A few years ago, I interrupted a panel discussion at the Guggenheim as it moved toward the dead-horse question of whether painting was still viable. How, I asked, uninvited, from the audience, could people talk of the end of painting when so many women were just beginning to paint? With hindsight I should have added that we were also still learning about the female painters of the past whose newly recovered works could very well influence the medium. History had in a sense not yet happened to their achievements.

Hindsight arrived one or two years later, when a largely unknown sector of that past was emphatically, unforgettably heard from — at the Guggenheim. This divine noise was the full-rotunda exhibition of the paintings of Hilma af Klint, which drew thousands of visitors and irrevocably altered the understanding of the genesis of abstract painting in the West. It was one of the most revelatory shows of many people’s lifetimes, my own included.

A similar jolt — if not of that magnitude — can now be felt in “Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that is still plenty inspiring and thought-provoking. (The museum announced late Thursday that it was temporarily closing over concerns about the coronavirus.) This career-spanning survey of 45 paintings presents the underappreciated but inimitable art of the American painter Agnes Pelton (1881-1961) and offers a reminder that the history of modernist abstraction and women’s contribution to it is still being written.