RAYMOND JONSON (1891–1982) was the first Transcendental Painting Group member to meet Nicholas Roerich. Jonson saw Roerich’s April 1921 exhibition in Chicago and the Chicago production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden for which Roerich designed the sets. Jonson’s strong response to Roerich’s paintings was based on a similar use of symbolism in his own painting at that time, which was also derived in large part from the work he executed as a stage designer. When the two met Jonson was involved in founding Cor Ardens (the burning heart), a brotherhood of Chicago artists with idealistic aims similar to those of Roerich’s. The organization was officially established in July 1921, with Jonson as President; Roerich was appointed Honorary President for Russia when the organization added international affiliations.
Jonson and his wife Vera moved to Santa Fe in 1924, was commuting to Albuquerque to teach at the University of New Mexico by 1934, and then moved permanently to Albuquerque in 1950 to live permanently in the house he built on the UNM campus which served as a gallery and repository for works by members of the Transcendental Painting Group.
Bisttram and Jonson undoubtedly met soon after Bisttram’s arrival in Taos in 1931. Their work developed in a parallel way as it moved towards the abstract and the non-objective. While the idea for the Transcendental Painting Group was proposed by Bisttram in Taos to his students, and then to Lumpkins and Jonson, it was Jonson who enrolled the other members – Lawren Harris, Agnes Pelton, and Stuart Walker, and did most of the organizational work. Jonson also enrolled Dane Rudhyar and Alfred Morang as writers for the group, and founded the American Foundation for Transcendental Painting (AFTP) to support the aims of the TPG.
C. G. JUNG (1875-1961) was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. He developed the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Mabel Dodge Luhan was in correspondence with Jung and considered therapy with him in Europe. When he did make the visit to Taos, she was in New York, and never met him. Jung visited Taos in January 1925 for about two weeks, accompanied by Mabel‘s friend Jaime de Angulo. Jung spent time at Taos Pueblo and had intense conversations with Antonio Mirabal. Jung, like so many others at the beginning of the 20th century, was interested in native peoples, their rituals, ceremonies, and symbols.
Bisttram was undoubtedly introduced to the ideas of Jung by Rudhyar, and the most influential text was undoubtedly The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, translated and explained by Richard Wilhelm with a European Commentary by C. G. Jung (1929), trans. Cary F. Baynes, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931. In this book Jung explains that he used art with his patients, and that when they produced mandala images, that it was a sign of their healing. He also asserted that the unconscious can only be reached and expressed by the symbol, an idea that was held also by Bisttram and Rudyar. Most interesting for interpreting art, Jung held that unconscious contents were always projected.
LEO KATZ (1887-1982), artist and art historian, lectured to Bisttram’s class at the Master Institute in New York in 1929 on the history of art. Katz’s theories, which formed the basis of Bisttram’s ideas about the development of art styles, were based on Oswald Spengler’s (1880-1936) theory of the morphology of history developed in Decline of the West (1918, 1922). Katz’s sequence “geometric, classic, impressionist, expressionist” implies a decline, a break-up of a civilization, and follows Spengler’s assertions that classicism was a sign of an age’s decline, and impressionism and expressionism were degenerate styles. Both Spengler and Katz gave precedence to the geometric period because of its universal qualities, and because the great religions developed in the earliest periods Katz wrote the introduction for the catalogue of Bisttram’s exhibition at the Delphic Studios in New York, Dancing God Series: Water Colors of the Indians of the Southwest (1933), and reproduced one of the works from this exhibition in Understanding Modern Art (1936). In 1932 Katz assisted Orozco, who used dynamic symmetry in his painting, with his murals at the Dartmouth Library.
SHRI VISHWANATH KESKAR (b. 1880), lectured to Bisttram’s classes at the Master Institute in February and March 1930. Keskar, a Hindu mystic and art theorist who lived in the United States off and on between 1927 and 1931, occupied the top floor apartment of the Master Institute when Bisttram knew him. Keskar was Bisttram’s primary source for a practical application of Eastern ideas in his thought and work during his New York period and introduced Bisttram to meditation. Keskar self-published two books, Pillars of Life (1931) and The Universal Gospel (1936).
