New Mexico Transcendentalist Painting Group

In late August 2021 we went to Santa Fe for Indian Market. I had heard about an exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum titled Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, which included work by Agnes Pelton, whose paintings I find wonderful after seeing one at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas about ten years ago. The exhibition also includes work by Raymond Jonson, whom I remembered from a work at the University of Texas, and Emil Bisttram, the co-founder of the Transcendental Painting Group. I was not familiar with the other eight painters in the exhibition, nor had I heard of the group, which existed only from 1938 to 1941 or ’42.

These were artists who came to Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque, New Mexico in the early 20th century and were dedicated to expressing spirituality in their abstract paintings, often influenced, like many artists of their time, by Theosophy the esoteric religious movement established in the United States in the late 19th century by the Russian immigrant Helena Blavatsky. The essays in the exhibition catalogue emphasize this spirituality and say that abstraction with spiritual or expressive content was not accepted in the larger art world at that time. (Oddly, I had always thought that early 20th-century abstract art was supposed to be expressive.) 

The two women artists in the exhibition, Agnes Pelton and Florence Miller Pierce, were my favorites. Their paintings show basically geometric shapes that suggest the sky and forms of nature in veils of light-infused color, usually shades of blue and purple. For me they are both inspiring and calming.

Agnes Pelton, Birthday, oil on canvas, 1943.
Collection of Rick Silver and Robert Hayden III

Agnes Pelton, Alchemy, oil on canvas, 1937-39
The Buck Collection at the UCI Institute and Museum of California Art

Florence Miller Pierce, Rising Red, oil on canvas, 1942
Collection of the McNay Art Museum
Purchase with the Ralph A. Anderson, Jr. Memorial Fund
 and the Helen and Everett H. Jones Purchase Fund, 1999.21

Florence Miller Pierce, Blue Forms, oil on canvas, 1942
Collection of Georgia and Michael de Havenon

Some of the paintings by Stuart Walker, who sadly died in 1940 at age 35, are translucent abstractions of intertwined forms that suggest movement. 

Stuart Walker, Composition 3A, oil on canvas, 1939
Courtesy of the Jean Pigozzi Collection

Raymond Jonson uses harder edged abstraction, still suggesting landscapes or cityscapes. 

Raymond Jonson, Oil No. 10, oil on canvas, 1939
Collection of Georgia and Michael de Havenon

I liked this one:

Raymond Jonson, Eclipse (from the Universe series), oil on canvas, 1935
Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM

Emil Bisttram’s paintings are busier, with stronger geometry. 

Emil Bisttram, Oversoul, oil on Masonite, c. 1941
Private Collection

The distinguished Canadian painter Lauren Harris moved to Santa Fe in 1938, met Raymond Jonson there, helped found the Transcendental Painting Group, and had to return to Canada in 1940 after World War II broke out. His works, derived from landscapes, often have monumental dynamic forms with strong color and dramatic contrasts of light and dark that suggest phenomena of weather.

Lauren Harris, Mountain Experience, oil on canvas, c. 1936
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Collection of the School of Art

 I was also taken by the bright geometry of the work of Ed Garman.

Ed Garman, Abstract No. 276, oil on Masonite, 1942
Collection of Shane Quails, Cincinnati, Ohio

The exhibition had informative labels in English and Spanish, and there is an excellent catalogue with essays and biographies of all eleven artists in the group. The title of the exhibition seems particularly apropos, since New Mexico is another world in the United States, the artists were aiming toward a transcendent world derived from Theosophy and spiritualism, and many of the paintings themselves present another way of seeing the world. According to the catalog, the exhibition opens at the Crocker on August 28, 2022 and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on December 18, 2022.

 Coincidentally, before I started writing this, I began reading Mabel Dodge Luhan’s book Winter in Taos. Mabel Dodge was instrumental in bringing Agnes Pelton to Taos and was very active in the arts community there. She also was inspired by arcane philosophy. Winter in Taos seems to represent how the painters in the exhibition might have thought. Here's a section: "All human utterance is an effort to crash the gate between consciousness and unconsciousness, to open a channel between the single sealed atom and the vast sea in which it exists, and to let a part of the undisclosed flow upwards to the outer racial life of air. All sound comes from another world, a world we cannot know but only dimly suspect; it is breathed forth and dies in the unfamiliar element: dying, it deposits its essence in our memories. Thus, little by little, we absorb and take into ourselves life from somewhere else, from somewhere so inconceivably remote to us that we have only negative names for it, like "the unconscious." What we know is positive but useless to us once it is ours. We care nothing for the crystals of knowledge, but only for the flow of light -- and we hanker for the experience of translation -- for the moment when we are channels, bridges, mediums between the unformulated and the dead limitations of the Known." (Winter in Taos, originally published 1935, reprint Las Palomas de Taos, 1982, pp. 140-141)

Agnolo Bronzino and Dawoud Bey, New York, August 2021

 Working through the past year, in order to get to what's on my mind now.....

