Raymond Jonson’s career spanned many American cities before he settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he cofounded the Transcendentalist Painting Group, a collective that explored spirituality and nature through abstraction. In the early 1930s, he produced a series of works that capture the pulsing energy of American urban and industrial might. In City Forces, reverberating colors and shapes evoke the cacophonous urban soundscape produced by cars, factories, and subways. This blending of representational and abstract elements can also be seen through the overlapping of objects in the foreground that suggests the belly of a guitar.