Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group

Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group surveys the work of the New Mexico artists who founded the group in Santa Fe and Taos in 1938. At a time when social realism dominated American art, the group pursued abstraction as a means of spiritual illumination.

Published with the Crocker Art Museum, this volume places their work within modern painting and twentieth-century American art, offering an alternative line through the history of abstraction.

The nine original members were Emil Bisttram, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce, and Stuart Walker; Ed Garman joined later. The group’s paintings have rarely been exhibited outside New Mexico and have often been overlooked in surveys of American art.

Essays consider the group alongside international artistic peers, its involvement with esoteric thought and Theosophy, its connections to the culture and landscape of the American Southwest, and the experiences of its two female members.

PUBLISHED WITH: Crocker Art Museum