06/16/2026
Throughout his life, Jonson was a powerful force for the development of modernism in the Southwest. According to Ed Garman, Jonson was never simply interested in his own work, but was always devoted to the development and preservation of art as a benefit to the entire community of his friends, colleagues, and students. At the University of New Mexico, where he taught from 1934 -1954, he taught and influenced such prominent artists as Richard Diebenkorn and Agnes Martin.
In 1938, along with Emil Bisttram, he co-founded the Transcendental Painting Group, a group of artists whose shared vision was to transcend material reality and advance the expression of spirituality in art through the creation of non-representational work. The Group included Agnes Pelton, Lauren Harris, Ed Garman, Robert Gribbroek, William Lumpkins, Florence Miller Pierce, Stuart Walker, and Horace Towner Pierce. In 1950, he founded the Jonson Gallery at UNM – the only space in the southwest where abstract and non-representational work was being exhibited at that time.
In 1938, Jonson’s work was profoundly impacted by his adoption of the airbrush. With the airbrush, Jonson found that he could create uniformity of surface, transparency of shapes, and smooth and subtle variations of color that had never been possible before. With the widespread availability of acrylic polymer paints in 1957, Jonson was able to free himself almost completely from technical considerations and devote himself whole-heartedly to the configurations of colors and shapes for which his later work is best known.
Jonson exhibited throughout his career in Chicago, New York, and New Mexico. His work is included in the public collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of New Mexico.
Raymond Jonson (1891 - 1982)
from top: Watercolor No. 6, watercolor on paper, 1947, 19 1/4” x 26”; 22 3/4” x 31” framed
Watercolor No. 22, watercolor on board, 1946, 19” x 27”; 23” x 31” framed