NANCY LANSDALE was a psychic who gave a reading to the Bisttrams in the 1920s in New York, which convinced Bisttram to change the spelling of his name from Bistran to Bisttram. Lansdale’s powers are described in an article by Gina Cerrninara (1914-1984), “The Candid Camera of the Cosmos,” The Searchlight (Association for Research and Enlightenment, Inc., Virginia Beach, Virginia), May 1954, Vol. VI, no. 7, pp. 1-8.
MABLE DODGE LUHAN (1879-1962), first visited Taos in December 1917. She was escaping from what she saw as the emptiness and materialism of life in Greenwich Village, where she knew many of the writers, socialites, political activists, and bohemians of her time. In New Mexico she was immediately attracted to the ceremonial dances at the pueblos and native life in general, and in 1923 married Tony Luhan, a native from Taos Pueblo. Her life in Taos was sustained by a prediction that a New York occultist had made, that she had a mission in Taos, to act as a bridge between the Indians and the Anglos, and that her charge was to heal the world by becoming a conduit for the “secret doctrine” possessed by the Indians. (Lois Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984, p. 165)
Like many in Taos, she believed that there was a connection between the Pueblo Indians and the Tibetans, seeing a similarity in the two languages. Luhan believed that Taos was a utopia that could nurture the creative spirit of America, and to this end she ceaselessly promoted Taos, writing to famous writers and artists inviting them to visit. Some who responded included C. G. Jung, Georgia O’Keeffe, D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, Dorthy Brett, John Marin, and Andrew Dasburg.
Luhan was the social arbiter in Taos, and she and Bisttram did not get along. This was mainly due to Bisttram‘s espousal of dynamic symmetry which went against her idea that art should be more emotional and less mathematical. Shortly after Bisttram’s arrival from Mexico City in 1931, she offered him the use of one of her cabins as a studio, but they quickly had a falling out, Bisttram not being willing to cater to her socialite ways. They must have made up because Luhan did include him in her book Taos and its Artists (1947).
WILLIAM LUMPKINS (1910-2000), the only member of the Transcendental Painting Group to be born in New Mexico, brought an interdisciplinary energy to the Group. In addition to painting, he was an architect specializing in active and passive solar design, having received his degree from the University of New Mexico in 1934. Lumpkins took an intuitive approach to painting, working in a proto-abstract expressionist style similar to John Marin’s. He was also interested in Zen Buddhism, which led him to write koans to accompany his paintings. Lumpkins, like many of the other artists in the TPG, felt that he was engaged in scientific research:
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“We are not transcendentalists in the sense that Emerson was one… We are not interested in the philosophy. We are interested in esthetic transcendentalism… Transcendent esthetics is the doctrine of space and time as the [a] priori forms of sense perception. You know something of Einstein’s theory of space and light? Art must keep up with science, that is creative art must, and as science discovers new angles in life, the creative artist must discover new forms of expression… We are not, like the early masters, religious painters, we are scientific painters. We are trying to reach beyond the illusory forms of materialism into the reality of form of the immaterial. We certainly are not trying to formulate a philosophy of life or religion.”
SUE PETTEY MARTIN (1896-1945) of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a devoted student of Bisttram‘s in the 1930s. She gave the lecture accompanying his 1936 exhibition in Tulsa.
MARION KOOGLER MCNAY (1883-1950) was Mrs. Donald T. Atkinson when Bisttram met her in 1932 in Taos. She was helpful to Bisttram, because it was she who underwrote his Witte Museum exhibition and lecture in San Antonio in 1933. Bisttram met Mrs. Atkinson while she was in Taos looking for Santos paintings for her collection. It may have been Victor Higgins who made the introductions since the two were married between 1937 and 1939. Mrs. Atkinson, who was a watercolorist herself and an avid collector of works in this medium, may have purchased Bisttram’s watercolor Knight of the Evening, 1928, during their first meeting. On their 1933 trip to San Antonio, the Bisttrams stayed at Mrs. Atkinson’s home, which, with its extensive art collection, opened to the public as the Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute a few years after her death.
