Excerpt from Martin Diamond, “Who Were They? My Personal Contact with Thirty-Five American Modernists Your Art History Course Never Mentioned,” typescript, 1995, pp. 42-48

EMIL BISTTRAM

ED GARMAN

ROBERT GRIBBROEK

LAWREN HARRIS

RAYMOND JONSON

WILLIAM LUMPKINS

FLORENCE MILLER

AGNES PELTON

HORACE TOWNER PIERCE

STUART WALKER

In June 1979, I received a telephone call from Jeffrey Hoffeld who, at that time, was the Director of the Neuberger Museum at the State university of New York at Purchase. He told me that he had been to an antique shop in Brooklyn and saw a wonderful painting by someone named Raymond Jonson. Knowing my appreciation of great work by unknown artists, he suggested I go see it. I went to Brooklyn and viewed a very unique large landscape circa 1920. I asked the price and was told that the painting was sold. I checked on Raymond Jonson and found that he was the artist in residence at the University of New Mexico. I said to Harriette, “We always wanted to go to New Mexico,” so we flew to Albuquerque and knocked on Jonson’s door. Jonson’s brother Arthur, answered the door and invited us in. He introduced us to Raymond who was in a wheelchair, but otherwise in good health. Arthur was the curator of the Jonson Gallery. The Jonson Gallery consisted of living space upstairs and gallery space downstairs. I told Jonson that we had seen a painting of his in New York and would like to see more. We went downstairs where paintings by Jonson were on exhibit. Immediately, I knew that I was in the presence of a great artist. I inquired as to the prices. Jonson extended his hands and said, “Everything this size (fifteen inches) is two hundred dollars, everything this size (thirty inches) is three hundred dollars, and everything larger is six hundred dollars.” I asked him if he had a dealer. He said, “No.” I then asked him if he would like me to represent him. He said,” yes.” Well, I replied, “The first thing we are going to do is change the price structure.” A group of paintings was selected for our gallery and Jonson also gave us a book written by Ed Garman entitled “The Art of Raymond Jonson, Painter.”

As I expected, Jonson’s paintings sold as quickly as I hung them on the wall. Some months later, we made arrangements to go back to Albuquerque to select some more works. While reading Ed Garman’s book, we saw a reference in the chronology to the Transcendental Painting Group and that they had showed at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939. We asked Jonson about them. He told us that sev er artists – nine in number – all abstractionists, decided to get together to show as a group in order to try to gain some recognition at a time that ar tists in this country were struggling for survival. As he spoke, I felt a wave of excitement, because I realized that there was a movement very similar in its makeup to the American Abstract Artists which had done the same thing a year earlier in New York – each group unknown to the other. To men, I could equate this with Columbus discovering America. Harriette and I sat on the floor enthralled as Jonson went through the photographs and told us about the trials and tribulations of the organization. Jonson asked me to pull certain paintings out of the racks and showed us the works of different artists. He explained that Lawren Harris who was a Canadian citizen left the group to go back to Canada at the outbreak of World War II and was replaced by Ed Garman. In my mind I decided I must do the same thing with the Transcendental Painting Group that I did with those American Abstract Artists I was involved with. I selected several wonderful, non-objective paintings by Ed Garman to be sent to my gallery with the next shipment of Jonson’s work. Jonson also wanted me to take Stuart Walker’s paintings, however my gallery space, tat that time , was quite small and I did not have the area to exhibit them.

At the end of 1980 , I made arrangements to move into much larger quarters. Jonson kep insisting that I take all the Stuart Walker paintings. He was determined to have them seen, appreciated and sold. I told Jonson he could send a few of the Walkers to me as I would soon have the room to exhibit them. Before I knew it, large crates were at my door. Jonson had sent all fourteen paintings in his possession to me. I stored tem in the basement of the building temporarily. In February 1981, I moved into the new space where I now had to large galleries with a connecting hallway. I hung the Stuart Walker paintings in the back gallery. They looked spectacular. I was stirred at the reception they received. People would walk in, congratulate us on our new quarters, go into the back gallery and not come out. I peeked in to see what was happening. I came back and said to Harriette, “They are sitting there and staring, the way I do when I go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at the Monet WATERLILIES.“ Ilene Susan Fort, an art historian, was in the back gallery busily writing. I asker what she was doing. She told me she was reviewing the Stuart Walker Exhibition for ARTS Magazine. I said, “This is not a Stuart Walker Exhibition. I just hung the paintings.” Fort Said, “Well it is now.”

At the time that Jonson told us about the Transcendental Painting Group he showed us a painting in the racks that was magnificent. It was by Emil Bisttram. Bisttram was the one name I was familiar with from the group, as he had done some regional paintings, but I had never been introduced to his abstract works. That painting was part of the Raymond Jonson collection designated to go to the university of New Mexico upon Jonson’s death. Jonson gave me Mrs. Bisttram’s address. I wrote to Mrs. Bisttram and made arrangements to see her. In April 1980, we visited with Mrs. Bisttram. She was a charming woman with very strong opinions. There were some great paintings and drawings in the studio. Mrs. Bisttram said that she had not been able to sell them, as there was no interest in the abstractions. I was as successful with Bisttram’s work as I was with just about everyone in the Transcendental Painting Group. Mrs. Bisttram told me that I was “sent to her by a hierarchy.” We became good friends. At her death she had willed all the works by her husband to St John’s College in Santa Fe with the request that I handle these works until I deem otherwise.

