Emil Bisttram Hidden Painting Released to Public

Hid­den Paint­ing, the ‘Over­soul’ by Emil Bist­tram, Renowned Painter and Orga­nizer of Tran­scen­den­tal Paint­ing Group, Released to Public

Many in the art com­mu­nity have won­dered where this paint­ing has been for the last 30 years. Safe in the hands of a pri­vate col­lec­tor, it is now being released to usher in the New Era along with two lith­o­graphs, ‘At One­ment’ and ‘Cre­ative Forces’.

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Emil Bist­tram and fel­low artist, Ray­mond Jon­son, are well known as the orga­niz­ers of the Tran­scen­den­tal Paint­ing Group, an asso­ci­a­tion of non-objective painters active in New Mex­ico from 1938–1942. The group pro­moted abstract paint­ings that would free view­ers from the con­straints of daily life and polit­i­cal affairs.

Bist­tram, who worked under famed artist and human­i­tar­ian, Nicholas Roerich, imbued his works with a sub­tle, spir­i­tual qual­ity. His paint­ing, The Over­soul, is now under the prove­nance of Aaron Payne Fine Art Gallery (505–995-9779) in Santa Fe, NM and is avail­able for pub­lic view­ing and sale.

“This paint­ing is a remark­able dis­cov­ery after all these years when many in the eso­teric art com­mu­nity have won­dered where it was. I believe the tim­ing of its release is sig­nif­i­cant to spir­i­tual seek­ers world­wide,” said an art col­lec­tor, who saw it first hand at the gallery and wished to remain anonymous.

Emil Bist­tram sought a New art for a New World Order, and he wrote of uni­ver­sal­ism and “the essen­tial One­ness of all things,” as replac­ing the mech­a­nis­tic, dual­is­tic con­cepts of the past. He spoke out against abstract art as a means of pro­duc­ing sim­ple aes­thetic emo­tion through the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact of pure form and color. Instead, he argued that artists should stim­u­late deeper ideas and intu­itions and thereby make a “sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the devel­op­ment of our cul­ture and the advance of civilization.”

Bist­tram became deeply involved with mys­ti­cal ideas and was attracted to the Theo­soph­i­cal Move­ment dur­ing the 1920s, while liv­ing in New York City. Theos­o­phy is a uni­ver­sal the­ol­ogy that Madame Helena Petro­vna Blavatsky syn­the­sized with East­ern spir­i­tual ideas dur­ing the late-nineteenth cen­tury. Blavatsky, from a Russ­ian noble fam­ily, stud­ied in Tibet from 1868–1870 and then pro­moted her mes­sage of the knowl­edge of the divine. Bist­tram also became fas­ci­nated with a math­e­mat­i­cal ratio called the “golden sec­tion,” or the “divine pro­por­tion,” thought to have spir­i­tual powers.

In his paint­ings and lith­o­graphs, the use of sym­me­try and pro­por­tion within each com­po­si­tion are deeply sym­bolic.
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