ALFRED (1901-1958) AND DOROTHY (1906-1994) MORANG moved to Santa Fe from Maine in 1937. Alfred played the violin, wrote short-stories, and painted, and Dorothy played the piano and painted. It was in his capacity as a writer that Alfred assisted the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG). Like Rudhyar, he was an elected officer of the American Foundation for Transcendental Painting (AFTP), the TPG’s administrative and publishing arm, with Rudhyar as one of two vice-presidents, and Morang as publicity director. Morang was particularly close to Raymond Jonson: his pamphlet on Rudhyar was dedicated to Jonson, and he wrote more articles on Jonson than on any other member of the Group. Both Alfred and Dorothy were also vitally associated with Arsuna, the Santa Fe gallery and school founded on the principles of Nicholas Roerich‘s Master Institute in New York. Alfred taught writing and Dorothy served as an assistant to Maurice Lichtmann and taught piano privately. In December 1940 Dorothy was appointed secretary to the school through the WPA. Dorothy studied dynamic symmetry with Bisttram.
JOHN O’NEIL (1915-2004) received a BFA and MFA in painting from the University of Oklahoma (1936, 1939). In the early 1940s, he studied with Bisttram. He served as professor of painting at the University of Oklahoma (1939-1965) and as Chair of the Art Department, Rice University, Houston (1965-70).
P. D. OUSPENSKY (1878-1947) was a theosophical writer whose concept of art and the artist was highly influential on Bisttram’s thinking. Ouspensky wrote, for example, “Only that fine apparatus which is called the soul of an artist can understand and feel the reflection of the noumenon in the phenomenon. In art it is necessary to study ‘occultism’ – the hidden side of life. The artist must be a clairvoyant: he must see that which others do not see; he must be a magician: must possess the power to make others see that which they do not themselves see, but which he does see.” (Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World (1911), 3rd ed., New York: Knopf, 1945. p. 145) “Cosmic consciousness is also possible of attainment through the emotion attendant upon creation – in painters, musicians and poets. Art in its highest manifestations is a path to cosmic consciousness.” (p. 301) Bisttram often quoted the last two sentences, “The meaning of life is in eternal search. And only in that search can we find something truly new.” (p. 306) Bisttram even executed a work titled Eternal Search. Claude Bragdon assisted with the translation of Tertium Organum from Russian into English, first publishing it in 1920.
RALPH M. PEARSON (1883-1958) developed the Correspondence Course in Critical Appreciation. These lessons were incorporated into a book The Modern Renaissance in American Art (1954), which includes an entry on Bisttram. Bisttram and Pearson were close friends. Pearson had a ranch near Taos. Their relationship probably didn’t begin until after Bisttram’s move to Taos even though both were in New York at the same time.
AGNES PELTON (1881-1961) lived in a studio on Long Island in the 1920s. She was a reader of Helena Roerich’s books, first mentioning Agni Yoga in a notebook entry of January 23, 1930. Later that year she gave a lecture at the Roerich Museum as part of their Monday evening Academy of Creative Arts series begun in October 1930; Thomas Hart Benton, Bragdon, Giles, and Bisttram also participated in this series. While Pelton did not reside in New Mexico during the TPG period, she was the first of the Group to make the pilgrimage to New Mexico, visiting Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1918 and 1922.
Pelton became a member of the Transcendental Painting on the recommendation of Dane Rudhyar, who had met her in New York after having seen her Nov. 1929 Montross Gallery exhibition. Following upon correspondence between Jonson and Pelton, she was included in an exhibition at the Museum of New Mexico with Jonson and Cady Wells in September 1933. Each artist had a separate alcove; their works were related by Rudhyar’s catalogue essays. Jonson became completely won over to her work after visiting her in Cathedral City, California, in 1935. She never met with the Group, but sent paintings for their exhibitions. Her spiritual approach to painting was admired by all the members, and is reflected by her appointment as honorary president of the Foundation; her inclusion in the 1913 Armory Show gave her additional status.
