Emil Bisstram

Hungarian-American artist, a painter and director of a School of Art in Taos, NM, with work exhibited in the Albright Gallery, the Roerich Museum of New York and in Taos, NM, with murals at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC. Bisstram moved from Hungary to the U.S. with his parents in 1906. He studied art in night classes and taught at Parsons School of Design and the Roerich Museum's New York Institute of United Arts. In 1931 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study in Mexico with muralist Diego Rivera, and in 1932 he opened his Taos New Mexico School of Art. He had begun to experiment with Kandinsky's ideas as early as 1931 but it was not until he began to observe Native American art in 1933 that he became seriously interested in abstraction. A group of artists who shared an interest in abstract and non-objective are formally organized a group, The Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), at the home of Emil Bisstram on 6/10/1938, a group that included Raymond Jonson, Lawren Harris and Dane Rudhyar. Their mission included a deeper philosophical intention. As pioneers of art, the Transcendental Painting Group sought to gain acceptance of their art by the largely antagonistic New Mexican public, thereby connecting themselves with similar issues held by a larger community of modern artists in the U.S. and the world. As WW II approached, Bisstram was forced to move his school to Los Angeles and Phoenix to draw adequate enrollment. He later recentered in Taos. Bisstram died in Taos, NM in 1976.