The Hungarian-born American painter was an important figure in several esoteric societies, and produced works that he believed were “portals” to enter the New Age.
March 15.03.2025
Emil Bisttram. From X.
Emil Bisttram (1895–1976) was a key figure in the New Mexico artistic and esoteric community during and after World War II. Born in Hungary, Bisttram had been a young street gang leader and professional boxer in New York before finding his way as an artist. A spiritual seeker, he was familiar with Theosophy, Swedenborgianism, and the Rosicrucian Association of Max Heindel (1865–1919), of which he became a member about 1928.
Alma Reed (1889–1966), a patron of the arts in New York with a variety of esoteric interests organized his first important personal exhibition at the Delphic Studios, which also hosted “Neo-Greek” rituals, in 1933, and arranged for a Guggenheim grant allowing Bisttram to study in Mexico under muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957). At the Delphic Studios Bisttram also met Swedenborgian painter Howard Giles (1876–1955), who became a mentor of sort, and Russian artist and Theosophist Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947), who was living in the US at that time. Roerich’s grand project in New York was the Master Institute of United Arts, a school promoting all forms of a spiritually oriented art. He involved in the project several Delphic Society regulars, including Giles and his pupil Bisttram. Both became important teachers at the Master Institute.
Young pupils at the Master Institute of United Arts. From X.
After his training in Mexico, in 1931 Bisttram decided to settle in Taos, New Mexico, which was home to several artists interested in alternative spirituality, and where eventually other painters who had been associated with the Delphic Studios in New York also moved. Artistic colonies had a long history in New Mexico. Roerich and his wife themselves had visited the state in 1921 and received revelations from Master Morya concerning the special significance of the place. Several followers of Roerich lived in Taos and Santa Fe, and Bisttram was naturally attracted to their circle.
The group of artists around Bisttram in New Mexico was among the first in the world to talk consistently of a coming New Age, connected with the astrological Age of Aquarius, whose beginning they awaited in 1936. Bisttram’s manuscripts studied by American scholar Ruth Pasquine demonstrate that the artist, upon his return from Mexico in 1931, believed that “we are on the threshold of a new cycle in man’s evolution called the Aquarian era (we are just passing out of the Piscean era).”
Bisttram based his ideas about the New Age on Madame Helena Blavatsky’s (1831–1891) notion of the emergence of a new sub-race, as re-interpreted by Annie Besant (1847–1933). It is probable that Bisttram was also familiar with theories about a coming New Age advanced by Alice Bailey (1880–1949), since she was an occasional visitor to the New York Delphic Studios and worked for a while at Roerich’s Master Institute, when Bisttram was also a teacher there.
The date 1936 came from Roerich, and was revealed to him by the Masters as the year that would mark the beginning of a mystical kingdom he would establish in Central Asia. Bisttram also took from Roerich the notion that 1936 “began the Aquarian Age, the age of women and the liberation of women,” an idea expressed in the mural “Contemporary Justice and Women” he realized in a style influenced by Rivera for the United States Department of Justice in Washington D.C. in 1937. Bisttram, however, also believed that the passage in the visual arts from Cubism to what he called “Neo-Classicism” corresponded to the entrance into a new cycle or sub-cycle, a view that might also reflect ideas of Rivera and his circle.
Emil Bisttram, “Contemporary Justice for Women,” mural, 1937. Source: U.S. Department of Justice.
Upon settling in New Mexico, Bisttram was fascinated by the Brotherhood of the Penitentes, a Catholic group practicing self-flagellation and a ritual re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday. These extreme practices led to the Penitentes’ exclusion from the Catholic Church, although they would eventually be readmitted into the fold in 1947. According to Pasquine, “Bisttram was probably so fascinated by the Penitentes because of Blavatsky’s assertion that a symbolic crucifixion was the last and most secret of Egyptian mysteries.” In the early 1930s, he produced several paintings inspired by the Penitentes.
Emil Bisttram, “Penitentes” (1932).
Later, however, Bisttram came to believe that the art for the New Age should be abstract. Between 1936 and 1947, he produced abstract paintings influenced by Hopi Indian art. He used the encaustic technique, based on the use of beeswax and pigments on paper. He never sold the encaustics during his lifetime, and showed the works only to close friends. Bisttram intended his encaustics as meditation tools and mystical objects. Their aim was to realign spiritual forces in anticipation of the advent of the New Age. Bisttram believe that his encaustics might act as portal leading to the New Age.
Two of Bisttram’s encaustics.