BERT PHILLIPS (1868-1956) was the founding artist of the Taos Art Colony. After studying art in New York and Paris, he and Ernest Blumenschein set out on a trip out West where their wagon famously broke down near Taos in 1898. Having grown up on James Fenimore Cooper novels and stories about Kit Carson, Phillips became fascinated with the local culture and became known for romantic paintings of Indians in native settings. He also painted pictures of the Penitentes, a subject that Bisttram also painted.
Bisttram and Phillips were good friends as Phillips participated in a number of Bisttram’s projects, and was interested in dynamic symmetry. According to Eya Fechin, Bisttram held his first lectures on dynamic symmetry in Philips studio. Phillips was one of four artists who collaborated on the mural project in the Taos County Courthouse, in 1933. The murals were executed in true fresco; Ward Lockwood and Bisttram had experience with fresco, while Phillips and Victor Higgins did not. The project was financed by the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). Phillips also exhibited at the art gallery which Bisttram organized in 1939 in the La Fonda Hotel, owned by the Karavas Brothers, located on Taos Plaza.
HORACE TOWNER PIERCE (1916-1958) and FLORENCE MILLER PIERCE (1918-2007) met in Bisttram’s studio and they both joined the Transcendental Painting Group. Florence Miller studied at the Phillips Studio School in Washington, D. C. before going to Taos to study with Bisttram for the summer of 1936; she returned the following winter. Horace Pierce studied at the Maryland Institute of Art before going to Taos to study with Bisttram in September 1936.
One of Horace Pierce’s most interesting projects was The Spiral Symphony, a group of thirty watercolors executed under Bisttram using the airbrush that was purchased for him Harriet Richards when she was in Taos visiting Bisttram in 1937. The concept for this project was that these works were to be the basis for a film for which music would be composed using similar principles. Horace Pierce and Florence Miller married in Bisttram’s studio in April 1938. In 1940 they left for New York to pursue the making of Horace’s film. They succeeded in getting a few of the paintings from the series exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940. The film, however, was never made.
RAYMOND PIPER (1888-1961), professor of philosophy at Syracuse University, had a long-standing interest in spiritual art and corresponded with Bisttram at length about his work. Piper’s book Cosmic Art (1975), which features two of Bisttram’s works, was published posthumously, assembled in large part by his wife and Ingo Swann, and represents only a fraction of the material Piper amassed during his lifetime. His notes and correspondence with hundreds of artists are preserved in 171 boxes at Syracuse University, where he was Professor of Philosophy. Bisttram and Piper began corresponding in 1949.
HILLA REBAY (1890-1967) came from a German noble family, was trained as a painter, became interested in theosophy and non-objective art, and relocated to New York in 1927. She met Solomon Guggenheim (1861-1949), encouraged him to collect non-objective art, and was appointed director and curator of his collection, opening as the Museum of Non-Objective Art in 1939. The museum was renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1952. She promoted a spiritual approach to art by acquisitions, exhibitions, and catalogues that primarily featured works by Kandinsky and Rudolph Baur. These catalogues were highly influential on Bisttram and other members of the Transcendental Painting Group. Rebay also exhibited and collected works by the more spiritually-oriented members of the American Abstract Artists, and exhibited some works by members of the Transcendental Painting Group, including Bisttram.
ALMA REED (1889-1966) met Angelo and Eva Palmer Sikelianos in Greece, became involved with their project of recreating the Delphic Festivals, and translated some of Angelo’s poetry. In New York Reed shared an apartment with Eva Sikelianos known as “The Ashram.“ In 1928, Reed met Orozco and mounted an exhibition of his work. In the fall of 1929 Reed opened her gallery, The Delphic Studios, on 57th Street, ostensibly to represent Orozco, whose fame in New York culminated with his mural cycle, A Call for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood, executed at the New School for Social Research between November 1930 and January 1931. In these murals he utilized dynamic symmetry, to which he had been introduced by Mary Crovatt Hambidge. He also included four members of the Delphic Society circle – the French philosopher Paul Richard, the art critic Lloyd Goodrich, the Dutch poet Leonard Van Noppen (1868-1935), and the Palestinian-Jewish painter Reuben Rubin – in The Table of Universal Brotherhood, the central panel of his New School murals. Others who frequented the Ashram, included followers of Mahatma Gandhi, Greeks, Russian exiles, and other foreigners, including the Lebanese poet and artist Kahlil Gibran.