Bisttram had a small room built in the studio for meditation. Mrs. Bisttram said he spent a lot of time there. While looking over the paintings in the studio I was amazed to see that PULSATION-THE OVERSOUL which was illustrated in the 1940 Transcendental Painting Group manifesto (in the manifesto it is entitled FULFILLMENT) and turned out to be the quintessential expression of transcendentalism of any painting done by the group, was still in the racks.

I also noticed there were five paintings – late Kachina Indian paintings done for the tourist trade. The back of each canvas had been gone over with a white painting that covered the painting. In order to save money buying canvas, Bisttram would remove the painted canvas from the stretcher and reverse it. However, I saw interesting color under the white paint and sent the five paintings to my conservator to see if the paintings could be restored. Three of the paintings had a good coat of varnish before the white paint was applied and were able to be completely restored. Sadly, the other two could not. One eof the three that were saved was a scene of the Taos Church, very similar in feeling and image to Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous painting. The other two were spectacular abstraction. All from the thirties.

Mrs. Bisttram also had a painting by Horace Towner Piece entitled ELIPSOS, a tempera from 1939. The painting was so far ahead of its time tat you would think it was done with the thought of atomic energy. We went to visit Pierce’s wife, Florence Miller, who was the youngest of the group. Florence miller only had about eight or nine pieces of her own work from that period. She let me have three and insisted that the rest were not for sale. Some years later, when the Transcendental Painting Group became recognized and their price structure strengthened, she sold some privately.

Robert Gribbroek was the only artist whose work I was not able to locate. I found out that he had left New Mexico for California to work as a layout man for Warner Brothers until 1953. I could not trace him after that time. The stories I had heard, were that when he left New Mexico his landlady took all his paintings and either sold them at a flea market, sold them in front of her house or threw them away. I put ads in the Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos newspapers asking for information on Gribbroek. I received two answers from friends of his who thought I may have been trying to arrange a liaison. One of the men was surprised to find out that Gribbroek was an artist. When I had the Transcendental Painting Group exhibition in my gallery all I was able to show were two photographs of his work which I borrowed from Jonson.

William Lumpkins lives in Santa Fe and we met him in the spring of 1980. His paintings from the mid-1930s were the earliest examples of Abstract Expressionism that I have ever seen – so far advanced of anything being done at that time. Without any recognition he continued to commit himself to his work. I remember unwrapping a package of works on paper that Lumpkins had just sent me when a young artist walked in, looked at them, noticed the dates and said, “Don’t tell me these were done in the thirties and early forties. These were all done yesterday.” I didn’t say a word, but opened my catalogue of the 1939 Worlds Fair pertaining to American art and showd him Lumpkins’ work in the book. The young artist apologized for his remark.

Ed Garman’s work was introduced to me by Raymond Jonson on my second visit to the studio. The works were very striking, pristine hard-edge paintings in the original frames from the Museum of Non-Objective Art (later to be known as the Guggenheim Museum). I contacted the museum to get more information on the exhibit. I received photocopies of incomplete records of the exhibition which opened June 25, 1942. Three of Garman’s paintings were shown in that exhibition.

From the time Garman met Jonson until Jonson’s death there existed a strong friendship. Garman moved to California and kept in close contact with Jonson. In his frequent visits to Jonson, Garman found time to write the book on Jonson and gather the archival material to compile the history of the Transcendental Painting Group Garman is still painting with the same purity, balance and tension that was seen his work in the early forties. Ed Garman is a good friend who is always willing to share his knowledge and experience with me.

I cannot remember how many paintings by Lawren Harris were in Jonson’s studio. It may have been one or possibly two. I had difficulty finding the estate of Harris which was in Vancouver. Jonson had an old address and we had to trace it from there. Originally, Harris lived in Toronto. He left his wife and children for another woman and moved to the United States. He ended up in Santa Fe in 1938 and became a member of the Transcendental Painting Group. Harris died in Vancouver in 1970.

In Canada, Harris was a member of the Group of Seven until its dissolution in 1932. He was a nationally recognized artist whoseee Canadian paintings sold for very high prices. In May 1980, I contacted the Harris estate and went to Vancouver to see the non-objective paintings done with the Transcendental Painting Group. While there, twenty-eight works were selected and sent back to New York for cleaning and framing. Harris was the only member of the transcendental Painting Group whose paintings showed signs of neglect. They were scratched, very dirty and poorly framed. I only mention this because the condition of the work of all the other members of the Transcendental Painting Group went from excellent to very good. Except for the exhibition I did prior to the Albuquerque Museum show, the abstract work that he had done in the United States with the Transcendental Painting Group had never been shown. Even as non-objective paintings, you still get the feel of the barren cold northern landscapes that Harris was famous for. We opened the exhibition of his paintings of the late thirties in the gallery in November 1983. Unfortunately, one collector who had selected four paintings reneged after the exhibition. I could have sold these paintings several times over during the exhibition. That was the first and only time I had such an exhibition with one of my clients. The estate was furious and not interested in explanations.

