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 the completion of his studies, he taught at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts and the Master Institute of the Roerich Museum.

1930 marked his first visit to Taos. The next year he traveled to Mexico on a Guggenheim fellowship to study mural painting with Diego Rivera. He returned to Taos shortly after, where he 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. In 1938 he founded the Transcendental Painting Group in Santa Fe, New Mexico, along with the painter Raymond Johnson. 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”. He remained in Taos until his passing in 1974.