CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/21/2021

Weird mojo in 'Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group'

“Blue Forms” (1942) by Florence Miller Pierce is reproduced from Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, the highly-anticipated new release from DelMonico Books and the Crocker Art Museum, published to accompany the traveling exhibition opening this week in Albuquerque. The first book devoted to this underrecognized group of artists from the Southwest who promoted abstraction in pursuit of enlightenment and spiritual illumination, Another World, collects 175 images by Emil Bisttram, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, Lawren Harris, Raymond Jonson, William Lumpkins, Agnes Pelton, Horace Towner Pierce, Dane Rudhyar and Stuart Walker, in addition to Miller Pierce. “Contemporary abstraction, broadly, now seems to be grasping for styles and concepts that break from the formal restrictions of the past century,” curator and editor Michael Duncan writes. “Aimless doodles, random tracings, scribbles and daubs have proliferated on canvases for several decades now. Given the dire state of the world today, we need something more. The TPG provides a model for how, today, more than eighty years later, nonobjective art might once again regain its mojo, rekindle the spirit and nourish the soul.”