Bisttram brought to the Southwest a particular synthesis available almost nowhere else in the country, academic European training, study with the leading Mexican muralist of his generation, the geometric system of Dynamic Symmetry, and the spiritual concerns of the Roerich and Theosophical circles, and used it to build the institutions through which the next generation of New Mexico modernists would emerge.
Bisttram's path into American art was the immigrant path of his generation. He arrived in New York as a child in the years before the First World War, grew up on the Lower East Side, and worked his way through the major New York art schools as a young man, accumulating a thorough technical training in drawing, painting, and design. His teaching career began almost immediately after his own studies, and by his early thirties he was already a well-established figure in New York's art-education world.
The decisive intellectual influence of his early career came from his contact with the Roerich Museum and the system of Dynamic Symmetry, the proportional theory developed by Jay Hambidge from his analysis of classical Greek design. Bisttram studied directly under Hambidge, absorbed his conviction that proper proportion was the basis of all enduring art, and would teach Dynamic Symmetry to his own students for the rest of his life. The combination of Roerich's spiritual seriousness and Hambidge's geometric rigor became the underlying structure of his later abstract work.
The Guggenheim award reoriented his life. The original plan to study in Italy was abandoned in response to the political climate, and he chose instead to work with Diego Rivera in Mexico, a decision that placed him directly inside the most consequential mural movement of the early twentieth century. He returned with both a deeper command of large-scale composition and a clear sense that his future lay in the American Southwest rather than in New York.
The relocation to Taos began the second, defining half of his career. He founded the Taos School of Art and the Heptagon Gallery almost immediately, and across the next four decades the school produced and trained a substantial portion of the modernist artists working in northern New Mexico. His own painting moved through cubist and futurist phases in the 1930s and arrived, by the end of the decade, at the pure geometric and non-objective idiom that would define his work with the Transcendental Painting Group.
The institutional commitments continued to the end. He chaired and built up the Taos School of Art for the rest of his life, helped found the Taos Art Association in the postwar period, and remained one of the central figures of the New Mexico art world until his death. His work today is recognized both as a body of accomplished American modernist painting in its own right and as the institutional foundation on which much of the postwar Taos and Santa Fe abstract scene was built.