The nuclear lab that recruited with cosmic art
The laboratory that built the first atomic bomb once tried to hire scientists with paintings about spiritual harmony.
In the early 1960s, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico placed recruitment advertisements in national trade journals featuring abstract paintings by members of the nearby Taos art colony, as reported by Artnet News.
A recurrent source was Emil Bisttram. The Taos-based artist made brightly coloured geometric abstractions about spiritual principles and universal laws.
Bisttram had left New York during the Great Depression and settled in the American Southwest. By the mid-1930s he had left behind realist training. His new work used glowing shapes, clear colour and symmetry. It became known as his Atom series.
In 1938, Bisttram and Raymond Jonson formed the Transcendental Painting Group. Its other members included Agnes Pelton and Lawren Harris. The group aimed to use form, colour and light to express non-objective reality, meaning art that does not depict recognisable objects.
Bisttram kept a meditation room. He practised a form of yoga focused on reaching higher consciousness.
Los Alamos noticed. The laboratory included Bisttram's abstractions in "Art and the Atom," a 1951 exhibition it organised. A decade later, his radiating forms were selling laboratory jobs to physicists and engineers.
The market has noticed again. Bisttram's Creative Forces (1936) sold at Sotheby's for US$192,000 in May, its second-highest price at auction according to the Artnet Price Database.
Collectors in New York can see the work up close. Santa Fe-based Addison Rowe Gallery is showing Bisttram abstractions at Independent 20th Century, the fair for 20th-century art. The gallery showed Jonson there in 2024. Its Bisttram display is listed as a solo presentation running 24–27 September 2026.
What makes this stand out is the overlap. Physicists were mapping invisible forces. Bisttram was painting them. Los Alamos saw a recruitment tool in that shared language.