Bisttram had his 1933 exhibition of Native American abstractions at the Delphic Studios. Leo Katz, who had lectured to Bisttram’s class at the Master Institute, wrote the introduction to the catalogue. Katz also assist Orozco on the Dartmouth murals (1932-4). Additionally, Reed commissioned and published Katz’s book Understanding Modern Art (1936), which was first issued in serial form as lessons for use in Delphic Society meetings.
Giles included Rubin in an exhibition he organized at the Master Institute. Bragdon knew Gibran and was familiar with Reed’s translations of Sikelianos’s poetry.
DIEGO RIVERA (1886-1957). Bisttram studied with Rivera in Mexico City in 1931 on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rivera was introduced to Platonic aesthetics and the use of the golden section in picture construction while a student in Mexico City by teachers schooled in the German Nazarene tradition. Mondrian, who was an avowed theosophist and whom Rivera met in 1912, was an important influence on Rivera’s transition to Cubism. Rivera’s interest in theosophy was sustained in Paris by a salon of Russian expatriates which he frequented. His friend Adolpho Best-Maugard, whose portrait he painted in 1913, was also a theosophist. Rivera’s friendship with Picasso, beginning in 1914, was based on a mutual interest in Platonic aesthetics and mathematical systems. In 1917 Rivera built a “machine” of floating gelatin planes to study the fourth dimension. According to André Lhote, Rivera was attempting to depict “Platonic essences” by depicting the silhouettes and shadows of objects. By the time Bisttram studied with him in 1931, he had taken up a realistic style in support of his political views. He was a great collector of Mexican antiquities.
HELENA ROERICH (1879-1955), the wife of Nicholas Roerich, translated Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1886) from English into Russian in the early 1930s. She also wrote the books that became the core of the Agni Yoga teachings, an occult movement that took hold in the U.S in the 1920s. She wrote her books with the assistance of Master Morya, who started communicating with her in 1920 while she and her husband were living in London. While Bisttram was unaware of Agni Yoga during the 1920s, he came under its influence through Ralph Houston, whose Agni Yoga group in Taos was meeting at the Bisttram home by about 1960.
NICHOLAS ROERICH (1874-1947), a Russian theosophical-symbolist painter, promoted his ideals in New York in the 1920s, by establishing a school, the Master Institute of United Arts, where Bisttram and Giles both taught, and a museum, Corona Mundi, which collected and showed works promoting his approach, which was that all the arts were related and interdependent. Roerich’s activities as a stage designer – most famously his sets for the 1913 Paris production of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring – show the importance of this idea for him, which essentially derived from Wagner‘s concept of the gesamtkunstwerk, which posited that the musical elements of rhythm, harmony, and tone, underlay all of the arts, and that an integrative feeling of depth harmony could be produced when all of the arts were brought together in one production such as an opera.
Roerich’s arrival in New York in 1920 was heralded by a large exhibition of his paintings that opened at the Kingore Galleries in New York and then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and twenty-eight other American cities. The strength of Roerich’s New York school was music; his collaborators, Maurice Lichtmann, vice-president of the school, and his wife Sina Lichtmann, were both pianists. After Roerich’s departure for India in 1923, the New York school was left in the main to be carried out by Louis Horch, Roerich’s financial backer, and the Lichtmanns. Roerich returned to the United States briefly in 1924, and again in 1929 for about a year. His final visit was in 1933. Roerich’s efforts in New York culminated in 1929 with the opening of a twenty-four story art deco “skyscraper” at 310 Riverside Drive which housed the school, museum, library, auditorium, and restaurant, with apartments on the upper floors. Bisttram designed the restaurant and elevator lobby.
Roerich also exerted a wide influence in New Mexico. His 1921 visit to study Pueblo artifacts resulted in a long-lasting friendship with Dr. Edgar Hewett, Director of the Museum of Anthropology and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, based on their mutual interest in anthropology. Hewett was one of Roerich’s most devoted advocates, and served as an honorary advisor to Corona Mundi. In 1925 Louis and Nettie Horch made a follow-up trip to Santa Fe, where they made arrangements to acquire Raymond Jonson’s Earth Rhythms I, 1923, for the Roerich Museum.
