‘Oscar Bluemner: Becoming a Painter’

Oscar Bluemner artwork
Roberta Smith Favis

You might not expect such enthusiasm in her voice when Roberta Smith Favis talks about “Oscar Bluemner: Becoming a Painter,” the elegant exhibit she organized for the Hand Art Center. After all, as professor emerita of art history at Stetson and curator of its Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection, Favis has assembled a number of exhibits on Bluemner’s work.

“I counted them recently, and there were 20 exhibits, all told, starting with one when Vera was in her 90s but still alive – she died in 1997,” said Favis. She will discuss the exhibit and her role in it at a Curator’s Talk set for 7 p.m. on March 1 in the duPont-Ball Library.

Oscar Bluemner artwork
“Canal, Roseville,” 1911, Oscar Bluemner. Watercolor on paper. Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection, Stetson University.

Since that first show, Kouba’s gift of over 1,000 paintings, documents and other objects by her father, a German-born architect-turned-artist who stands at the center of American modernism, was studied, catalogued and exhibited at Stetson.

“It’s an incredible trove,” said Favis, noting that shows from Stetson’s Bluemner collection have traveled to major museums and its works have been on loan to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and other major institutions.

A walk through “Becoming a Painter” shows why. Even in tiny colored-pencil sketches like “Erie Railroad near Gutenberg, Aug. 28, 1911,” one of the exhibit’s latest works, Bluemner’s sense of structure, color and subtly impressionistic atmosphere are evident. His ability to manipulate delicate watercolor into a visceral tactile quality transforms “Canal, Roseville” into a luminous near-abstraction. And purple-and-yellow clouds in “Newton, Long Island,” a 1910 landscape, appear lusciously dense.

Oscar Bluemner
Alfred Stieglitz took this photograph in 1913 of Oscar Bluemner.

Those qualities won Bluemner exhibits at the Armory Show in 1913, the watershed shock of European modernism in New York, at Alfred Stieglitz’s influential 291 and, later, his Intimate Gallery, the Whitney Studio Galleries and other prominent art spaces.

Still, Bluemner was often ahead of his time and, though he was part of the Public Works of Art Project during the Depression, he was often impoverished. His work continued to evolve even as he became despondent enough to take his own life, in 1938.

Bluemner’s genius is clear today, Favis said. His works shared space with other greats of American modernism in the Whitney’s 1999 “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–1950,” and were the focus of Barbara Haskell’s 2005 Whitney exhibit and book, “Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color.” His works are in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as Archives of American Art and in Stetson’s peerless Kouba collection.

And, as Carter Ratcliff wrote recently in an Arts and Antiques magazine, “now that Bluemner is receiving an increasing share of attention, it seems odd that the art world ever neglected his vision of the American landscape — or, one might say, of America itself — in moods ranging from passionately welcoming to grandly foreboding.”

Oscar Bluemner artwork
“Newton, Long Island,” 1910, Oscar Bluemner. Watercolor on paper. Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection, Stetson University.

To Favis, who is already planning 2017 events to honor Bluemner on the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Kouba gift has been more than a source of high-level local exhibits and recognition. The Bluemner legacy, much of it documents and works on paper, led to the creation of the Hand Art Center – as a suitable location for storing such fragile material. “Obviously, we now have fundamental resources for Bluemner scholarship, as more and more of his work is moving from private hands to public ownership.”

Still, what is most important is the work itself, and its power. Favis took one key period in Bluemner’s career – 1903 to 1911 — and in just 28 pieces traces his evolution as a painter.

Oscar Bluemner artwork
“Leonia” (Vera Bluemner), June 26, 1910, Oscar Bluemner. Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection, Stetson University.

“In these early years, he was in all the right places at all the right times,” she said. “He was teaching himself to paint in oils, developing his style as he headed from a synthetic post-impressionism to a more expressionistic handling of paint.

“We see it in his watercolors, as he draws on Van Gogh and Cezanne and makes the work his own,” Favis said. “It’s hard to categorize; as an architect who is becoming a painter, he kept his sense of structure and his European roots, but infused them with an American vigor.

“These works are a very big deal.”

Roberta Smith Favis will present a Curator’s Talk on the Hand Art Center exhibit, “Oscar Bluemner: Becoming a Painter,” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 1, in Room 25L of Stetson’s duPont-Ball Library. Admission is free. Details: (386) 822-7270.

-Laura Stewart