'Oscar Bluemner: A Passion For Color' At The Whitney

NEW YORK, CITY

:"Color in itself is beautiful," Oscar Bluemner once wrote. "I use intensity of colors to express strong feeling and convince the spectator," he observed another time. The current retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art demonstrates the accuracy of his view.

A German-born architect-turned-painter, Bluemner (1867-1938) specialized in applying fauve-like colors to Cubist-inspired buildings and landscapes delineated with architectonic rigor. Bright red buildings seem to leap out of almost every picture, demonstrating why Bluemner called himself the "Vermillionaire."

Bluemner's art combined facets of German Expressionism with early Twentieth Century French avant-garde styles. The result was a rare melding of exuberant, emotional art created with order and discipline. Bluemner's compelling, richly hued works sustained a continuing dialogue with contemporary developments in European and American modernism and with a range of Asian and European historical art.

His simplified, semiabstract shapes are reminiscent of Arthur Dove and Charles Sheeler, but his work is sufficiently different to put him out of step with American Modernism. Moreover, his irascible personality hindered his relations with dealers and patrons, furthering his isolation from tastemakers and art buyers of his day.

His canvases, which he said sought to convey "sorrow and joy," have been overlooked too long. A joy to the color-sensitive eye, they deserve the retrospective curator Barbara Haskell has mounted at the Whitney.

Haskell, who has curated a string of important exhibitions in 30 years at the museum, offers a rewarding survey of Bluemner's entire oeuvre, from early architectural drawings to late, intensely colored, symbolic landscapes. With nearly 80 works, "Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color" is the most comprehensive retrospective of the idiosyncratic artist ever organized. It remains on view at the Whitney through February 12.

The exhibition and catalog clearly vindicate Haskell's view that Bluemner has been unfairly neglected and that he deserves a prominent place among the early American Modernists. She observes at the outset of her catalog essays that Bluemner was "an artist of the first rank who destroyed his career through a combination of arrogance and insecurity that left him incapable of sustaining relationships with those in authority." She adds that today, more than seven decades after his death and "without the impediments of personality - Bluemner's successful portrayal of the deepest realities of his inner life can be viewed as a major achievement of early Twentieth Century American art."

Bluemner was born in Prussia into a family of architects and artists. Intending to follow his father and grandfather into a career as an architect, he trained at the prestigious Royal Technical Academy in Berlin. He excelled not only in building designs but in the quality of his architectural drawings.