Another important aspect of Roerich’s influence in New Mexico was Arsuna, a school and gallery based on Roerich’s teaching principles established in Santa Fe in 1937 by Clyde Gartner. It featured a permanent installation of Roerich’s paintings and served as a center for the activities of the Transcendental Painting Group.
DENMAN ROSS (1853-1935) was a writer, color theorist, and artist. His book A Theory of Pure Design (1907) was an important source for Bisttram’s ideas, and Bisttram used Ross‘s color system in all his works. Ross was a lecturer on the theory of design at Harvard, a specialist in Oriental art, and served as a trustee of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where he influenced the expansion of its Oriental collections. He drew and painted because he felt that direct experience with procedures and techniques was necessary to critically judge a work of art. On Giles’s suggestion, Bisttram visited Ross in Cambridge to learn his color theory for use in the Three-Year Course which Giles and Bisttram developed for their course at the Master Institute.
As a thank you to Ross for explaining his color theories, Bisttram sent Ross a T-square with the triangles set into a single instrument, presumably of his own invention.
Ross also used dynamic symmetry in his own work. Ross became acquainted with Hambidge in 1919, while the latter was working at Harvard courtesy of the Samuel Sachs Research Fellowship. Ross wrote a letter of recommendation for Bisttram’s Guggenheim Fellowship application. Ross’s color theory involved the use of “set palettes,” a series of scientifically- determined color combinations that Bisttram adopted in his own work.
DANE RUDHYAR (1895-1985), theosophist, musician, astrologer, and painter, was born in Paris, studied law at the Sorbonne, then turned to music. In 1915 he served as secretary to Rodin. After arriving in New York in 1917, Rudhyar traveled frequently between New York, California, Chicago, and Boston pursuing his composing, performing, lecturing, and publishing activities primarily for occult and music organizations.
Rudhyar was aware of the cultural renaissance brewing in New Mexico and was corresponding with Mabel Dodge Luhan as early as 1925, to prepare for his entrance into her milieu. Complimenting her efforts, he wrote “When the magnetic center, the Purpose, the clear vision and the will are there, one by one the individuals are drawn into the magic circle.”
Bisttram undoubtedly met Rudhyar when he gave the lecture series, “Four Essential Types of Forms: their characteristic historical representations and their significance for artists today,” at the Roerich Museum during March and April 1930.
In 1933, Rudhyar began making regular stops in New Mexico. He became close to Raymond Jonson, who gave him painting lessons, and later was appointed to become one of two writers for the Transcendental Painting Group. He also recommended Alice Pelton, whom he had met in New York, to Jonson, who then invited her to become a member of the TPG. At that time Rudhyar was developing his theory of transcendental painting by combining ideas from Jung and theosophy.
Rudhyar was a close personal friend of Alice Bailey’s. The Lucis Trust, founded to publish Bailey’s books, published Rudhyar’s The Astrology of Personality: A Reformulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy (1936),which he wrote in New Mexico, and which shows a strong influence from the writings of Carl Jung. Lucis also published Rudhyar’s New Mansions for New Men (1938) as well as Alfred Morang’s booklet Dane Rudhyar: Pioneer in Creative Synthesis (1939) which reproduces 3 of Ruhhyar‘s paintings, includes a reference to a book he translated titled Book of the Living God by the “great German mystic and painter Bo Yin Ra,” and the statement that he gave 30 lectures in Santa Fe and Taos between 1933 and 1934. Rudhyar’s article “The Indian Dances for Power” (1933) reflects his initial interest in New Mexican culture – the music, dance, and customs of the indigenous peoples.
GEORGE SCHRIEVER, curator of the Anschutz Collection, acquired a substantial number of works by Bisttram for the Denver collector, and a smaller number of works for himself, which he later donated to various museums.
