// literary & arts //
Fall 2005
A Bloom That Never Fades
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Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color
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More than one hundred years after Goethe wrote his treatise on color effects, another German-born artist took up the mantle of color experimentation and translated it into a lifelong fascination with the emotional effects produced by color in painting. The body of work now on display at the Whitney is the most comprehensive retrospective on the little-known artist's work to date. Arranged in loosely chronological order, the exhibit walks the viewer through the whole spectrum of Oscar Bluemner's singular artistic career. Though his subjects evolve from New Jersey factories to psychodramatic landscapes, all of his canvases proclaim his interest in the emotional and psychological effects of color and its interplay with light.
Prior to his emigration to the United States in 1892, Bluemner was an award-winning architect trained at Berlin's prestigious Royal Technical College. Indeed, there are vestiges of architectural precision in his early work, some of which feature plumb-lined vectors and mathematical prisms. A work from 1917, Morning Light (Dover Hills, October), directly recalls Futurism's imposition of formalistic grids and refracted light systems. Yet, unlike the Futurist fixation with movement and speed, Bluemner's landscapes emit an aura of stillness and calm.
Left: Expression of a Silktown (Patterson) (1914). Right: Death (1929). Bluemner’s wife had passed away earier that year.Like Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and many other American artists who formally engaged with the changing American landscape and its increasing industrialization, Bluemner was also attracted to industrial scenes because he found it easy to reduce the chimneys, the pipes of steel mills, and bridges to their geometric essences through symbolic colors. While in many ways Bluemner's flat perspectives and fauvist colors anticipate Expressionism's preoccupation with free-form abstraction, his landscapes never disintegrate into pure abstraction. He outlines the vibrant forms in his early paintings with severe black lines, geometricizing and flattening the landscape. His palette may not seem unusual to us now after the vibrant pop art of the `60s and `70s, but at the time Bluemner's colors were considered shocking. He was an early proponent of the synaesthetic use of vivid colors to transmit a whole range of emotions in painting. He considered red to be the essence of vitality, energy, power, and most of all, masculinity. Blue stood for hope, green for calm, violet for melancholy—and nowhere is there a more moving example of his mastery over color's emotive power than Death, a small watercolor from 1926, which he probably painted as a cathartic response to his wife's death earlier that year. Shades of muted purples emit an otherworldly glow in the abstracted background, while a twisted dead tree leans diagonally in the foreground. Though strictly speaking a landscape, the painting's subject is executed with such latent pain that it is hard to see the tree as anything but a human figure in the anguished throes of death.
Bluemner sought to illustrate primal, universal forces through the material world around him. Although his trees, houses, and paths initially seem easily recognizable as static elements, his style eventually matures to the point that all elements–natural and man-made–take on anthropomorphized features. Bluemner infused this life force in as unlikely subjects as a New Jersey silk mill, or a winding path through the woods. "He was very interested in Hegel's notion of synthesizing opposite forces," says Barbara Haskell, curator at the Whitney and organizer of the exhibit, "and was most interested in the anonymous intersections of man and nature." Thus, his paintings depict houses and telegraph lines communing with moonlight and pine trees in an atmosphere of vibrant harmony.
After his wife's death, Bluemner made a stunning series of sun and moon studies which the Whitney groups together in a dimly-lit room to show off the paintings' ethereal glow. These gorgeous pictures mark the stirrings of his creative impulses after his period of mourning. There is something about these haunting watercolors that affirm both life and death simultaneously, showing both as intertwined in the same primal element or universal force.
