Oscar Bluemner

Book excerpt: In this first monograph on important early modern artist Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938), who was born and trained as an architect in Germany before moving to the United States and becoming a painter, the author gives a thorough account of Bluemner's background, creative development, professional relationships, major works, and intellectual framework based on his own diaries and other unpublished or previously neglected sources. Of particular interest are Bluemner's early emulation of Cézanne and especially van Gogh; his association with Alfred Stieglitz's pioneering 291 Circle; several major but little known paintings and drawings found in private collections; a unique theory of colour and landscape shaped by both Far Eastern aesthetics and Western thinkers such as Goethe and Freud; a closing critical estimate of Bluemner's role and 'place' in American early modernism.