, 1938. Oil on canvas, 30 1/8 × 25 in. . Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.
The artist, understandably skeptical of Christianity, sought succor in esoteric spiritual movements, first in the teachings of New Thought and Theosophy, later in the study of Agni Yoga. In her early adulthood, Pelton painted nostalgic scenes of Grecian maidens in sylvan glades, two of which appeared in the seminal
. But following her mother’s death in 1921 and a move to live in an abandoned windmill on Long Island, the artist leaned into abstraction, mining her transcendental explorations to produce paintings like, a 1926 canvas depicting plumes of water vaporizing before a glowing orb. At 50 she permanently decamped to Cathedral City, California, a dusty town outside Palm Springs, and her work took on the expansive feel of the desert.
For Pelton, these paintings were “vehicles for her own insight into spiritual enlightenment,” says Haskell, so draining to produce that she worked on them intermittently and kept them for herself, making money by hocking more straightforward desertscapes to tourists. Though she showed her paintings occasionally, her retreat from the art world and increasingly inward-facing practice meant that by her 1961 death, Pelton, childless and unmarried, had fallen into obscurity.
As the art world rediscovers a glut of fantastic 20th-century female artists unfairly ignored by history books, Pelton often comes up alongside fellow desert painter