Despite Bluemner's focus on the modern American landscape, he maintained a lifelong interest in researching Old European masters, as well as Chinese and Japanese art. A vitrine in the gallery displays an annotated page from an exhibit of Early Chinese Paintings and Sculptures he visited in 1922. "Eastern artists are truer artists than those in the West since they do not imitate the accidental, tangible reality," he wrote. In the same catalog, he juxtaposes a lovingly sketched Tang-dynasty horse in all its animal, fleshy agitation with a sinewy drawing of a Chinese sculpture of a human which seems much flatter, without as much mass. Bluemner believed that the difference between the representation of human forms in Asian and European art had to do with the latter's Biblical and Classical traditions. Both of these traditions celebrate the spirit within the flesh and identify the human form as a manifestation of the divine. Hence, organic forms in European art are rendered with perspectival, tangible volume; whereas Asian art emphasizes the otherworldly and the distinction between mind and body. A quote from his notebooks explains how he combines a technique used in Chinese ink landscapes, where one carves out empty space with flowing lines, thus imbuing space with active, intangible tension, which symbolizes mass, with his preoccupation with the primal force of color: "Line limits a mass (of abstract space) to a figure (flat) as a symbol of complex realistic volume forms. Line calls for simple color." This statement sums up the essence of his artistic vision.
Even as he was exploring the symbolic aspects of Eastern art, Bluemner was also formally experimenting with the material compositions of his paints and surfaces. He attempted to recreate the highly glossy, lacquered surfaces of Japanese decorative art by resurfacing wooden boards, layering them over several times with casein, a type of milk acid found in plastics. He concocted his own chemical mixtures by blending his paints with formaldehyde and acid, in order to preserve the fidelity of his high-octane colors. Bluemner's preoccupation with smoothness and flatness, as well as his chemical experiments, show that he was in step with modern art's self-consciousness about material and surface. As a result of his paint-and-chemical mixtures, his paintings are extraordinarily well preserved and will remain so for decades to come.
The Asian philosophy of opposing universal Yin and Yang forces fits right into his artistic sensibilities. His engagement with binaries plays itself out over the course of his career: man versus woman, life versus death, light versus darkness, ego versus id, red versus green, and so on. The most powerful of his psychodramatic landscapes is his Summer Night from 1936, which was his last painting. A red house stands in half-darkness, confronted by a sinewy green tree (intimated by a thin curved trunk and an orb sitting on top of it). The piece's theatrical tension is augmented by a dramatic spotlight in the middle of the canvas. Like other modernists who were preoccupied with crises of language and representation, Bluemner was also interested in communicating the unspeakable in human relations; thus he staged each canvas with theatrically symbolic elements in order to better depict the narrative of the human condition.
Bluemner's writing and art indicate that he was heavily influenced by the aesthetic and philosophical traditions of Dürer, Hegel, and Goethe. Unfortunately, his pride in Germanist humanism was misinterpreted by critics, who at the height of World War I dismissed his early work. They claimed it was a manifestation of barbaric German aggression, calling his industrial landscapes from 1911 "ugly" and depraved. These accusations could not have been a more mistaken view of Bluemner's life and work. Throughout his life he chafed under authoritarian rule—in fact, his disillusionment with Prussia's Bismarck-led militaristic expansion was what brought him to America in the first place. Despite the fact that his work may have stemmed from the same anti-bourgeois impulse as the Futurists or the Expressionists, he refused to be aligned with an artistic movement with a political agenda. In 1933, when it became clear that Nazism was on the rise, Bluemner made a radical break with the contemporary connotations of German nationalist culture and instead aligned himself with the Northern Renaissance old masters by signing his paintings "Florianus," a Latinization of Bluemner, which means "flower."
Summer Flat (1936)
In keeping with his political isolation, Bluemner also distanced himself artistically. Although his work was championed by Alfred Stieglitz, the foremost arbiter of American modernism (he even exhibited in Stieglitz's famous 291 Gallery concurrently with American masters such as Georgia O'Keefe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin), Bluemner never felt at home in this community. He dismissed the work of contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, removing himself from the incendiary Expressionists in Europe and eventually distancing himself from Stieglitz's elite circle.
