Oscar Bluemner

Van Cortlandt Park , 1936

Oscar Florianus Bluemner , actually Oscar Franz Julius Blümner , (* 21st June 1867 in Prenzlau ; † 12. January 1938 in South Braintree, Massachusetts ) was a German-American painter of modernity .

Bluemner attended grammar school in Hildesheim , then in Krefeld , before taking the Abitur at Easter 1886 at the grammar school in Elberfeld to study construction. In fact, he received his first award for an architectural painting in 1892, and in the same year he emigrated to New York City . There he got a job in an architectural office and only seven years later he received US citizenship. In 1910 he made the acquaintance of Alfred Stieglitz , a photographer, connoisseur and art dealer of American modernism.

In 1912 he returned on a trip to Europe. His travel stops were Paris , Italy , Frankfurt am Main , Amsterdam and London . He also had an exhibition in the Gurlitt Gallery in Berlin. A year later he took part in the Armory Show in New York, an important exhibition for both European and American modernism. In 1915 an exhibition followed in Stieglitz ' Gallery 291 in New York. A year later he was also in New York participant in The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters , a group exhibition of the Anderson Gallery.

Bluemner moved from New York to New Jersey in 1916 . Many motifs from New Jersey can later be found in his works. From 1917 to 1923 he took a new direction by studying Asian art and design, and he also developed color theories .

More exhibitions followed: first in 1924 in JB Neumann's New Art Circle in New York and in 1926 in Aline Meyer Liebman's Art Room in the Handiwork Center. He then moved to South Braintree, Massachusetts .

However, Bluemner kept coming back to New York for exhibitions. From 1928/29 he exhibited in Stieglitz ' Intimate Gallery and in the Whitney Studio Gallery . In 1932, participation in the first Biennale in Whitney in New York. In the meantime, he developed in 1930 that " casein - varnish medium".

Between 1935 and 1937 he exhibited several times, also outside of New York. He was involved in the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York, the Arts Club Gallery in Chicago , the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC , a second time in the Whitney Museum of American Art and in the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts .

In 1936/37 he had to stop painting due to an illness and severe deterioration of his eyesight; on January 12, 1938, he committed suicide .

Create

Oscar Bluemner is a representative of modernism , many of his works show abstract buildings or landscapes, whereby the intense coloring is particularly striking. One could almost call his pictures the forerunners of Pop Art . This painting style was very unusual in the USA at the time, so that it was mostly laughed at and was not a success during his lifetime. In the meantime, however, his works are fetching considerable prices at auctions.

Until February 12, 2006, the Whitney Museum in New York dedicated an exhibition to him.

literature

• Barbara Haskell (Ed.): Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005 ISBN 0-87427-149-5 (hard cover) 0-87427-150-9 (soft cover)

Web links

Commons : Oscar Bluemner  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Oscar Bluemner in the catalog of the German National Library
• Search for Oscar Bluemner in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
• Page of the Whitney Museum