An ineffable quality: 'Peter Miller: Coming Home'

Oct. 1—A pale yellow, misshapen orb at the center of a black shape, ringed with dark lines like the rays from an inverse sun, appears as a kind of portal in a cloud-strewn sky.

Is it the opening to another dimension? Another plane of being? Two abstract forms, rendered in shades of pink carnation and cerise, seem either to be moving toward it or moving away. Is it the beginning of some esoteric journey they've embarked on — or is it the end?

From left to right, you can view artist Peter Miller's (1913 — 1996) oil painting Pink Figures in terms of its movement, away from the black sun and toward the black-and-gray rectangle that dominates the far side. That form, which stretches from top to bottom along the right side of the canvas, is vaguely architectural, even door-like.

Conversely, you can read it as a movement away from the dark vertical slab and toward the portal in the sky.

"This is likely a promise," says John Schaefer, owner of Peyton Wright Gallery, referring to the shape in the sky. "There seems to be a thematic commonality in a lot of Miller's work that suggests 'the journey of' and 'becoming.'"

The gallery's retrospective Peter Miller: Coming Home, an exhibition of 31 paintings from the artist's Pennsylvania estate, is the first solo exhibition of her work in New Mexico since 1948, despite her longtime association with the state she considered her spiritual home.

Yes. Peter Miller was a she.

Miller was born Henrietta Myers and likely changed her name to Peter Myers (later Miller) soon after attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in the 1930s or, perhaps, while still a student. The reason? "Collectors and critics would take her paintings more seriously if she were identified as male," writes independent scholar, curator, and gallerist Francis M. Naumann in a new monograph titled Peter Miller: Forgotten Woman of American Modernism.

She was, after all, beginning her career at a time when sexism was rampant in the art world, and female artists weren't often afforded the respect and prestige of their male counterparts.

Miller was an American surrealist whose work was in the vein of Swiss-born German artist Paul Klee and Spanish surrealist Joan Miró, who were among her greatest artistic influences. Miller was uncompromising in her devotion to the surrealist aesthetic, whose ambiguous and enigmatic nature she found best expressed a spiritual sense of transformation or transcendence. They were hallmarks of her work. She rarely dated or signed her paintings. Part of the reason she's little-known today was her steadfast devotion to the work itself and not to self-promotion.

That might seem ironic, considering she changed her name to give her work a greater standing in the art world. But it's hard not to see that name change as more of a statement than an act intended to serve an idiosyncratic, utilitarian purpose. The fact that she was a woman wasn't a secret.

Her first exhibition under the name "Peter" was at the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico (now the New Mexico Museum of Art), not long after she and her future husband, artist Charles Earle Miller, came to New Mexico. By as early as 1944, when she had the first of two exhibitions at New York City's prestigious Julien Levy Gallery, the critics were referencing her gender in their appraisals of her work.

Naumann cites a review in The Art Digest by Margaret Breuning, for instance, in which the critic states "so many suggestions of [Miró's] work are to be felt in most of Miss Miller's canvases."

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In New Mexico, Miller's artistic vision was affected by her long association with the Tewa people, whose land bordered the Española ranch she owned with her husband (although the artists divided their time between New Mexico and a horse farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania).

Peter née Henrietta and Earle Miller were married in 1935 in a ceremony officiated by a man from San Ildefonso Pueblo named Tilano Montoya. Through their association with him, they witnessed ceremonial dances and rituals that most non-Pueblo visitors were prohibited from attending. She incorporated a sense of spiritual and ceremonial Pueblo culture into her work, but not always in obvious ways.

You can see the Indigenous influence in her 1940s-era painting Story of the Hunt — a depiction of human and animal forms, where several elements, including individual figures and groups of figures, are separated into a grid of cartouche-like spaces.

"Miller's interest in the symbols and pictorial language practiced by Native Americans was shared by a host of artists in New York at this time who would go on to become the leading abstract painters of the next decade: Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and others," writes Naumann, who adds these artists' interest in Indigenous imagery had a greater frame of reference, including Oceanic, African, and pre-Columbian art.

But Miller's paintings, he adds, "can be traced specifically to petroglyphs she had seen near her home in Española and to various utilitarian artifacts made by the Pueblos of New Mexico."

Such characteristics gave Miller's work a distinctive flair, which separated it from her European art influences. And at various times in her career, they could be seen quite readily.

And it wasn't just Klee or Miró. In Toro Bravo (circa 1940s), which was exhibited at Julien Levy, one can see the influence of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The painting depicts a bull in its death throes.

"In order to render this tragic moment, Miller resorts to the anatomical distortions and bluntness of Picasso," Naumann writes. And something of the patchwork nature of the multiple transverse planes comprising the bull's face is suggestive of cubist abstraction.

Toro Bravo, however, is less enigmatic than many of the other works on view in Coming Home, such as Three Spirits (1940s), an oil on canvas showing three figures — one standing, one down on one knee, and one prostrate — whose fluid depictions suggest forms in transition. Without explicit references, Miller conveys a sense of figures engaged in a sacred ceremony. Of course, how one interprets Three Spirits is subjective. Miller was reticent to explain the meaning of a given work.

"From what I know about her, she would refrain from addressing that question because, I suspect, she felt it would interfere with the viewer's journey with the piece and the viewer's perception," says Schaefer.

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Miller continued painting into her 70s. But in her final decades, she rarely exhibited her work publicly. She died at her Pennsylvania horse farm in 1996 after a car accident left her brain damaged and physically scarred. She left her ranch land in New Mexico to San Ildefonso Pueblo.

It would be difficult to find a direct through line from the work of other New Mexico painters to Miller's work. Even in her most explicit use of representational imagery, she was never a realist, never a painter of a Pueblo scene or narrative that wasn't open-ended or that wasn't imbued with some ineffable quality.

"She would have been aware of the history of painting in New Mexico back to the early 20th century at least," Schaefer says. "But I don't see a lot of adapted familiarity or correspondence with any of that in her palette, in her formative compositions, or in the gestural personification of her work. They seem to stand singular."