Jonson had four wonderful paintings by Agnes Pelton who died in 1961. As an early American modernist none were better. I borrowed the four paintings from Jonson for the exhibition in my gallery. I was determined to find more works by her. Ed Garman offered to help by giving me name of people who owned her paintings. As these paintings we collected many years ago, I ended up on a wild goose chase. In most cases there were no telephone numbers listed for these names and addresses, so I drove to the houses and range the doorbells. In one instance, the old house had burned down (new house- new people). In another, the owner was on his deathbed and the family did not want to make a decision and so it went. One lead did come through. I located a collector that had two early transcendental works. I also fund a few paintings through my own efforts. I still had the four Peltons in the gallery at the time of Jonson’s death. The University of New Mexico called and asked if I would seee the works by Pelton back to them. When I took the Pelton paintings, Jonson told me they were not for sale. He wanted to leave them to the University of New Mexico. I had them listed on the consignment sheet for insurance purposes with the paintings I had taken for sale. The University of New Mexico assumed that I owned them. I told the University that the Peltons were not mine, they were theirs. I had only borrowed them for the Transcendental Painting Group exhibit. I enjoyed showing her work off to the New York art world.

By the summer of 1981, I had decided that I had enough material to do a museum exhibition of the Transcendental Painting Group. I took photographs of a large number of the works and called James Moore, Director of the Albuquerque Museum of Art, History and Science to set up an appointment and discussed the possibility of an exhibition. Harriette and I flew out to Albuquerque and during dinner I showed him the photographs, transparencies and a copy of Robert C. Hay’s thesis on “Dane Rudhyar and the Transcendental Painting Group of New Mexico 1938-1941” (submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Department of Art 1981). Moore agreed with me that Albuquerque was the place to show the Transcendental Painting Group. I had the exhibition in my gallery during the month of February 1982. The museum then had an expanded exhibition from June through September 1982. Robert Hay was supposed to write the catalogue for the museum, but because they asked him to do some thing tht he felt were not in keeping with the contract, he quit. The museum engaged two writers to replace Hay. To my mind, Robert Hay knew more about the Transcendental Painting Group than any person outside the Group and I was sorry that he left. I was surprised to see paintings by Dane Rudhyar in the museum show. From my discussions with Raymond Jonson, Dane Rudhyar paintings were not shown with the Group. Rudhyar was the vice-president of the Group, wa but he was not one of the exhibiting artists. When seeing the cataogue in print, I realized that Rudhyar who was alive at the time of the Albuquerque Museum show, used his influence in the writing of the catalogue. There were five of his paintings in the exhibition. Two of them were illustrated in the catalogue. The only time I had see Johnson upset was when he spoke of Rudhyar. Jonson told me that Rudhyar had stolen his ideas for his “Zodiac Series” and he, Jonson, has never forgiven Rudhyar.

The strength of the works exhibited of the original ten Transcendental artists made the show a success in spite of the liberties taken. New Mexico got the first good look at some of their best modernists who had not been shown together for forty years.

I retired and closed the gallery in November 1985. It had been six years since I first heard of Jonson and three years since the Transcendental Painting Group show. I think I accomplished the goal of reawakening a n interest in the Group. In 1981, Raymond Jonson’s painting VARIATION ON A RHYTHEM H, 1931, was brought to me by a woman who purchased it some years earlier at a deacquisition sale at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts F for two hundred dollars. It is a magnificent painting and is now in the collection of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. In the last few years, three excellent raveling exhibitions have given the public a chance to familiarize themselves with the American Abstract Artists and Transcendental artists.

On September 8, 1989, the National Museum of American Art opened an exhibition of the Frost Collection. It traveled through the United States and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Eighty of the works in that exhibition came from my gallery. The Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts exhibited “The Second Wave of American Abstraction of the 1930s and 1940s” in September 1991 with twenty-one paintings by my artists. The Dayton Art Institute exhibition “Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde” opened at the Phillips Gallery in September 1992 and showed fourteen of my artists. However, the thing that gave me the realization that I had achieved my goal was in 1989 when I saw an advertisement from a small auction house in Massachusetts offering among other things a Raymond Jonson painting. I called to inquire and was gold that an elderly woman had founding a panting in her basement entitled COMPOSITION #5 – GOLDEN WIND, 1925 and was putting it up for sale. The auction house felt it should go from fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars. I had never seen the painting, but was familiar with the drawing that was the study for the painting. As it was a great example of Jonson’s early work, I decided I must have it. I made up my mind that I would go up to twenty-five thousand dollars. I made arrangements to bid by telephone, and when the painting came up, the person at the auction house said, “There is a lot of interest in the painting.” With great confidence, I replied, “Just let me know when the bidding starts.” The bidding opened at twenty-four thousand dollars – I never ad a chance to open my mouth. It sold for seventy thousand four hundred dollars. I created a monster!