Seven years ago, I was at the Montclair Art Museum viewing an exhibition called “Cezanne and American Modernism.” As the title indicates, the show traced the influence of the French artist upon American artists ranging from Maurice Prendergast to Arshile Gorky. The works were wonderful, but I found myself thinking of non-aesthetic matters as well.
“Let’s see,” I mused, going down the line, “Alfred Maurer killed himself, and Patrick Henry Bruce killed himself, and Oscar Bluemner killed himself, and Arshile Gorky killed himself, and George Ault probably killed himself.” I could have been forgetting someone, but even that quick list of painters was enough to make me realize that if I had been a life insurance salesman back in the period between the World Wars, I wouldn’t have sold a policy to an American modernist artist on a bet.
I’ve been thinking about that exhibition because I recently acquired watercolors done a year apart by two artists in the show, one who killed himself, and one who didn’t.
Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) was born in Germany, trained as an architect there, and emigrated to the United States at the age of 25. He soon found work as a draftsman in architectural firms. Yet two years later, he was living on the streets, sleeping in Bowery flophouses, and relying on soup kitchens to keep from starvation. Drastic changes in fortune would accompany Bluemner for the rest of his life.
He found work again as an architect, designed the Bronx Borough Courthouse (and was cheated out of his fee), took up painting, studied color theory, won a lawsuit over his Bronx design, met Alfred Stieglitz, traveled to Europe, moved in German Expressionist circles, and came home in time to be included in the famous Armory Show of 1913.
Bluemner turned against architecture, vowing that he would “rather be a bum painter than . . . a ‘successful’ so-called architect,” and he proceeded to live up to that vow. Sales of his paintings suffered in the wake of growing anti-German sentiment in the years leading up to America’s entry into World War I, and Bluemner was investigated as a possible spy when his New Jersey neighbors grew suspicious of the time he spent sketching industrial scenes. He had exhibitions at Stieglitz’s 291 and other galleries, but midnight moves, after the eviction notice came but before the sheriff showed up to dispossess his family, also became habitual.
Self-absorbed, self-destructive, alternately convinced of his genius and full of self-loathing, with a real gift for quarreling with those who might have helped him (in other words, he was an artist), Bluemner nevertheless was able to create a formidable body of work before poverty, bad luck, and a truly nasty array of health problems caused him to take his life at the age of 70.
Gloucester Street, done in 1929 when he was living in Massachusetts, is a wonderful example of Bluemner’s ability to create a monumental effect in a small format (the painting is only about 4 by 5 inches). It has a glowing center in the vermillion that served Bluemner almost as a signature – it was in the year this work was painted that he briefly adopted “The Vermillionaire” as a pseudonym. Regardless of personal troubles, Bluemner was able throughout his life to call on a radiant emotional core when engaged in the act of creation.
Max Weber (1881-1961) led a blessedly less fraught life. Born in Russia, he emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of 10. He trained at the famous Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and taught briefly before heading to Paris, where he spent three years studying with Matisse and getting to know most of the French avant-garde.
Returning to the United States, Weber was an early exhibitor at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. His modernist leanings soon brought him notoriety. A portrait commissioned by prominent gallery owner N.E. Montross was rejected because of its “distortions,” and his 1911 show at 291 occasioned what Milton Brown has called “one of the most merciless critical whippings that any artist has received in America.”
Weber persevered, though like Bluemner he was all too capable of shooting himself in the foot. Invited to participate in the Armory Show, he quarreled with its organizers and refused to participate when told he could exhibit only two paintings in the exhibition. He quarreled with Stieglitz and left 291. He alienated collectors and curators alike with his opinionated nature, particularly when he claimed that there were only three indisputably great modern painters: Cezanne, Rousseau, and Max Weber.
Yet Weber could deal with the mundane requirements of getting teaching gigs, and he was politically astute enough to cultivate people who could help him. By 1945 Life magazine was assuring its readers that Weber was the “pioneer of modern art in America,” and in 1948 Look magazine reported the results of a survey of art experts who declared him one of the greatest living American painters, second only to John Marin. (Given Weber’s personality, I can imagine that he was truly pissed at that ranking.)
Weber’s posthumous critical reputation has suffered because of his sheer artistic facility. He can be a cubist, he can work in a fauvist style, he can do anything. Art historians like artists to paint in one style or at least to work in styles whose one-direction evolution can be handily boiled down for an academic paper. Weber never did that, but when he was on top of his game, whatever the style, he was capable of truly beautiful results.
Colonial Bowl with Fruit was painted in 1928, a time when many artists, most notably Picasso, were pulling back from the more experimental styles of the previous decade and returning to a calmer, more classical mode. Weber’s painting evinces the clear influence of Cezanne in its tonalities, the colors being applied in blocks rather than with subtle modulations. Yet for all the seeming sketchiness of execution, there is a firm control of the medium and a real sense of the “bones” of his subject.
Weber’s and Bluemner’s achievements in these works put me in mind of the old saying that watercolor is the perfect medium for one who knows nothing about art and for one who knows everything. If you want to know more about these or any other works of art, let’s talk.
