Emil Bisttram

Emil Bisttram was a Taos Modernist painter and a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group of New Mexico. Born in Hungary in 1895,  he immigrated to New York City at the age of eleven with his family. After beginning work as a commercial artist at a young age, he started taking night classes at the National Academy of Art and Design. He went on to study at the Cooper Union, Parsons, and the Art Students League. After completing his studies, he taught at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts and the Master Institute of the Roerich Museum.

In 1930, he marked his first visit to Taos. The following year, he traveled to Mexico for a Guggenheim fellowship to study mural painting with Diego Rivera. Returning to Taos shortly after, Bisttram founded the avant-garde Taos School of Art and the Heptagon Gallery. While he came to Taos as a strictly representational painter, he came to be profoundly influenced by the abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky. This led to a major movement in 1938 when he founded the Transcendental Painting Group in Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with the painter Raymond Jonson. Through his involvement in the group, Bisttram’s work was included in several group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Emil Bisttram’s legacy as an artist, educator and arts advocate remains very much alive in New Mexico today. Many of his students at the Taos Art School went on to become well-known artists in their own right, such as painter Cliff Harmon. April 7th has been designated a New Mexico State holiday known as “Emil Bisttram Day”. The artist remained in Taos until his passing in 1974.