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG (1688-1772) was a mystical theologian, who presented a concept of the heaven-world that included angels and life on other planets. Swedenborg was most famous for his theory of correspondences, which meant that each thing in this world corresponded to something in the other world, in a macrocosmic-microcosmic relationship. For example he proposed a “grand man of the universe” which was made up of human beings, so that each human being had a place in the larger scheme. He also believed in redemption through the “unification of opposites” which was often represented as the androgyny. These concepts are also found in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky and Alice Bailey.
Giles and Bisttram applied dynamic symmetry to Swedenborg’s theories by, for example, applying the rhythmic relationships of dynamic symmetry’s rectangles to Swedenborg’s correspondences between the mathematically proportional macrocosm and the microcosm. Swedenborg’s theory of redemption and regeneration involved ascending by proportional steps. In all the spiritual writings, the creative act is considered to be redemptive, both personally and for the larger group. This is the essential attraction of mysticism for the artist.
OLIN TRAVIS (1888–1975) was the primary source for dynamic symmetry in Dallas. He graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1914. Returning to Dallas in 1924, he founded the Dallas Art Institute in January 1926, and remained the director until 1941. Bisttram’s Dallas friends Jerry Bywaters and Alexander Hogue both taught at the Dallas Institute.
WILLEM A. VAN KONIJNENBURG (1863-1943) was a Dutch symbolist painter who used a grid system and focused on drawing. His mystical aesthetic, which used mathematics, proportion, and rhythm to symbolize the opposition and struggle between good and evil was remarkably similar to Giles and Bisttram’s approaches. Van Konijnenburg was much admired by Howard Giles and his wife Evelyn Carter Giles. The Giles’ made at least one trip to Holland, visiting van Konijnenberg, probably in 1932 when Mrs. Giles had her portrait painted by him. She bequeathed some 43 works on paper by van Konijnenburg to the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College.
The link between Giles and van Konijnenburg is provided by the tonalist painter Alexander Shilling (1860-1937), who was friends with both, which is shown by a book of appreciation, The Book of Alexander Shilling (1937), to which both contributed. A fascinating reference indicates that Shilling had a studio in New York in the Fleishmann Building where H. P Blavatsky also had a studio for a season. Another contributor to the book, the art critic Karel H. de Haas who was based in Rotterdam, made a trip to New York in 1918 to hear Jay Hambidge lecture, and then published Hambidge’s ideas in a book he published in 1920 in Europe.
Bisttram was probably first introduced to Van Konijnenburg’s work at his exhibition at the Montross Gallery in New York in 1930. Leo Katz undoubtedly shared Giles and Bisttram’s enthusiasm for van Konijnenburg since he included him in Understanding Modern Art (1936) in the section on contemporary religious painters, and rated him higher than Roerich.
DUANE VAN VECHTEN (d. 1977) studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in France before moving to Taos in 1928. She entertained the Taos artists in her lavish home and purchased works by them, developing a substantial collection. Ms. Van Vechten studied with Bisttram both in Taos and later in Los Angeles. After her death, her husband Edwin Lineberry built a museum in her honor on their property. The Van Vechten-Lineberry Taos Art Museum holds a number of works by Bisttram. Ms. Van Vechten offered land to a number of Bisttram students so that they could settle in Taos. Only Cliff and Barbara Harmon accepted and remained
STUART WALKER (1904-1940), a painter of ethereal abstractions, was ill when he joined the Transcendental Painting Group, and died shortly after the formation of the Group. After serving in the Navy and studying art in Indiana and Delaware, he moved to Albuquerque in 1925 for his health. In 1929 he served as president of the Art League of New Mexico. By the 1930s he was painting non-objective canvases based in part on Kandinsky’s Bauhaus works, art deco geometry, and a spiritual approach.
WILLIAM WARDER (b. 1920) studied with Bisttram in 1937. He assisted Mrs. Bisttram with making an inventory of Bisttram’s works after his death. Mrs. Bisttram entrusted him with some of Bisttram’s papers.
HARRY E. WOOD, JR. (1910-1995) studied with Bisttram in 1939. After he was appointed chairman of the art department at Arizona State University in 1954, Wood organized two exhibition of Bisttram’s work (1955, 1966), wrote a number of articles on Bisttram, and acquired one of Bisttram’s works for the museum.