SFMOMA, Part 55: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Growth Variant No. VII (Raymond Jonson, 1931).
It doesn't look like a landscape, and it doesn't look like an abstraction either — which is exactly where Raymond Jonson wanted you. Stemlike forms curve across an asymmetrical canvas, rising, bending, reaching, driving a sensation of upward growth that the wall label names before you can. Nothing here is a plant, precisely. Nothing here is not a plant. Painted in 1931, in oil on canvas, Growth Variant No. VII belongs to a series of eight Growth Variant paintings Jonson made between 1929 and 1935, each one more abstract than the last — a slow, deliberate walk away from representation toward something he spent his whole life trying to name. In 1938 he would co-found the Transcendental Painting Group, whose stated aim was to "carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world." This canvas, seven years earlier, is the carrying already underway.
The Armory Show in Chicago
Raymond Jonson was born in 1891 in Chariton, Iowa, to a Swedish Baptist minister, and raised in the Midwest and the West — Portland, Oregon, then Chicago, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute. The hinge of his young life arrived in 1913, when the Armory Show came to Chicago and he stood in front of the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky. He was twenty-two. What struck him, by every account, was not the shock of the new but the conviction behind it: Kandinsky's belief that a universal visual language could express inner feeling, that abstraction could be spiritual work rather than decoration. Jonson read Concerning the Spiritual in Art and never really recovered. He had found the problem he would spend sixty years solving.
Cor Ardens
In the 1920s Jonson fell into the orbit of Nicholas Roerich — the Russian painter, mystic, and theosophist — who had gathered a brotherhood of like-minded Chicago artists called Cor Ardens, dedicated to theosophy and to the unity of the arts. Jonson became its secretary. The language sounds remote now, faintly embarrassing to the modern ear: the fraternity of beauty, the spiritual in art, planes of idealistic design. But it gave Jonson something the Armory Show alone could not — a community and a metaphysics, a reason to believe that pushing past representation was not an aesthetic game but a serious pursuit. The Transcendental Painting Group, founded sixteen years later, would be Cor Ardens grown up and gone west: same ideals, desert light.
New Mexico, 1924
Jonson visited New Mexico in 1922 and moved there for good in 1924, settling first in Santa Fe. He tried to acquaint himself with the landscape the hard way — hundreds of drawings and paintings of the dramatic terrain, its geology, its light. He founded the Atalaya Art School. From 1927 to 1931 he ran a "Modern Wing" at the New Mexico Museum of Art, mounting monthly exhibitions of modern artists — a one-man campaign to drag the Southwest into the present. In 1934 he began teaching at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he would stay for twenty years. The Southwest gave him two things Chicago never could: the forms — mesas, arroyos, the abstracted geometries of Native American design — and the silence to think in.
The Transcendental Painting Group
In 1938 Jonson and Emil Bisttram co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group: nine original members, later ten, including Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce, Horace Towner Pierce, Stuart Walker, William Lumpkins, Lawren Harris, Robert Gribbroek, and eventually Ed Garman. Their aim, in their own words, was "to defend, validate and promote abstract art" and "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new expressions of space, color, light and design." It was a brave, slightly doomed project — spiritual abstraction in 1938 America, with Surrealism and Social Realism dividing the art world between them — and it lasted four years before World War II forced it to disband in 1942. Jonson was its primary organizer and president. He had been rehearsing for it since 1913.
Growth, variant by variant
The Growth Variant series is the rehearsal made visible. Eight paintings, 1929 to 1935, exploring the processes of plant growth — and the label's phrasing matters: "each more abstract than the last." This is serial abstraction with a botanical alibi. Jonson starts from something observed — stems, shoots, the way living things push upward — and with each variant lets the observation dissolve a little further into pure form: curve, rhythm, interval, pressure. No. VII is near the end of the sequence, which means it is near the far edge of representation. The stems are still there if you want them. They are also, already, just lines that know how to grow.
What the painting does
Stand in front of it and the first thing you notice is the asymmetry — the canvas refuses balance, refuses the centered composition, and that refusal is the energy source. The stemlike forms don't decorate the surface; they climb it, curving across the field with a botanical insistence that feels observed even where nothing is recognizable. The palette is Southwestern without being scenic: earth, mineral, the colors of geology rather than flora. There is no horizon, no ground line, no sky — growth without context, the process isolated from the place. That isolation is the transcendental move. Jonson isn't painting a plant. He's painting growing.
The label's last line
The wall label ends somewhere unexpected: it says the group's ideals "resonate with what Takako Yamaguchi calls 'semi-abstraction' — a distinct visual language at the threshold of naturalism, abstraction, and craft." Threshold is the right word, and it's the word for this whole painting. Growth Variant No. VII lives on a threshold — between the observed and the invented, between the plant and the line, between 1931 Santa Fe and the timeless space Jonson was trying to reach. Semi-abstraction isn't a compromise. It's a location. Jonson spent the 1930s mapping it, one variant at a time.