Bluemner's sense of dramatic isolation evinced itself in his paintings as much as in his life. His haunting, symbolic 1933 Self-Portrait reveals a glimpse into the methodological rigor of his style as well as into his taut psychological state. As Haskell says, "Just as he renders his landscapes as people, he does his face as a landscape." The clefts of his sunken cheeks and stubborn chin seem hacked out like craggy mountain cliffs. Every facial feature seems vaguely geometric in form as his head floats against an abstract panel of pure red. In a wry acknowledgement of his impoverished condition and his obsession with red, Bluemner would dub himself "the Vermillionaire." In keeping with his desire to invoke the tradition of Northern Renaissance masters, his portrait directly recalls that of Albrecht Dürer's, replete with dramatic undertones of martyrdom and artistic torture.
Bluemner's view of himself as a misunderstood artistic genius had a direct impact on the erosion his relationships with gallery owners and clients. As a result, he became financially destitute and forced his family to move every couple of months. Although his later shows were well received by critics, he demanded astronomical fees for his works that were out of touch with the economic landscape of the Depression. Despite some critical acclaim and Stieglitz's support, Bluemner did not sell a single piece in his final show of 1935. Though partly responsible for his own commercial failure, Bluemner was nevertheless troubled by his relative obscurity and even wrote in his journal that "Geniuses are spurned in their own time." Ultimately, he could not reconcile his Old-World conception of the romantic artist with the commercial realities of the American art market.
After a car accident in 1936, saddled with mounting debts and failing health, Bluemner took his own life in his rented run-down bungalow just outside of Boston. Meticulous and dramatic to the very end, Bluemner planned all the details of his gruesome suicide. Dressed in a white robe on white sheets, he slit his throat, finally letting that glorious red life force seep out of his wracked body, savagely connecting his physical presence to his scarlet-hued paintings. Unfortunately, Bluemner's hermeticism and paranoia were inherited by his children; they were unwilling to part with the many hundreds of pictures in their possession until the late nineties. This partially explains why Bluemner's work was not brought to light and recognized as an important part of the modern American canon. This landmark exhibit proclaims the triumphant return of Oscar Bluemner's paintings from obscurity to deserved recognition, in their entire colorful splendor.
Prior to his emigration to the United States in 1892, Bluemner was an award-winning architect trained at Berlin's prestigious Royal Technical College. Indeed, there are vestiges of architectural precision in his early work, some of which feature plumb-lined vectors and mathematical prisms. A work from 1917, Morning Light (Dover Hills, October), directly recalls Futurism's imposition of formalistic grids and refracted light systems. Yet, unlike the Futurist fixation with movement and speed, Bluemner's landscapes emit an aura of stillness and calm.
Left: Expression of a Silktown (Patterson) (1914). Right: Death (1929). Bluemner’s wife had passed away earier that year.Like Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and many other American artists who formally engaged with the changing American landscape and its increasing industrialization, Bluemner was also attracted to industrial scenes because he found it easy to reduce the chimneys, the pipes of steel mills, and bridges to their geometric essences through symbolic colors. While in many ways Bluemner's flat perspectives and fauvist colors anticipate Expressionism's preoccupation with free-form abstraction, his landscapes never disintegrate into pure abstraction. He outlines the vibrant forms in his early paintings with severe black lines, geometricizing and flattening the landscape. His palette may not seem unusual to us now after the vibrant pop art of the `60s and `70s, but at the time Bluemner's colors were considered shocking. He was an early proponent of the synaesthetic use of vivid colors to transmit a whole range of emotions in painting. He considered red to be the essence of vitality, energy, power, and most of all, masculinity. Blue stood for hope, green for calm, violet for melancholy—and nowhere is there a more moving example of his mastery over color's emotive power than Death, a small watercolor from 1926, which he probably painted as a cathartic response to his wife's death earlier that year. Shades of muted purples emit an otherworldly glow in the abstracted background, while a twisted dead tree leans diagonally in the foreground. Though strictly speaking a landscape, the painting's subject is executed with such latent pain that it is hard to see the tree as anything but a human figure in the anguished throes of death.