In fact, rather than a time of universal peace, World War II was coming, and Bisttram’s works became somewhat darker as the war progressed. 1936 appeared as yet another case of failed prophecy for both Bisttram and Roerich. The Masters advised the latter that the New Kingdom had started in the invisible “subtle spheres” rather than on Earth in New Mexico or in Central Asia, a classic example of “spiritualization” of a failed prophecy. Bisttram eventually found solace in the study of local Native American folklore. Ancient prophecies persuaded the artist that the New Age he waited for was not an external political event but an inner transformation of the hearts of an enlightened minority, visible only to those who had eyes to see.
The failed prophecy did not prevent Bisttram from becoming a central figure in the American network of artists interested in alternative spirituality. Some of them actually moved to New Mexico, including Lawren Harris (1885–1970), the best-known Canadian painter of the twentieth century and a very active member of the Theosophical Society and, later, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), who had herself encountered Theosophy. Harris spent the years 1938–1940 in New Mexico, as his art was increasingly turning to abstraction. He was also interested in Canadian nationalist political thought, and placed the emergency of Blavatsky’s sixth sub-race in Canada rather than in the United States.
In 1937, two members of Roerich’s inner circle, a wealthy socialite from Oklahoma, Clyde Gartner (1900–1967), and pianist and composer Maurice Lichtmann (1887–1948), founded in Santa Fe the Arsuna (“One Art” in Latin) Gallery and School, where both Roerich-connected Chicago artist Raymond Jonson (1891–1982), who in the meantime had moved to New Mexico, and Bisttram came to teach. In 1938, Jonson, Bisttram and Harris were among the founders in New Mexico of the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG). Another painter with a background in Theosophy and Roerich’s splinter Theosophical group Agni Yoga, Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) also joined the TPG, although she never made the move from California to New Mexico. What created a special bond among the TPG members was their shared admiration for Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), whose theosophically oriented book “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” (1912) remained a crucial influence for them .
The administrative and publishing arm of the TPG was the American Foundation for Transcendental Painting, which elected as one of its vice-presidents Dane Rudhyar (pseud. of Daniel Chennevière, 1895–1985), a French-born composer and artist who went on to become one of America’s leading astrologers of the twentieth century. He was also a decisive influence on the group’s theories on the New Age.
The TPG was short-lived and its activities formally ceased in 1942. With the war, Harris returned to Canada and international contacts became difficult, particularly with Roerich in the Himalayas, where he died, in Kullu, India, in 1947. The TPG’s choice for abstraction separated the American painters from the Mexican muralists, and after the war new trends emerged.
One of the abstract paintings typical of the late Bisttram.
Bisttram aligned himself with one of the splinter groups from Roerich’s Agni Yoga, led by Ralph Harris Houston (“Guru R.H.H.,” 1908–1976). The painter hosted the meetings of the R.H.H. group in his home in Taos, where people came from as far as away as California. One of them was social activist Burt Wilson (1933–2021), who later went on to found his own group, the Academy of Ancient Wisdom.
Wilson recalled that R.H.H. was “literally cursed” for his schism by leaders of the “orthodox” New York Roerich circle, including by actress Angela Lansbury (1925–2022, of “Murder, She Wrote” fame), an Agni Yoga devotee and the sister of Edgar Lansbury (1930–2024), a Broadway producer and the president of the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York. Relationships between the different Roerich groups are now improving.
Another member of the Bisttram-Houston group was Gayle Pierce (1903–1999), a popular chiropractor and spiritual healer who had among her clients and followers several artists. Her life shows how relationships between the artistic milieus and alternative spirituality survived the demise of the pre-war network. Raised as a Mormon, Pierce was part of the earlier Dianetics circle in California. Later, she became a close disciple of Guru R.H.H. with Bisttram, before starting her own group based on both Roerich and Pyotr Demyanovich Ouspensky (1878–1947). She then traveled to Japan, where she joined one of the local new religions, Tenshō Kōtai Jingū-kyō and became a health advisor of its founder Sayo Kitamura (“Ogamisama,” 1900–1967). After Kitamura’s death, she left Japan and later adopted Tibetan Buddhism as her religion. Pierce’s story confirms how many 20th-century artists and their friends were “seekers,” exploring different forms of alternative spirituality.
Bisttram died in 1976, still persuaded that the Masters had a “Great Plan” for a coming New Age of peace. While contemporary events may make us somewhat skeptical about this prophecy, Bisttram may have been unduly pessimistic about the success of his art, which is today increasingly appreciated and commands significant, if not outstanding, prices in international auctions.
Source: bitterwinter.org
Comments