Oscar Bluemner: Selected Works on Paper    Aug 15 - Oct 11, 2008

August 15 – October 11th, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, August 15, 2008, 5 - 7 pm

Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) is considered one of the most influential figures of the American Modernist era. Bluemner was born in Germany where he was trained as an architect in Berlin. He emigrated to the United States in 1892 and soon turned his attention to painting. His early work consisted of poetic landscapes in watercolor, but a trip to Europe in 1912 exposed him to the possibilities of Expressionism.

Like the Precisionists, many of his subjects were industrial buildings, mostly in New Jersey, but his treatment was unique, as in Patteron, New Jersey, 1913, on exhibit at Aaron Payne Fine Art. This small pen and ink masterwork combines linearity and jagged forms in an explosion of color totally unique to Bluemner. Impressed by European contemporaries such as Cezanne and Van Gogh, Bluemner’s highly personal and boldly colored landscapes shocked the New York art scene in the early 1900s.

According to Bluemner’s color system, which assigned physical and emotional properties to specific hues, red was of primary importance—representing “power, vitality, energy, life…passion, struggle.” He regarded color as a universal language akin to music. With his revolutionary ideas and eloquent voice, Oscar Bluemner became part of a group of artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Joseph Stella—who essentially brought Modernist art to life in America.

Underappreciated and financially impoverished during his lifetime, Bluemner is today the object of renewed critical and public interest. In 2005–06, his career was the subject of a major retrospective, “Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color,” organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. Bluemner is represented in private and public institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Phillips Collection, and The Corcoran Gallery, both in Washington, D.C.; The Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, and The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Texas.