It’s O’Keeffe who points to the final frontier. As someone who chose West over East, she exemplifies the truly unorthodox view that the Modernism of New Mexico, California and the Pacific Northwest may well have constituted a more authentic and original vision of Modern Art than what was cooked up in New York. Specifically, the strain of theosophical abstraction surveyed in Maurice Tuchman’s LACMA 1986 show “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985,” where artists like Agnes Pelton (where the hell is she in “The Modern West”?!) and Lee Mullican (ditto) trumped the formalism of Eastern secular materialists with works that both looked good and laid claim to a deeper transpersonal function. It’s about time for some West Coast museum to put together a traveling exhibit making that revolutionary argument. But it probably wouldn’t make it past Kansas City.
more from the LA Weekly here.