Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938)

Oscar Bluemner is one of five artists represented in What It Meant To Be Modern, 1910-1965, American Works on Paper from the Karen and Kevin Kennedy Collection that was curated by Julie Augur. The exhibition is first on view at the Denver Art Museum, in Denver, Colorado, (August 21, 2016-March 5, 2017) and was presented at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, SUNY Buffalo State, Buffalo, NY, April 14-June 23, 2017. Augur stated: “These works on paper all share the magic of the modernist movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Where some of the images flirt with abstraction, as seen in Charles Sheeler and John Marin, others experiment with a pulsing sense of nature endowed with an incredible lightness of being, as in Charles Burchfield. Oscar Bluemner’s pieces glow with mystery and intense color while Stuart Davis gives us a simplified yet powerful view of the landscape with the objects broken down into symbols of themselves on shifting planes of perspective. These five artists were chosen for the diversity of their art at a time when a new way of exploring an image reflected a new, exciting vision of the world around us.”

 With this in mind, Oscar Bluemner is a significant American artist whose work contextualizes Burchfield’s, as does the work of Rehn Gallery artists, such as Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh, Eugene Speicher, Peppino Mangravite, and John Carroll, who are also represented in the collection for this reason. In addition, Bluemner’s color theory and his impressive “painting diaries” that have been digitized by the Smithsonian Institution (see https://transcription.si.edu/project/6589), justify the acquisition of this drawing to demonstrate both the artist’s methodology and theoretical approach to his art that parallels Burchfield’s. - NW