Big Ginger Flower, 1925

After considerable success in the New York art scene during the 1910s, Agnes Pelton moved to the East End of Long Island, in 1921. She resided for a decade in the historic Hayground mill in Water Mill, Southampton. Financed by the portraits she painted in the Hamptons, she spent much of the 1920s traveling to several exotic locations, such as Hawaii, Syria, and Greece. In the winter of 1923-24, while visiting with relatives in Honolulu, she was entranced by the exotic plant forms she saw. Pelton was already an avid gardener and the Hawaiian tropical paradise was a revelation for her. Big Ginger Flower is dated 1925, after she had returned to New York. Pelton related that her typical practice was to make studies of the flora and then work them up later, even in the following years.

At around the same time, Georgia O’Keeffe was painting her monumental flower pictures. Indeed, both artists’ close-up views of blooms share a charged immediacy and voluptuousness, using overlapping forms pushing against the confines of the canvas. These representations seem to float between abstraction and realistic description. In Big Ginger Flower, petals of red and pink swell and overflow, while retaining a sense of delicacy not seen in O’Keeffe’s work. Whereas O’Keeffe’s images are always quite self-referential, Pelton’s flower images reflect her overall awe at nature’s variety and mystery.