Oscar Bluemner, March 3, 1928. Photograph by Arnold Genthe. Genthe photograph collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Oscar Bluemner, March 3, 1928. Photograph by Arnold Genthe. Genthe photograph collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Oscar Bluemner’s impact and legacy over the past century is analogous to the experience of other leading modernists: embraced in the years leading up to and following 1913’s Armory Show and the 1916 Forum Exhibition, they mostly fell out of favor during the middle decades of the twentieth century, only to be rediscovered in the years following America’s Bicentennial in the late 1970s and 1980s. The story of Bluemner’s life and career are emblems of the friction and benefit of the developing crosscurrents between Europe and America. We believe the market’s reevaluation of Bluemner’s contributions is central to expanding international interest in and understanding of American modernism. Bluemner and the Critics shares the artist’s career and accomplishments through his works of art, writings, theories, and also through the words of America’s leading critics over the broad sweep of the twentieth century. 

  • Notes on painting from Oscar Bluemner's Theory Diary, January 12, 1920

    Bluemner’s diaries provide rich insight into the artist’s working method, including details on location, notations on color and pigment mixtures, preliminary sketches for related works and extensive comments on his painting theory and art techniques

  • An almost legendary example of “artistic temperament,” [Bluemner] had an exuberant personality and a keen eye for pictures. He told the most fantastic stories. Typical was his reply to the question why his paintings were predominantly red: “I accepted a hundred gallons of red paint in payment of a bad debt, so I had to use up the red paint.”

    - Henry Clifford and Carl Zigrosser, History of an American:

    Alfred Stieglitz: “291” and After, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1944

  • Alfred Stieglitz is showing some oils and watercolors by Oscar Bluemner at the Intimate Gallery. Mr. Bluemner is a German artist who came to this country about thirty years ago. He has had hard knocks and—this is perfectly evident in his work— has persevered with a kind of lyric passion for painting, with an inner fire of enthusiasm that has carried him to a certain stage of achievement and that may carry him very much further.

    - “Paintings by Oscar Bluemner” The New York Times,

    March 11, 1928

  • Oscar Bluemner is a true exponent of Expressionism in the correct interpretation of this much misunderstood and misapplied term. The collection of his paintings now on view at the Marie Harriman Galleries is therefore quite apart from its interest as an exhibition, a concrete definition of the term. For Mr. Bluemner form and color are mediums by means of which he sets down his emotional reactions to the universe.

    - H. A. R., “Paintings by Oscar Bluemner”,

    The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 13, 1935

    • Oscar Bluemner Downpour, 1924
      Oscar Bluemner
      Downpour, 1924
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    • Oscar Bluemner Sunset, 1925
      Oscar Bluemner
      Sunset, 1925
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    • Oscar Bluemner Sketch for "Sunset", 1925
      Oscar Bluemner
      Sketch for "Sunset", 1925
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    • Oscar Bluemner, Study for "Morning Light (Dover Hills, October)", 1916
      Oscar Bluemner, Study for "Morning Light (Dover Hills, October)", 1916
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  • He calls himself “the Vermillionaire” because of all bright colors he likes the reds best. Vermillion was therefore the predominant color in the most vivid art exhibition of the season which opened last week at New York’s Marie Harriman Gallery. On view were a succession of carefully drawn studies that might be landscapes, trees, sky, the ends of old houses and narrow streets, but were actually elaborately conceived studies in pure color, psychologically akin to the huge abstractions of Pablo Picasso.
    - “Art: Vermillionaire”, Time, January 14, 1935

     

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  • An old canal route in Northern New Jersey has been discovered for art by Oscar Bluemner in an exhibition of twenty new paintings on panels in the Whitney Studio Galleries. He spent a season as a wayfarer among scenes that artists and others have slighted as commonplace, and he has come through with a gallery of brightly intimate pictures. His excursions began perhaps as nocturnal, when a backyard in June stirred moonlight moods and fantasies. The waters of a creek, rippling under moonlight, invoked his brush, and a canal scene at dawn pressed upon his vision like the transition from dreaming to awakening.

    - Fred W. Eddy,  “Old Canal Route Discovered for Art”, The World, November 17, 1929

  • If you are interested in speaking with us directly about the available works, please do not hesitate to connect with Alana Ricca by phone call, to the gallery at (212) 879-8815, or by mobile at (203) 524-2694. We look forward to being in touch with you soon. 
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