In Agnes Pelton’s Ebullient Paintings, the Cosmos Is Flush with Gentle Energy

In 1932, at age fifty, Agnes Pelton, moved from Long Island to the desert town of Cathedral City, California, and, shortly thereafter, witnessed a great storm. She captured her impressions in the painting Sand Storm (1932), in which a rainbow arcs over abstracted palm fronds as the bulbous rays of a blue flower-shaped sun pierce the dirty yellow atmosphere. Given Pelton’s distinctly ebullient artistic style, the rainbow appears not as a chance collision of sunlight and mist, but as evidenc