Oscar Florianus Bluemner


Oscar Bluemner, born Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner and after 1933 known as Oscar Florianus Bluemner, was a German-born American Modernist painter.

Early life

Bluemner was born as Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner in Prenzlau, Germany, on June 21, 1867. He studied painting and architecture at the Royal Academy of Design in Berlin.

Architecture

Bluemner moved to Chicago in 1893 where he freelanced as a draftsman at the World's Columbian Exposition. After the exposition, he attempted to find work in Chicago. In 1901, he relocated to New York City where he also was unable to find steady employment. In 1903, he created the winning design for the Bronx Borough Courthouse in New York, although it is credited to Michael J. Garvin. The scandal that arose around this took down borough president Louis Haffen for corruption and fraud.

Painting

In 1908 Bluemner met Alfred Stieglitz, who introduced him to the artistic innovations of the European and American avant-garde. By 1910, Bluemner had decided to pursue painting full-time rather than architecture.
He exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show. He said that the Americans' contribution failed to match that of the Europeans because the American selection process reflected rivalries and compromises rather than curatorial judgment, resulting in a "melée of antagonistic examples". Then in 1915 Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his gallery, 291. Despite participating in several exhibitions, including solo shows, for the next ten years Bluemner failed to sell many paintings and lived with his family in near poverty.
He created paintings for the Federal Arts Project in the 1930s.

Later life

After his wife's death in 1926, Bluemner moved to South Braintree, Massachusetts. From there in 1932 he contributed a letter to an ongoing debate in the New York Times on the question "What is American Art?". He wrote:
He had a successful one-man show in 1935 at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York City. In the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell called it Bluemner's "apotheosis". He wrote:
Bluemner committed suicide on January 12, 1938.

Legacy

holds more than 1,000 pieces of Oscar Bluemner's work bequeathed in 1997 by his daughter, Vera Bluemner Kouba. In 2009 the Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center at Stetson opened with a primary mission of housing a providing exhibition space for the Kouba Collection. Often overlooked in his lifetime, Bluemner now is widely acknowledged as a key player in the creation of American artistic Modernism, with better-known colleagues such as Georgia O'Keeffe and John Marin.
In 2013, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey presented an exhibition of Bluemner's works depicting the landscapes and industrial areas of Paterson, painted between 1910 and 1917, drawn from the Stetson holdings. It marked the centenary of the Paterson silk strike, which had inspired his politics.
An oil painting by Bluemner, Illusion of a Prairie, New Jersey sold at Christie's, New York, for $5,346,500 on November 30, 2011.

Artworks

YearTitleImageCollectionComments
1932Imagination, casein with ground watercolors on paper boardCorcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.