Oscar Bluemner
Oscar Bluemner
1867 - 1938
American painter and architect of German birth. Bluemner emigrated to the USA in 1892, after receiving his diploma and an award for a painting of an architectural subject from the Königliche Technische Hochschule, Berlin. He first worked as a draughtsman at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, and later designed New York’s Bronx Borough Courthouse (1902). Around 1910 his professional focus moved to painting under the aegis of ALFRED STIEGLITZ, who gave him a one-man exhibition at the 291 gallery in 1915, published his writings in CAMERA WORK and recommended his inclusion in the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters (1916).
Bluemner’s prismatically structured early landscapes (e.g., Expression of a Silktown, 1915; Trenton, NJ State Mus.) reflected his lasting interest in colour theory and familiarity with the work of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh and with Neo-Impressionism. During the 1920s he concentrated on watercolours (e.g., Eye of Fate, 1927; New York, MOMA, and Flag Station, Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1925; New York, Met.), whose dramatic forms and enriched palette followed his study of oriental art, Symbolist painting and such thinkers as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henri Bergson and Oswald Spengler. His late pictures, painted in oil or casein, were produced in part while he was employed by the Public Works of Art Project and were conceived as a series of Compositions for Color Themes (e.g., Situation in Yellow, 1933; New York, Whitney); they were formally inspired by classical music and iconographically influenced by Freud’s ideas on the subconscious. After 1933 Bluemner signed his paintings florianus, a Latin idealization of his own surname. [Jeffrey R. Hayes. "Bluemner, Oscar." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T009363.]
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French, 1864 - 1901
