Emil Bisttram’s Cosmic “Atom” Goes on View in New York, After His Works Once Advertised Los Alamos

The “Atom” series of painter Emil Bisttram is on view at the booth of Addison Rowe Gallery of Santa Fe at the Independent 20th Century fair, held in the iconic Breuer building of Sotheby’s at 945 Madison Avenue in New York, from September 24 to 27, 2026. Bisttram, a painter of brightly colored geometric abstraction, was born in Hungary in 1895 and emigrated to New York as a child, before moving to Taos, New Mexico, after the 1929 stock market crash.

The series took the name “Atom” after the 1951 exhibition “Art and the Atom,” organized by the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. In the early 1960s, Los Alamos used art as a recruitment tool: it placed advertisements in national trade magazines featuring abstract paintings by artists from the Taos artist colony, only about 60 miles from the laboratory, and Bisttram was a regular presence in these ads. His work “Moon Magic” (1958) was used in an ad with the line: “At Los Alamos, the mysteries of the universe provide the dynamics for projects ranging from space propulsion to nuclear research.”

Bisttram himself saw a direct link between his precise abstractions and the revolutionary physics being developed nearby — both aimed to move beyond the external appearance of the physical world to reveal fundamental structures. The work “Creative Forces” (1936) — overlapping ellipses representing both the cosmic egg and the scientific replica of atomic orbitals — sold for $192,000 at Sotheby’s in May, the second-highest auction price for the artist, according to the Artnet Price Database.

In 1938 Bisttram co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group with Raymond Jonson; the group included artists such as Agnes Pelton and Lawren Harris. Their manifesto aimed to express non-objective reality through form, color and light — a philosophy that found an echo decades later in the laboratories where the history of modern physics was being written.

Source: USA Art News.