Two art stories this week sit at opposite ends of the prestige spectrum and share the same uncomfortable logic. At Independent 20th Century, Emil Bisttram's surreal atomic paintings, made by a transcendentalist who genuinely believed geometry could channel cosmic energy, ended up being appropriated as promotional material for Los Alamos. At London Fashion Week, Burberry's SS27 show centered the work of Celia Birtwell, an 85-year-old artist whose prints carried the whole collection. Both cases involve an institution reaching toward an artist whose credibility is spiritual or subcultural or simply very old, and converting that credibility into something more legible: a brand story, a press moment, a product.
The Artist as Legitimacy Engine
Bisttram's case is the darker version. His Taos-based transcendentalism was genuinely esoteric: he studied with Wassily Kandinsky's circle, believed abstract form carried divine information, and painted the atom as a mystical rather than a military object. The nuclear program found his imagery useful precisely because it aestheticized what would otherwise terrify. Birtwell's situation is warmer but structurally similar. Burberry has been running a strategy of centering 'legendary British artists' for several seasons now, which is a way of saying: we are borrowing a person's lifetime of accumulated cultural meaning and wearing it for a season. The artist gets visibility; the brand gets soul.
When Transcendence Becomes a Mood Board
Emma Kunz, also showing at Independent this week, insisted she was a healer before she was an artist, and her geometric works were tools for diagnosis, not objects for sale. The art market is now retrospectively categorizing her as both. This is the arc. Spiritual technology gets made. Institutions find it useful. The original intent fossilizes into provenance. A 2021 paper in the Journal of Material Culture by Weiner and Davis traced how outsider and visionary art gets reframed by market contexts that the makers never anticipated and often explicitly rejected. The throughline from Bisttram to Birtwell to Kunz is not exploitation exactly. It is more that transcendence, once aestheticized, becomes portable. And portable things get carried by whoever is moving fastest. Right now, that is fashion weeks and art fairs.