EMIL BISTTRAM WAS THE MOST INFLUENTIAL TEACHER AND INSTITUTIONAL BUILDER OF MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY NEW MEXICO MODERNISM, A HUNGARIAN-BORN MURALIST AND ABSTRACT PAINTER WHOSE TAOS SCHOOL OF ART AND CO-FOUNDING OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL PAINTING GROUP RESHAPED THE TRAJECTORY OF ART IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST.
Emil James Bisttram (1895–1976) was a Hungarian-born American painter, muralist, and teacher, and a central figure of the New Mexico modernist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Nagylak, Hungary, he emigrated with his family to New York at the age of eleven, settling on the Lower East Side, and trained at the National Academy of Design, the Cooper Union, the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts (Parsons), and the Art Students League. He taught early in his career at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts and at the Master Institute of the Roerich Museum, where he absorbed the spiritual and theosophical concerns that would shape his later abstraction, and he studied the system of Dynamic Symmetry directly with its principal proponent, Jay Hambidge.
A 1931 Guggenheim Fellowship in mural painting, originally awarded for study in Italy but redirected to Mexico in response to Mussolini's policies, brought him into the studio of Diego Rivera, and the experience confirmed the trajectory of his work. He moved permanently to Taos in 1932, founded the Taos School of Art and the Heptagon Gallery, and in 1938 co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group with Raymond Jonson and several other Santa Fe and Taos artists. Through Hilla Rebay he was included in major exhibitions at the Museum of Non-Objective Art (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) in 1940, 1944, and 1950, and in 1952 he co-founded the Taos Art Association. His work is held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Harwood Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and other institutions.