook attributesthese remarks to “GMP,” suggesting thatthey may not be her own words. Thepassage does refer to Pelton in the thirdperson, yet it is filled with the eccentricterminology and syntax typical of her own writing. Regardless of who first madethis observation, the fact that Peltonrepeated it without comment or correction is a good indication that she agreed with the sentiment.

6.Pelton, quoted in Zakian, Agnes Pelton, 53.7. Carter Ratcliff, “Georgia O’Keeffe and ‘the

Great American Thing,’” in Georgia O’Keeffe,ed. Bice Curiger (Ostfildern-Ruit: HatjeCantz, 2003), 29; Achille Bonito Oliva, “AConstellation of Forms,” in Richard Marshall,Achille Bonito Oliva, and Yvonne Scott,Georgia O’Keeffe: Nature and Abstraction,exhib. cat. (Dublin: Irish Museum of ModernArt; Milan: Skira; Vancouver: Vancouver ArtGallery, 2007), 27.

8. For a discussion of this series, see JudithZilczer, “‘Light Coming on the Plains’:Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sunrise Series,” Artibus et

Historiae, no. 40 (1999): 191–208.9. This painting had not been located when

I organized Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature

in 1995, and was not included in thatretrospective. It appeared on the LosAngeles art market in early 2008.

10.Pelton identified with the upright arabesqueand in 1932 adopted the image of a spiraling“green flame over a white triangle abovedarkness” as her personal symbol. It drawsupon William Hogarth’s “Line of Beauty,” adouble inflected curve, but the analogy withan illuminating flame conveys a higherspiritual calling. See Zakian, Agnes Pelton, 73.

11. Ibid., 50, 53.12.Pelton employed active symbols. Future

is filled with various symbols based onprocesses that define steps on the journeytoward paradise. The orange zigzag linehovering at the right represents the back-and-forth movements of a weaver’sshuttlecock and stands for the spiritual worknecessary to enter heaven. The darktriangular shapes at the left edge and upper-left corner stand for the shutter of a camera,which opens in a spiral to reveal a heavenlyvision. See ibid., 93.

13. Charles C. Eldredge, “Skunk Cabbages,Seasons, and Cycles,” in Georgia O’Keeffe:

Visions of the Sublime, ed. Joseph S.Czestochowski (Memphis: Torch Press;International Arts, 2004), 63–73.

14. For discussions of O’Keeffe’s New Yorkskyscraper paintings, see: Anna C. Chave,“‘Who Will Paint New York?’: ‘The World’sNew Art Center’ and the SkyscraperPaintings of Georgia O’Keeffe,” American Art

5 (Winter–Spring 1991): 87–107; and VivienGreen Fryd, “Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘Radiator

Documents

Agnes Pelton