Bluemner sought to illustrate primal, universal forces through the material world around him. Although his trees, houses, and paths initially seem easily recognizable as static elements, his style eventually matures to the point that all elements–natural and man-made–take on anthropomorphized features. Bluemner infused this life force in as unlikely subjects as a New Jersey silk mill, or a winding path through the woods. "He was very interested in Hegel's notion of synthesizing opposite forces," says Barbara Haskell, curator at the Whitney and organizer of the exhibit, "and was most interested in the anonymous intersections of man and nature." Thus, his paintings depict houses and telegraph lines communing with moonlight and pine trees in an atmosphere of vibrant harmony.
After his wife's death, Bluemner made a stunning series of sun and moon studies which the Whitney groups together in a dimly-lit room to show off the paintings' ethereal glow. These gorgeous pictures mark the stirrings of his creative impulses after his period of mourning. There is something about these haunting watercolors that affirm both life and death simultaneously, showing both as intertwined in the same primal element or universal force.
Despite Bluemner's focus on the modern American landscape, he maintained a lifelong interest in researching Old European masters, as well as Chinese and Japanese art. A vitrine in the gallery displays an annotated page from an exhibit of Early Chinese Paintings and Sculptures he visited in 1922. "Eastern artists are truer artists than those in the West since they do not imitate the accidental, tangible reality," he wrote. In the same catalog, he juxtaposes a lovingly sketched Tang-dynasty horse in all its animal, fleshy agitation with a sinewy drawing of a Chinese sculpture of a human which seems much flatter, without as much mass. Bluemner believed that the difference between the representation of human forms in Asian and European art had to do with the latter's Biblical and Classical traditions. Both of these traditions celebrate the spirit within the flesh and identify the human form as a manifestation of the divine. Hence, organic forms in European art are rendered with perspectival, tangible volume; whereas Asian art emphasizes the otherworldly and the distinction between mind and body. A quote from his notebooks explains how he combines a technique used in Chinese ink landscapes, where one carves out empty space with flowing lines, thus imbuing space with active, intangible tension, which symbolizes mass, with his preoccupation with the primal force of color: "Line limits a mass (of abstract space) to a figure (flat) as a symbol of complex realistic volume forms. Line calls for simple color." This statement sums up the essence of his artistic vision.
Even as he was exploring the symbolic aspects of Eastern art, Bluemner was also formally experimenting with the material compositions of his paints and surfaces. He attempted to recreate the highly glossy, lacquered surfaces of Japanese decorative art by resurfacing wooden boards, layering them over several times with casein, a type of milk acid found in plastics. He concocted his own chemical mixtures by blending his paints with formaldehyde and acid, in order to preserve the fidelity of his high-octane colors. Bluemner's preoccupation with smoothness and flatness, as well as his chemical experiments, show that he was in step with modern art's self-consciousness about material and surface. As a result of his paint-and-chemical mixtures, his paintings are extraordinarily well preserved and will remain so for decades to come.
The Asian philosophy of opposing universal Yin and Yang forces fits right into his artistic sensibilities. His engagement with binaries plays itself out over the course of his career: man versus woman, life versus death, light versus darkness, ego versus id, red versus green, and so on. The most powerful of his psychodramatic landscapes is his Summer Night from 1936, which was his last painting. A red house stands in half-darkness, confronted by a sinewy green tree (intimated by a thin curved trunk and an orb sitting on top of it). The piece's theatrical tension is augmented by a dramatic spotlight in the middle of the canvas. Like other modernists who were preoccupied with crises of language and representation, Bluemner was also interested in communicating the unspeakable in human relations; thus he staged each canvas with theatrically symbolic elements in order to better depict the narrative of the human condition.
