Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Estate of the artist

J.B. Neumann, New York

Private collection, Connecticut

Born in Germany in 1867, Oscar Bluemner came to the United States in 1892, after succeeding at the study and practice of architecture in his native country.  (Although trained in architecture, Bluemner’s early interest in art was evident:  during his studies at Berlin’s Königliche Technische Hochschule, he received an award for his painting of an architectural subject.) 

By late 1907, Bluemner’s interest in visual art began to subordinate his interest in architecture, and by 1912, he abandoned the latter profession to concentrate all of his energies on painting. Although he left architecture, its presence is seen throughout his oeuvre.  His interest in manmade structures inserted into the natural landscape lasted throughout his career.

Winterscene is an intricately detailed gouache that displays Bluemner’s interest in the marriage of the manmade with nature.  And there is, as always, the evidence of his skill as a colorist.  In Winterscene Bluemner uses variations on two colors in combination with black and white.  Central to the composition are the mustard yellow buildings in the background, with the contrapuntal gray/blacks of the doors and the red verticals of the buildings’ chimneys.  Bluemner frames the buildings with darker hues in the foreground: a black tree at waterside on the left, which seems to merge with the building on one side and with the bridge on the other, and a muddier yellow of another building in shade and a smaller black tree at right.  These darker forms are made more specific by contours of snow, rendered in relatively wide swaths of vertical whites on the trees and horizontal on the building. 

Bluemner’s use of white in the foreground has a pillowy softness, especially vis-a-vis the dark gray/black of the water in the immediate foreground.  These nearly surreal juxtapositions of color result in, as Bluemner has stated, “a stir[ring] up of an exquisite sensation.”[1]  As in many of his works, here Bluemner explores and expertly evokes the harmonic convergence of the manmade with the natural.

This work is closely related to a larger painting in the collection of the Phoenix Art Museum, A Light Yellow.