Vera Kouba Bluemner: Her dying wish becomes reality
by Katharine Hansen
From the Fall 2000 issue of Stetson magazine

Vera Bluemner Kouba spent much of her life seeking for her father the recognition she felt he was denied by the art world. But if the work of Oscar Bluemner went largely uncelebrated by the art establishment during his lifetime, it was later enshrined in a tiny DeLand dwelling with no air conditioning. There, Vera Kouba lived frugally for more than two decades, refusing to part with any but a few pieces of her father's art, the sale of which could have afforded her a much more comfortable lifestyle. Lovingly storing endless stacks of Oscar Bluemner's drawings, sketches and charcoals in dresser drawers and under beds and sofas, Kouba dreamed of a grand exhibition of her father's work even as she held onto the artwork for her own retrospection. Each piece held a memory of her life with her father in the first third of the 20th century.

Most of Bluemner's pictures are landscapes, and his method of finding subjects was to travel from town to town within the middle-Atlantic states, usually on foot, and often with his children, Vera and Robert, in tow. Thus, many of Bluemner's works represent places Vera Kouba remembered visiting with her father. The family would board streetcars, trains and ferries from New York City and roam the countryside and small towns in nearby New Jersey.

It was not an easy life. The frugal existence Kouba led in the years before she died in 1997 was nothing new for her. Though Bluemner had made a living as an architect following his 1892 immigration to the United States from Germany, few patrons bought his work after he left architecture and turned to painting. During the years he and his wife were raising a family, the Bluemners lived in poverty. Kouba recalled in a 1994 interview that her father often sent her to pick up pieces of coal that passing trains had spilled onto the railroad tracks.

Despite their modest circumstances, it was not unusual for the Bluemners to rub elbows with the great luminaries of the early 20,'' century art world. Kouba remembered visits from photographer Alfred Stieglitz and painter John Marin.

Young Vera, too, dabbled in painting, but her true passion was the piano. At a time when a piano was far beyond the impoverished family's reach, she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. After many years of dreams, the Bluemners' neighbors sold them a piano for $10, and Vera's mother gave her lessons.

Upon his daughter's high-school graduation, Oscar Bluemner sent her to Leipzig, Germany, to study at a conservatory. There, she recalled in 1994, she studied under a teacher who was one of only a handful of people she met in her long life whose genius rivaled that of her father.

But Kouba's musical education was not to last. Back in the Depression-era United States, things were worse than ever for Bluemner, so he asked his daughter to return from Europe. Only the U.S. government, under the Public Works of Art Project sponsored by the Work Projects Administration (WPA), was buying his art and at a rate of only $35 per piece.

Once back in the United States, Kouba cared for her father after her mother died. She struggled to keep his spirits up in the face of failing eyesight, a slow and painful recovery from an auto accident, and increasingly engulfing depression. It was Kouba who found her father's body after he ended his despair by committing suicide in 1938.

In the years immediately following Oscar Bluemner's death, Kouba supported herself in various jobs, occasionally trying to sell her father's paintings. Later, she married Rudolph Kouba, an Austrian and fellow music lover.

The Koubas retired to DeLand in the 1970s. "My husband and I were happy to discover that we had arrived in this university city," she wrote in a 1993 letter. The couple enjoyed Stetson University's cultural offerings, especially the School of Music's many concerts.

" We admired the beautiful architecture and the full extent of the numerous buildings that surrounded the lovely campus," Kouba wrote. "We enjoyed walking through and watching students hurrying on their busy routes. Sometimes, coming out from a concert on a chilly night, for instance, and crossing through the moonlit scene of the great fountain was a thrilling and poetic experience."

After her husband died in the early 1990s, Kouba began to put her affairs in order and consider ways to preserve and enhance her father's legacy after she was gone. "I feel very honored," she wrote in 1993, "at the prospect of leaving ... whatever I have of my father's works and notes, eventually to your greatly esteemed Stetson University." Kouba told her acquaintances at Stetson that she hoped her father's work would not only be in good hands, but that the art would be studied and exhibited. Her dream was realized on a small scale during her lifetime when Stetson mounted two exhibitions of several of Bluemner's works, the first in 1994. At age 91, the frail, wheelchairbound Kouba attended the show's opening, where a plaque honoring Bluemner and Kouba was dedicated and placed in the Foyer Gallery of Stetson's Sampson Hall. A 1995 exhibition featured some of Bluemner's color sketches.

Vera Kouba's wish for her father's work went even beyond preservation and exhibition; she hoped Oscar Bluemner would achieve the recognition that eluded him in his lifetime. With Kouba's posthumous gift to Stetson of this significant body of Bluemner's work, her wish is on its way to becoming reality.

"Paintings and drawings of extraordinary quality and of haunting beauty vividly affirm the central role Bluemner is increasingly accorded among the early modernists of America," said Dr. Roberta Favis, Stetson associate professor of art, the art historian working closely with the Bluemner collection. "The study of these images will offer endless opportunities for scholars of art history and theory and also of American culture. Bluemner always had absolute faith in the significance of his work, a faith that his daughter honored and preserved, a faith immeasurably justified and reinforced in the riches of this collection."