“We must not imitate Nature in her effect but rather follow her in her laws and principles. Only in doing so may we hope to create works comparable to hers.” — Aristotle In 1975, when Taos artist Emil James Bisttram was eighty, Jerry Apodaca, New Mexico’s governor at the time, designated April 7, the artists’ birthday, as Emil Bisttram Day. Less than a year later, Bisttram died. Though we remember the man and his art, the day that honors him is all but forgotten. Having moved to Taos from New York City in 1932 — living on Ledoux Street, near what is now the Harwood Museum of Art — Bisttram somehow fell into the shadows cast by modernist artists whose fame eclipsed his own: Florence Miller Pierce, Raymond Jonson, and Agnes Pelton among them. These artists’ convictions were what united them when they formed the influential Transcendental Painting Group, established by Bisttram and Jonson in 1938. Before the movement even began, Bisttram and his colleagues held themselves to tenets that reflected Aristotle’s vision of order in the natural world. Five years earlier, when Bisttram, who was born in Hungary and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of eleven, was still fresh on the Taos art scene, he was one of several artists exhibiting at the Heptagon Gallery, which he established inside the Don Fernando Hotel in May 1933. The gallery’s first show opened soon after — with work by Dorothy Brett, Victor Higgins, Ernest Blumenschein, Eleanora Kissel, and John Ward Lockwood — marking the start of a loose affiliation of American artists, living at a crossroads between the coasts, who collectively became known as the Taos Moderns. Some of them held to the Aristotelian belief that art must follow an essential, intrinsic character of nature. For Bisttram, this was a lifelong conviction. All of his compositions, whether in the form of landscape or abstract painting or figurative drawing, offer a sense of order and harmony. “True art is not spontaneous,” he told Anne Hillerman, who wrote a profile of him for The Santa Fe New Mexican in 1975. “There’s nothing ‘free’ about art. One has to set limitations. Otherwise, all is chaos in art and in life as well.” Bisttram’s Transcendentalist paintings followed principles found in sacred geometry, an ancient system based on concepts of cosmic order and harmony that was used in the design of religious structures and art. These ideas weren’t new to Bisttram: Even the more gestural abstracts he painted adhered to artistic underpinnings based on such notions. There is nothing haphazard about them at all... (http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/art/gallery_openings/iconic-taose-o-emil-bisttram-at-addison-rowe/article_a729197d-3eca-562b-b25e-14422acd149c.html)