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Transcendental Painting Group

1938 - 1942 Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico

BiographyTowards the end of the Great Depression, a loose configuration of artists organized to discuss and perpetuate an alternative to the social realism and homespun Americana that had been promoted by Regionalism and the Ash Can school. Initiated in Taos in 1938, the Transcendental Painting Group formed to explore a heightened vision of the American landscape, employing free-wheeling symbols and imagery drawn from the collective unconscious to depict a transfigured, spiritually alive America. Drawing as well on the non-objective experimentation of Wassily Kandinsky, along with other American modernists, these artists sought to evoke sensuous, synesthetic experiences of nature and the cosmos, often using references to music and esoteric philosophies.

Under the guidance of painters Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, other artists affiliated with Transcendental Painting Group were Agnes Pelton, Lawren Harris, Florence Miller Pierce, Horace Pierce, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Dane Rudhyar, Stuart Walker, and Ed Garman. All worked in New Mexico except Pelton, who lived in Southern California.

The Transcendental Painting Group artists issued a manifesto stating that their purpose was "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual." Formally experimental, the Transcendental Painting Group painters often used geometric compositions similar to those of Constructivism and the Bauhaus, though their richly chromatic depictions of form celebrate musical rhythms and auratic light often missing from those earlier paintings.

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