Purchase, 1979
SFMOMA bought the painting in 1979 — nearly fifty years after it was made, three years before Jonson's death at ninety. He died, by the accounts, at the Jonson Gallery itself, the gallery he had founded on the UNM campus in 1950 to preserve the art of the Transcendental Painting Group. The late purchase has a certain justice: the museum acquiring the work of a man who spent his life building institutions for unfashionable art — the Atalaya school, the Modern Wing, the TPG, his own gallery. The collection was moved to the UNM Art Museum in 2010. The painting stayed in San Francisco, growing upward on Floor 2.
The other Southwest
It's worth saying what Jonson is not. He is not Georgia O'Keeffe, making the desert iconic and sensual. He is not the Taos Society painters, rendering adobe and ceremony. The Southwest modernists mostly painted the place. Jonson painted through the place — using its geology and its Native geometries as a doorway to something that had no location at all. That's why the Transcendental Painting Group reads now as the road American abstraction didn't take: while New York was heading toward the heroic gesture and the existential stain, a handful of painters in New Mexico were trying to make art that pointed past the physical world entirely. History chose New York. Floor 2 keeps the other option on the wall.
The WPA murals
Jonson wasn't only a studio mystic. In the 1930s he painted six WPA murals at the University of New Mexico — public art, federally funded, on the walls of the university where he taught. The murals are the other half of the practice: the same hand that chased transcendence in the studio could also address a wall, a public, a building. It's a useful corrective to the image of the desert recluse. Jonson believed modern art belonged everywhere — in the monthly Modern Wing exhibitions he ran, in the Atalaya Art School he founded, in the federal mural program, in the university gallery he would later build. The spiritual in art wasn't a retreat from the world. It was a curriculum.
Bisttram and Taos
Emil Bisttram, Jonson's co-founder, deserves his own sentence. Hungarian-born, trained at the National Academy and the Art Students League, Bisttram settled in Taos in 1932 and opened a school there — the conduit through which Jay Hambidge's Dynamic Symmetry, theosophy, and non-objective painting flowed into the Southwest. Where Jonson was the organizer, Bisttram was the teacher-evangelist, running the Emil Bisttram School for Transcendentalism and carrying the ideas to Los Angeles as well. The two men were complementary opposites: Jonson's cool, systematic growth-variants; Bisttram's warmer, more explicitly cosmic compositions. Together they held the group's center for its four-year life.
The student who carried it
In the early 1950s, teaching at UNM, Jonson had a profound influence on the Cochiti Pueblo artist Joe Herrera — one of the most consequential teacher-student lines in Southwestern art. Herrera took Jonson's lessons in abstraction and carried them into Pueblo painting, a transmission that runs in the opposite direction from the usual story. The usual story is modernists borrowing Indigenous forms. Here the Indigenous artist took the modernist's tools and made them Pueblo. Jonson, who had spent the 1920s studying Native geometries as a doorway to the universal, lived to see the doorway walked through from the other side. He retired from UNM in 1954 but kept mentoring. The teaching was the work, too.
The revival
For decades the Transcendental Painting Group was a footnote — too spiritual for the formalists, too abstract for the regionalists, disbanded too early to build a market. Then, in the 2010s, the museums came back: major surveys reintroduced Bisttram, Pelton, and Jonson to an art world newly interested in mysticism, in alternative modernisms, in everything New York didn't choose. Pelton became the breakout star. Jonson remains the deep cut — the organizer, the theorist, the man who kept the gallery. Growth Variant No. VII, bought by SFMOMA in 1979 when almost nobody was looking, now reads as an early bet on the reevaluation. The museum saw it before the market did.
So here's the thesis: Growth Variant No. VII is a painting of a process, not a thing — growth abstracted one variant at a time until the stem becomes a line and the line keeps growing anyway. Jonson found his problem at the Armory Show in 1913, found his metaphysics in Cor Ardens, found his landscape in New Mexico, and spent the 1930s walking the threshold between naturalism and abstraction with a botanist's patience and a mystic's ambition. Eight variants, each more abstract than the last. This is number seven. The plant is almost gone. The growing remains. 🌁
Timeline — Raymond Jonson
1891 — born in Chariton, Iowa; raised in the Midwest and Portland, Oregon
1913 — the Armory Show comes to Chicago; Kandinsky converts him to spiritual abstraction
1917 — instructor of painting, Chicago Academy of Fine Arts
1920s — secretary of Roerich's Cor Ardens; theosophy and the unity of the arts
1922 — first visit to New Mexico; the landscape changes everything
1924 — settles in Santa Fe; founds the Atalaya Art School
1927–31 — runs the "Modern Wing" at the New Mexico Museum of Art
1929–35 — paints the eight Growth Variant paintings, each more abstract than the last
1931 — paints Growth Variant No. VII
1934 — begins teaching at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
1938 — co-founds the Transcendental Painting Group with Emil Bisttram; serves as president
1942 — the group disbands under wartime pressure
1950 — founds the Jonson Gallery on the UNM campus
1954 — retires from UNM; keeps mentoring, keeps painting
1979 — SFMOMA purchases Growth Variant No. VII
1982 — dies May 10, at the Jonson Gallery, age 90