Agnes Pelton, Ahmi in Egypt

Carrie Moyer: Agnes Pelton's Ahmi in Egypt from 1931 gives the sense of a kind of film still. It has this kind of glowing light and really hard shadows. 

Narrator: Artist Carrie Moyer.

Carrie Moyer: So we're looking at something that is silhouetted. We assume it's a kind of hillside or some abutment with this fantastic—I almost want to say extension or some kind of flower—that's glowing to the left, with the swan in the foreground. It's so grandiose in this interesting way. 

This painting was made a few years after Tutankhamun's tomb was found this idea about ancient Egypt, and the fascination that designers and artists had with ancient Egypt, feeds into the ideas around art deco and the aesthetics of art deco. You can see this in the painting because everything in it incredibly rounded and stylized, there's something obviously magical about this. It feels a little bit more descriptive than some of her other paintings, which tend to be more abstract. So this feels like it's part of a fairytale, or some kind of encampment or something where the protagonists are off to the left, but the colors in it are completely saturated and vibrant, and for that reason really unusual for this time.