Raymond Jonson

Raymond Jonson (1891 – 1982)

Raymond Jonson, along with Emil Bisttram was the founder and leader of the Transcendental Painting Group. Born to a strict Baptist family, he was raised in the west and the midwest. As a teenager he took classes at the Portland Museum in Oregon, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and later at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the course of his training, Jonson met the modernist painter and printmaker B. J. O. Nordfelt, who encouraged his interest in modern art and urged him to develop a personal form of expression. In 1913 when the Armory Show was exhibited in Chicago, Jonson was particularly impressed with Kandinsky’s paintings, and was struck by Kandinsky’s conviction that a universal language could be used to express inner feelings.

Jonson was included in group shows at the Chicago Art Institute in 1913, 1914 and 1915, and in 1917 he became an instructor of painting at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Two years later, Jonson received a four month fellowship to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where he was able to dedicate himself solely to his painting.

After reading Kandinskyís Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Jonson’s interest in artistic spirituality grew. It was further nurtured in the 1920s by his association with the Russian artist-mystic Nicholas Roerich. Roerich formed a brotherhood of like-minded artists in Chicago called Cor Ardens. Dedicated to exploring issues of theosophy, the group was committed to achieving a unity of the arts. These issues continued to have resonance for Jonson long after he left Chicago, and they formed the basis for the TPG.

Jonson traveled to New Mexico for a visit in 1922. He found the dramatic landscape with the abstracted forms of Native American designs exhilarating, and he settled permanently there in 1924. In Santa Fe, Jonson tried to acquaint himself with the landscape by making hundreds of drawings and paintings in which he explored the dramatic terrain and its effects.

In 1934 Jonson began teaching at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. During the Depression he created two murals under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, one at the University of New Mexicoís Library, and the second at Eastern New Mexico University. Although he was happily settled in New Mexico, Jonson kept abreast of current events in the art world. In 1931 he visited Albert E. Gallatinís Gallery of Living Art in New York, and in 1937 he viewed an exhibition of the New Bauhaus in Chicago. His work was represented during these years at the Katherine Kuh Gallery in Chicago, and at the Howard Putzel Gallery in Hollywood, California.

By forming the TPG Jonson created a community of artists with a shared vision of mysticism found in nature articulated through abstraction. The group exhibited together in 1939 at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, and in 1940 at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York. Although the group disbanded in 1941, Jonson continued to explore the non-objective in his art until poor health forced him to stop painting in 1978.