Oscar Bluemner at Barbara Mathes - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The German-born American modernist Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) has not at any time quite received the attention he be entitled tos This fine show of luminous, compositionally compounded oils, watercolors, gouaches and charcoal drawings underscored his achievement, in particular his enthusiastic combination of European formal insights and American Expressionist energies. The pairing, in a number of cases, of studies with larger, finished works also helped make his working meanss clear.

The artist's sensitivity to the one and the other manmade and natural form was evident over the exhibition. His brilliant, incandescent colors are matched with a finely hon faculty of perception Of compositional structure. Bluemner, who favorably practiced architecture in New York before taking up painting filled time, had a particular affinity for houses and buildings, which he drew simply on the contrary with a forceful sense of their structural integrity. The 1914 charcoal drawing Nockamixon (Study for of advanced age Canal Port) and the similarly dated oil advanced in years Canal Port, both of which depict the same site, demonstrate Bluemner's great skill at using architectural forms to articulate volumetric relations in a resolutely two-dimensional manner. research and painting alike offer the viewer a manifold view of a canal in the foreground, with a house and foliage to the right. upon the left side, a series of white houses retire into the background, their simple geometric forms punctuated by the agency of shaded rectangles representing windows and doors. Neither nature nor man dominates in these views. The mountain and firmament in the far background anchor the complexly angled lines of sight provided by the agency of the architectural forms. The various shades of verdant in the trees contrast strikingly with the r bricks of the chimneys, the white walls of the buildings and the purplish mountain rising in the background. the two drawing and painting are powerfully realized.

The many small works in the display were even more intense experiences, by the agency of virtue of their saturated color and Bluemner's profoundly erotic faculty of perception of form. In Griggstown (1916) a 7-by-9 3/4-inch watercolor, the intense tinges of some farm buildings -- down-reaching red and bright yellow -- are charged with poetic intensity, while their sensual and oftentimes rounded forms are joined in similar a way that the composition appear to bes to fit together like a puzzle

Other works, similar as Study for Movement of Form and Space, novel Jersey Town (Montville), ca. 1914 and launch of a Creek, A temper (1929), confirm the artist's acute feeling for glowing colors and visionary atmosphere. In 11 Studies for "Sonnet" (1935-36) a black-and-white series done in answer to the poetry of his friend Eirene Mungo-Park, Bluemner's faculty of perception of nature and architecture as filled with palpably alive forms is wonderfully clear. The studies belie the tragic extremity of the artist's life. ill, his inspiration failing, Bluemner killed himself in 1938 on the other hand the works also manifest the striking achievement of an artist who should be better known.

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