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)