To love a painting is to feel that this presence is… not an object but a voice.
~ Andre Malraux ~
Evening Tones
by
Oscar Bluemner
Strolling through a museum, I often feel that I am at a reunion of sorts, looking for familiar friends, which I long to reconnect with, and hoping perhaps to meet a new member of their of family. There are paintings and painters that I love, and it is always exciting to see a cherished Winslow Homer or to discover a new painting by Edward Hopper. But, it is also equally thrilling to be drawn to an unfamiliar canvas and to learn of a new artist!
Such was the case with this abstract landscape of the Hudson River Valley, Evening Tones; I was instantly drawn to the artist vibrant palette and had to learn more. The artist, Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938), was born in Germany, where he studied architecture. He came to the United States in 1892, to work on the World’s Columbian Exposition, in Chicago; and later settled in New York where after having become disenchanted with architecture, he began to focus his attention on art. Within ten years, he had established himself in the art world, exhibiting at the Armory Show in 1913, and in 1915 Alfred Stieglitz published and exhibited Bluemner.
His work is dominated by the boldness of color, especially red, and pays homage to his background in architecture, with an appreciation for cubism, as he helped create the American Modernism movement.
Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
~William Blake ~
