Cosmic Web, Emil James Bisttram

For more than a century, Taos has drawn the attention of artists who found inspiration in the cultural traditions and striking landscape of northern New Mexico. In 1915, a group of artist/pioneers established the Taos Society of Artists; their paintings of the Native Pueblo and Hispanic peoples, as well as the desert landscape, prompted interest nationally and helped make Taos one of America’s premier art colonies. A younger generation of artists began arriving in Taos in the years between world wars, many of them drawn by the chance to pursue more personal, sometimes abstract imagery apart from metropolitan centers. This second wave of arrivals included Emil Bisttram, who settled there in 1931, eventually becoming one of the most prominent of the “Taos moderns.”
This work is from a group of drawings Bisttram called the Time Cycle Series. Many years later, the artist recalled that the series “dealt with metaphysical and occult ideas in which I am deeply interested. At the time I had a strong urge to give some of the symbolic concepts form and the drawings were the result.” Some of them inspired Bisttram’s large abstract paintings that, like the Time Cycle drawings, have found their way into scattered museums and private collections. Although Bisttram originally intended to keep the Time Cycle Series intact, he finally was “not unhappy over this [division] since I believe an artist’s work should get out to the public as much as possible, where, if it has something to say it will stimulate the imagination of the beholder.” CCE