Press Release - Three Works by Important California Painters and an American Art Deco Sculpture Join The Huntington's Collections

SAN MARINO, Calif.— The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens announced today it has acquired three works by important 20th-century California painters as well as a significant American sculpture. Charles Reiffel’s intense 1916 expressionist landscape, Bit of Silvermine – The Old Farm House, Henrietta Shore’s lilting Clivia (1930), and Gaston Lachaise’s elegant bronze Art Deco masterpiece, The Peacocks (1918), were acquired in recent months. Passion Flower (1945) by modernist painter and founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group, Agnes Pelton, officially joined the collections this week. All four pieces currently are on view in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.

“We’ve been looking to add paintings by Pelton and Shore to the collections for some time, and the resplendent Reiffel, on loan to us for the past few years, has generously been made a gift to us,” said Kevin Salatino, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Collections at The Huntington. “What a pleasure it is finally to have acquired stellar examples by each of these artists. As for Lachaise’s great The Peacocks, it beautifully complements The Huntington’s growing collection of important American sculpture from the 18th to the 20th century.”

Agnes Pelton, American (1886–1961), Passion Flower, ca. 1945, oil on canvas, 24 × 16 in.

Pelton was born in Germany to American parents, spent her early career in New York studying with Arthur Wesley Dow (with whom Georgia O’Keeffe also studied), and moved to Cathedral City, Calif., in 1932. At the time, Cathedral City was an isolated desert enclave, allowing the artist the mystical serenity she craved for her work.

In 1938, Pelton became a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group (based in Santa Fe, N.M.), which was formed to promote non-objective painting and was influenced by Theosophy, Zen Buddhism, and other forms of non-Western thought. From the 1920s on, Pelton’s paintings became more and more visionary, and her technique, relying upon a complex layering of colors, developed an inner radiance that characterizes her finest work. About her, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has written “Pelton infused an organic light into the otherwise machine-influenced Art Deco styling of the 1920s and 1930s, creating easel paintings that are like modern talismans of spiritual wonderment.