Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group

by Malin Wilson Powell (Contributor), Dane Rudhyar (Contributor), Scott A. Shields (Contributor)

Abstract painting meets theosophical spirituality in 1930s New the first book on a radical, astonishingly prescient episode in American modernism Founded in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, in 1938, at a time when social realism reigned in American art, the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG) sought to promote abstract art that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. The nine original members of the Transcendental Painting Group were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce and Stuart Walker. They were later joined by Ed Garman. Despite the quality of their works, these Southwest artists have been neglected in most surveys of American art, their paintings rarely exhibited outside of New Mexico. Faced with the double disadvantage of being an openly spiritual movement from the wrong side of the Mississippi, the TPG has remained a secret mostly known only to cognoscenti.

Another The Transcendental Painting Group aims to address this slight, claiming the group’s artists as crucial contributors to an alternative through-line in 20th-century abstraction, one with renewed relevance today. This volume provides a broad perspective on the group’s work, positioning it within the history of modern painting and 20th-century American art. Essays examine the TPG in light of their international artistic peers; their involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy; the group’s sources in the culture and landscape of the American Southwest; and the experience of its two female members.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

239 pages, Hardcover

Published July 6, 2021

Reviews

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating study that sheds light not just on an obscure art movement but on the relationships between different, seemingly disparate, trends in nineteenth and twentieth century thought. Many of the members of the Transcendental Painting Group, founded by Romanian expat Emil Bisttram, were inspired by Theosophy, an esoteric spiritual movement that came to the US by way of pre-revolutionary Russia. Theosophy took inspiration from many sources, both western and eastern, but at its heart was the conviction that the perceived world was a kind of shadow (or shadows) of something far more real and eternal. Theosophy, in other words, was deeply Platonic.

The painters of the Transcendental Group took inspiration both from Theosophy and their New Mexico habitat. Forms and colors reminiscent of the desserts of the southwestern United States take geometric shapes that suggest a spiritual realm, only momentarily suggested by the natural world, that is characterized by a perfect, harmonic order.

The canonical works these paintings most resemble are unmistakably those of the revolutionary Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, who ascribed to both Marxism-Leninism and Theosophy. I had always taken the geometric aspect of Kandinsky’s “Suprematism” as a symptom of the Soviet avant-garde’s fetishization of technological modernity, as if these ostensibly abstract works suggested a futuristic, mechanized utopia. (The quasi-ironic similarities between the early twentieth-century Soviet and American avant-gardes, especially the school known as Precisionism, has, of course, been well documented.)

After seeing this exhibit I wonder if the similarities in the art worlds of what would become the two great enemy camps wasn’t at least as much a result of the popularity of Neo-Platonic thinking, most specifically its Theosophic variation, in both Russia and the USA as it was a fetishization of the mechanical. If so, this would help explain the unfortunate metaphysical idealism and striving for “perfect order” that haunted communist regimes from the Bolsheviks onward. One can see ostensibly materialist Marxism haunted by idealism even in its most contemporary manifestations, such as the philosophy of the Neo-Platonic Post-Marxist Alain Badiou.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading about one my favorite art movements. My absolute favorite artist of the movement is Agnes Pelton. It took me a while to finish it but it allowed me to savor the reading and photos.

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book at a museum shop after visiting the exhibit. I was amazed at the artwork. If you are like me, I had never heard of Transcendental Painting (or knew it was a NM school of art).

TPG artists attempted to connect with viewers actively rather than passively, inducing a feeling of transcendence, or creating a transcendental state of being, in those who viewed their art. They did so through carefully arranged combinations of highly charged---and primarily nonobjective---forms and colors that they believed had mystical resonance. (35)

The book is filled with essays and does provide pretty comprehensive bios of these artists.

Again, the art is amazing.

[Victor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Modernist mysticism expressed through abstract art. Gorgeous reproductions. Criminally unknown artists throughout.