The Transcendental Painting Group
Frieze Los Angeles 2023 is here, and one of the highlights is the exhibition ‘Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938-1945’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The Transcendental Painting Group achieved their modernity through potently charged shapes, patterns, and archetypes that they believed dwelled in the “collective unconscious.” The artists looked to a wide variety of literary, religious, and philosophical forces, including Zen Buddhism, Theosophy, Agni Yoga, Carl Jung, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Convinced that an art capable of being intuitively understood would have equal validity to representational painting in an era of uncertainty, political divide, and fear, they attempted to promote abstraction that pursued enlightenment and spiritual illumination. According to their manifesto they strove “to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.”
The group, which came to include Agnes Pelton, Lawren Harris, Florence Miller Pierce, Horace Pierce, William Lumpkins and Dane Rudhyar, among others, followed the guidance of Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram, who were in turn heavily influenced by the colour theories of Wassily Kandinsky.
📷
1. Stuart Walker, Composition 55 (Convergence), 1938, Jean Pigozzi Collection
2. Agnes Pelton, Winter, 1933, Crocker Art Museum
3. Emil Bisttram, Oversoul, 1941, Private Collection