I was determined to go to New York to see the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570. so we took the chance and went to New York when Covid was still a concern, but we had been vaccinated. I understood that the exhibition was dominated by portraits by Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572) and his circle, with a few additions by other artists (several works by Francesco Salviati (1510-1563), a less-known contemporary of Bronzino, and single portraits by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, plus sculpted portraits by Benvenuto Cellini, Baccio Bandinelli, and Giambologna). It refers to just a segment of the Medici family, including neither the fifteenth-century profoundly important Cosimo Il Vecchio, Piero, and Lorenzo, nor the later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Medici dukes who led the declining city. 

Both Tom and I were disappointed by the exhibition, For Tom it did not do what it advertised: "Cosimo shrewdly employed culture as a political tool in order to convert the mercantile city into the capital of a dynastic Medicean state, enlisting the leading intellectuals and artists of his time..." He wanted to understand how Cosimo de' Medici used art to promote his agenda and increase his power and international standing, but for Tom the various portraits, many unidentified and many of people not engaged in power building, did not advance his understanding of that mission adequately.

I wanted to see the Bronzino paintings. Looking at my photographs from the exhibition, I'm struck by how wonderful the are, but I also remember having doubts about whether several, which I did not photograph, were actually by Bronzino, I didn't see much about how he employed assistants to make multiple versions of some portraits, and found some of the works by other artists, especially Bronzino's teacher Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1556), especially wonderful. I was particularly troubled by a portrait of Cosimo from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The label says there are almost 30 versions of this portrait and this one, autograph, was given to Paolo Giovio, a physician, writer, and art collector. I wanted to know how many of the portraits are autograph and who else received them, and why giving it to Paolo Giovio mattered, since the label didn't mention Paolo Giovio's influence at the Papal Court, particularly with the Medici Pope Clement VII or the reputation of his collection of portraits. The idea of Bronzino having a sort of portrait factory seemed worth discussion.

photographed at an angle to avoid reflections from glazing

I was doubtful about the authenticity of a small number of the portraits, which looked like Bronzino's work but without the subtlety of his handling of paint. Perhaps they were significantly restored or products of studio assistants. 

There were several portraits of unidentified people who suggest the hauteur of rulers, but add little to the narrative of the exhibition. A wonderful example is the Woman with a Lapdog from the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, which we were fortunate to see again in its home institution in June, 2022.

If you're going to show so many portraits by Bronzino, it would help to give more indication of his other paintings patronized by the Medici, for example the monumental fresco of the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo in the Medici church of the same name in Florence, or the renowned and infinitely reproduced Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time allegory in the National Gallery in London. Bronzino's people seem to be made of something hard, the light that molds their faces and hands is bright and cold, and their expressions are reserved, proud, and distant. 

Finally, the Pontormo portraits were wonderful, softer than Bronzino's very marble-like figures and strange in their own way. This example of a Man with a Book, also indicates the wide-ranging sources of loans for the exhibition; it was not an easy show to organize. This painting is from the Collezione Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti per l'Arts, on long-term loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporaneo, Rivoli, Turin (CC.3P.PON.1534.A195). 

Drawn to New York by the Medici show, we stayed for several days and visited other museums, as well as the new little island on the West Side near the Whitney. We saw fabulous Cezanne drawings and Automania at MOMA, the Frick Collection's installation at the old Whitney, Bibiena stage designs at the Morgan Library, the art at the new Penn Station, Craft in Art 1950-2019 at the Whitney, and the Maya Lin installation at Madison Square Park.

A year later, I'm particularly struck by the exhibition we saw at the Whitney, Dawoud Bey: An American Project. Bey is a photographer whose work has captured my attention since the first time I saw it quite a few years ago. The Whitney's labels aptly describe Bey's purposes and interests, and I'm copying a bit of the text referring to Harlem U.S.A., an early series: "Drawn to the neighborhood as both a symbol of and a wellspring for Black American culture, Bey wanted to portray its residents as complex individuals in images free of stereotype...it was critical to Bey that the work be shown in the community where they were made, allowing the people he was representing to have access to the work they inspired." Bey's large photographs give power to his subjects, in a completely different context and medium, that seems to me somehow still a version of what Bronzino was doing in the 16th century. My photographs are inadequate, so I'm hoping links to the NY Times review of the exhibition, the Whitney announcement of the exhibition provide some images, as well as information. I was especially drawn to the large-format Polaroid image of Kerry James Marshall and Cheryl Lynn Bruce, 1993, titled Kerry and Cheryl I. 

One series in the exhibition, shown in its own gallery, was particularly moving. As the label reminds us, on September 15, 1963 the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four girls and two boys were killed. For the 50th anniversary of the bombing, Bey made paired portraits of Birmingham residents, one the age the victim of the attack died and one the age he or she would have been in 2012. He made the photographs in the Bethel Baptist Church, an early civil rights headquarters, and the Birmingham Art Museum, which in 1963 admitted Black visitors only one day a week. Here's one of the images:

Betty Selvage and Faith Speights, from The Birmingham Project, 2012
Rennie Collection, Vancouver