Bluemner's writing and art indicate that he was heavily influenced by the aesthetic and philosophical traditions of Dürer, Hegel, and Goethe. Unfortunately, his pride in Germanist humanism was misinterpreted by critics, who at the height of World War I dismissed his early work. They claimed it was a manifestation of barbaric German aggression, calling his industrial landscapes from 1911 "ugly" and depraved. These accusations could not have been a more mistaken view of Bluemner's life and work. Throughout his life he chafed under authoritarian rule—in fact, his disillusionment with Prussia's Bismarck-led militaristic expansion was what brought him to America in the first place. Despite the fact that his work may have stemmed from the same anti-bourgeois impulse as the Futurists or the Expressionists, he refused to be aligned with an artistic movement with a political agenda. In 1933, when it became clear that Nazism was on the rise, Bluemner made a radical break with the contemporary connotations of German nationalist culture and instead aligned himself with the Northern Renaissance old masters by signing his paintings "Florianus," a Latinization of Bluemner, which means "flower."
Summer Flat (1936)
In keeping with his political isolation, Bluemner also distanced himself artistically. Although his work was championed by Alfred Stieglitz, the foremost arbiter of American modernism (he even exhibited in Stieglitz's famous 291 Gallery concurrently with American masters such as Georgia O'Keefe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin), Bluemner never felt at home in this community. He dismissed the work of contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, removing himself from the incendiary Expressionists in Europe and eventually distancing himself from Stieglitz's elite circle.
Bluemner's sense of dramatic isolation evinced itself in his paintings as much as in his life. His haunting, symbolic 1933 Self-Portrait reveals a glimpse into the methodological rigor of his style as well as into his taut psychological state. As Haskell says, "Just as he renders his landscapes as people, he does his face as a landscape." The clefts of his sunken cheeks and stubborn chin seem hacked out like craggy mountain cliffs. Every facial feature seems vaguely geometric in form as his head floats against an abstract panel of pure red. In a wry acknowledgement of his impoverished condition and his obsession with red, Bluemner would dub himself "the Vermillionaire." In keeping with his desire to invoke the tradition of Northern Renaissance masters, his portrait directly recalls that of Albrecht Dürer's, replete with dramatic undertones of martyrdom and artistic torture.
Bluemner's view of himself as a misunderstood artistic genius had a direct impact on the erosion his relationships with gallery owners and clients. As a result, he became financially destitute and forced his family to move every couple of months. Although his later shows were well received by critics, he demanded astronomical fees for his works that were out of touch with the economic landscape of the Depression. Despite some critical acclaim and Stieglitz's support, Bluemner did not sell a single piece in his final show of 1935. Though partly responsible for his own commercial failure, Bluemner was nevertheless troubled by his relative obscurity and even wrote in his journal that "Geniuses are spurned in their own time." Ultimately, he could not reconcile his Old-World conception of the romantic artist with the commercial realities of the American art market.
After a car accident in 1936, saddled with mounting debts and failing health, Bluemner took his own life in his rented run-down bungalow just outside of Boston. Meticulous and dramatic to the very end, Bluemner planned all the details of his gruesome suicide. Dressed in a white robe on white sheets, he slit his throat, finally letting that glorious red life force seep out of his wracked body, savagely connecting his physical presence to his scarlet-hued paintings. Unfortunately, Bluemner's hermeticism and paranoia were inherited by his children; they were unwilling to part with the many hundreds of pictures in their possession until the late nineties. This partially explains why Bluemner's work was not brought to light and recognized as an important part of the modern American canon. This landmark exhibit proclaims the triumphant return of Oscar Bluemner's paintings from obscurity to deserved recognition, in their entire colorful splendor.
// Joyce Hau, CC'07, is majoring in Comparative Literature and Society and concentrating in Art History. She is originally from Hong Kong but got lost in the woods of New Hampshire for four years before coming to the Big Apple. She likes pears, poetry, parks, pretty things and alliteration