Oscar Bluemner: The legacy
by Ann Mikell
From the Fall 2000 issue of Stetson magazine

He was "a shaggy German in baggy clothes who wore large black ... hats.  Between the wings of his open collars the gilt button invariably protruded above his negligently knotted poor cheap ties. And the atmosphere of a rank boheme as well as of an unregenerate masculinity hung about his entire person, and his tongue was racy and Rabelaisian. Yet his was a vivid personality as well as a picturesque one.  Together with a sense o f humor he had his nation's keen analytic faculty. Even though he sometimes soared in attempting to express himself accurately, his sharp eyes took in what was before them ... [and] while they oftentimes twinkled with wit and malice, their childlike blue was cold."

So wrote the respected art critic Paul Rosenfeld about the man he termed "one of the talented  representatives of the modern-art movement in America" - German-born painter Oscar Bluemner.  A prolific artist and sketcher, Bluemner painted more than 15,000 works during his career. He was a pivotal figure in the emergence of modern art in America at the beginning of the 20^th century, yet sadly, noted art scholar Jeffrey R. Hayes, "during the crucial decade immediately following Bluemner's death, tittle was done to securely document his work, appraise its significance, or place it in key public collections."

Now, however, a $2.6 million collection of more than 1,000 of Bluemner's artworks has been left to Stetson by the artist's late daughter, whose lasting wish was to preserve her father's legacy and make it known to a wider public. Final settlement of the estate of Vera Bluemner Kouba of DeLand, who died in 1997, has provided the university with a collection that will more fully document Bluemner's evolution as an artist.

"This is an amazing collection of work," said Gary Bolding, chair of the Stetson Art Department.

"We have been immensely moved by Mrs. Kouba's loving devotion to see that her father's work should receive the recognition that it so richly deserves. It brings a body of distinguished work to this campus to support an outstanding program in art and art history."

Kouba, who always felt that her father had been overlooked in the art world, kept the works in her

home on walls, under beds, and in drawers and chests.  Included in the collection, valued by Christie's Appraisals Inc., are 29 fully completed oils and watercolors, 45 partially developed compositions in watercolor, and 989 sketches and studies in watercolor and pencil.

Stetson hosted an exhibition of Bluemner landscapes on loan from his daughter in 1994. The collection reflects many of his best-known paintings of mill towns, factories, and industrial canals set against a backdrop of glowing landscapes.  Drawings usually record the location, date, and time of day the artist sketched and include extensive notations about the colors and moods of the landscape.

A major monograph by Hayes, published in 1991 bythe Smithsonian Institution and Cambridge University Press as part of a series on important American artists, offers the most complete account to date of Bluemner's role and place in American art.

An architect "with a distaste for the building business," Bluemner emerged as a professional oil painter after immigrating to the United States. The distinctive touches of glowing red in his paintings and his interest in color theory earned for the artist the nickname, "the Vermillionaire." Numerous preparatory sketches and color studies accompany most of  his important works. Many were made around the New Jersey countryside where the family went on outings.

Bolding said Stetson eventually plans to host a major exhibition, and quite likely a series of traveling exhibitions of works from the Bluemner Collection and establish an Oscar Bluemner archive that will provide a permanent home for the collection in its entirety. Major museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Institution, own works by Bluemner, but until now, no one in the art world has been able to organize such a show as the collection offers, Bolding said.

Stetson art historian Roberta Favis, who undertook an extensive historical investigation of the artist and his work, will serve as acting curator for the collection. The first task, she said, is cataloging, housing and conserving the works. At that point, the department can best determine how to present the works to the public and to the artistic and scholarly community.

"This archive will not only preserve the work, it will also provide scholars and the public access to this important body of drawings and paintings," Favis said. "We are extremely excited that Stetson will be able to play a role in completing the contemporary picture of Oscar Bluemner's accomplishment and  importance."

Though he is not as well-known as other modernists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, Bluemner has been slowly gaining wider attention as interest in early modernists steadily increases. Christie's noted "there are many buyers of American Modernism in general and for Bluemner's work in particular, and the market for this artist's work is still expanding, with new buyers of this material entering the market at all times."

Exhibitions in 1979 at the Hirshhorn Museum and in 1988 at the Corcoran Gallery also traveled to many other locations. The availability of a large portion of the artist's papers in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, also has made possible investigations of the artist's critical thought and theory, Favis said. The artist also is represented in many private collections.

Born in Prenzlau, Germany in 1867, Bluemner trained as an architect and immigrated to the United States in 1892. He gradually turned his focus from architecture to landscape painting and embraced the group of modernists associated with photographer Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, known as "291."

"Between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner discovered Alfred Stieglitz's unorthodox Little Galleries of the

Photo-Secession," Hayes wrote. In Stieglitz, Bluemner recognized "a missionary ... a pioneer battling with the white Indians of obsolete New York; in the gallery, he soon found support and fellowship enough to leave architecture for the less practical venture of painting." Bluemner undertook an extensive tour of Europe in 1912 and solidified his identification with the major currents of emerging modernism, including Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, German Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism.

Bluemner arrived back in the United States to participate in two ground-breaking modernist shows, the Armory Show of 1913 and the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters of 1916.  He held his first solo show at 291 and a later show at Stieglitz's Intimate Gallery in 1928, as well as the Whitney Biennial in 1932.

Never commercially successful in his lifetime, Bluemner struggled at near poverty level during the Depression and depended on support from the federally funded Public Works of Art Project in early 1934. Hayes noted that Stieglitz's wife, the noted painter Georgia O'Keeffe, vividly recalled Bluemner's earlier predicament:

"He lived in a house that was half in one county and half in another. When the collectors came for

the rent, Bluemner would go to the other side ... and  the collector couldn't collect from him. And the same thing happened when the collector from the other county came. Finally, Bluemner's wife pushed one of [them] down the stairs. The children of the locality would throw vegetables at him when he went out on the street. When I said that seemed odd - he said, 'You never had to get old paint and grind it up to use again ... you were never that poor."'

Despite hardship, the years from 1926 to 1938 were among Bluemner's most productive. He held three major shows during those years. As Hayes noted, Bluemner "at last earned significant critical praise, but little else." Plagued by deteriorating health and problems with his eyesight, Bluemner took his own life in 1938.

In Rosenfeld's view, Bluemner was "overlooked" because "his appointed place in all probability was [with] the pre-Nazi German moderns and not in an America attracted as is ours by the qualities of French art," Hayes wrote. The art critic also thought Bluemner was neglected because of "regionalist trends."

"Two retrospective exhibitions, one held at the University of Minnesota, the other assembled by

Spelman College professor John Davis Hatch, did take place, but neither afforded the strategic exposure or serious critical attention that Rosenfeld prescribed," Hayes wrote. Stetson College of Arts and Sciences Dean Grady Ballenger expressed his excitement over having the Bluemner Collection as another distinctive resource for liberal study at Stetson. "For undergraduates studying art and culture in 20th century America, Bluemner's work is of obvious importance," he said, "but I'm also pleased that our cutting-edge digital artists will have an exemplary model of lifelong devotion to one's craft and thoughtful engagement with the ideas and technologies of one's time."

As the artist himself once urged his audience:  "Look at my work in the way that you listen to music-look at the space filled with colors and try to feel; do not insist on `understanding' what seems strange. When you `feel' colors, you will understand the `why' of their forms. It is so simple."