Bluemner's Androgynous Mind

Oscar Bluemner, Venus, 1924, watercolor on paper.

Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) was an important and influential, yet underrepresented figure in the Stieglitz circle and American modernism. An immigrant from Germany in 1892, Bluemner began his career as an architect, developing his style of painting from one of hard-lined, calculated architectural sensibilities to deeply personal, heartfelt abstractions. His work became most formally successful the closer he came to a melding of masculine and feminine aspects toward an androgynous mind.

The exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art spans Bluemner’s career, charting his development of a personal painting language. His paintings of New Jersey factories from 1913-1915 reveal meticulous planning and a structuralized outlook on the world. Watercolors and drawings, such as the 1914 charcoal Study for Expression of a Silktown, New Jersey (Paterson Centre), were made from close study and observation, faithfully translated into fields of color in the oil painting of the same name. The composition does not vary between study and painting – it is as if it has been translated as a cartoon to a fresco – the rich language of marks and tonality transforms into corresponding predominantly red buildings offset by light blues and teals. While an exacting and precise method, Bluemner did not leave himself much room for discovery, and as such, some of these works stagnate when they rely exclusively on color to energize the picture plane.

Bluemner’s work began developing through logical formal changes as he implemented fracturing planes to reorganize space. He formed a devotion to Asian art and abstraction, stating “Art is Vision and Imagination . . . faithful representation is not art.” A dramatic turn occurred when Bluemner’s wife Lina died in 1926, plunging him into a deep state of grief and despair. Looking inward, he sought spiritual comfort, engaging in an existential dialogue with nature. The “Suns and Moons” series exhibited in February 1928 achieved new depths of emotional poignancy and sincerity. The works in this series use a similar schema : organized with a centralized celestial orb dominating the sky, trees or mountainous shapes, and occasional houses forming the lower valley or basin of the plane. The suns and moons, fundamentally archetypal and evocative forms, radiate with spiritual energies and ambient suggestions. Using color as a major expressive tool, Bluemner regarded these works as “symbols of the universal creative spirit,” exploring polarities of “body and soul, life and death, ecstasy and terror, and male and female.”

The elements Bluemner juxtaposed in his “Suns and Moons” are some of the most fundamental archetypes of the unconscious and correlate with Asian concepts of yin and yang, commonly associated with the “light” and “dark” in familiar symbolism. To this extent, Bluemner uses remarkably appropriate yet unexpected color relationships, such as captivating crimsons in Sun Storm (1927, watercolor on paper) surrounded by pale blues, rich greens, and navy, set off against grey-brown undulations of the land. In Sunset on the St. Lawrence (1927, watercolor on paper), the rich orange of the sun is circled by a light lavender ring, bleeding out to a dark turquoise sky, with a touch of sienna where the sun touches the horizon. The grey mountains are not the jagged hard lines one might expect, rather lush and curving, as if just flowing into place, an ingenious and contemporary use of watercolor evocative of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Canyon” series or Arthur Dove’s landscapes.

As in Eye of Fate (1927, watercolor on paper), Bluemner demonstrates the consequence of cathexis, staring so intently at one point that all others become distorted and pushed to the sides of consciousness. The deep reds, which Bluemner associated with masculinity, passion, and aggression, fight against the deep turquoise sky. Crimsons, browns, and purples form rings of atmosphere which overwhelm the sky, drawing stronger contrast from the greys of the bowing warped rooftops and a curved blackish-brown telephone pole.

Bluemner used this series to transition into a new view of nature and landscape, applying psychological projection to panel paintings. He wrote, “analogy and imagination are freely used to transpose things into other shapes of life by way of association of ideas.” Later works explored “Ego,” “Nonego,” and “Unego” in a sophisticated modern way. His paintings became about human nature, more personal while investigating the universal. Using motifs of a house, a tree, and a sky or a canal, Bluemner created theatrical compositions describing all the complexities of modernity, while remaining sincere and personally significant.

Oscar Bluemner is a modernist painter deserving of more consideration and attention. By combining the unconscious elements of the psyche with the specificity of landscape elements and precisely-focused motifs, he developed an original and effective painting style, as well as a unique method for exploring the world around him. His paintings achieve a balance of androgyny, inhabiting important places in modern art and thought through fusion of archetypal polarities.

LINKS:

- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
- John Haber on Bluemner, Haber's Art Reviews

Schiele's Skin

Egon Schiele, Girl with Black Hair 1911, watercolor & charcoal on paper. (left)
Mother and Child, 1910, watercolor & charcoal on paper (right)

To say that Egon Schiele’s show at the NEUE Galerie in New York City goes skin deep is actually saying a lot – in this large show of paintings and drawings, Schiele uses the skin as a window to the idiosyncrasy of character and the individuality of a moment.

Much of Schiele’s brief career revolved around the display of skin, with allegations that his sexually-charged erotic images were indecent and obscene. In his treatment of skin’s surface qualities with a unique sensitivity to what the skin reveals, Schiele transcends the pornographic or base to create formally-stimulating, genuinely original depictions of the body and his subjects.

In his 1910 Portrait of the Painter Karl Zakovsek, Schiele uses the skin to convey exhaustion, weariness, and the strained life of a fellow artist. The redness of the eyelids and the pink tinge of Zakovsek’s lips contrast starkly with the languid pallor of his cheeks, neck and exposed chest. Hairs jut through awkwardly, intimating the rough texture his right hand meets when leaning his chin on his arm, the armrest invisible. The skin becomes more corpse-like and foreboding, as the exaggerated elongation of the left hand extends the composition to the lower right of the canvas in a vertiginous diagonal. The grey fingers point nearly straight down, the knuckles and cuticles uncomfortably rendered in exquisite detail. Zakovsek’s skin is so close in tone to his grayish-brown suit that one cannot help regarding him as a living spectre of death, despite his apparent youth as Schiele’s contemporary.

By ruthlessly overstating the world-worn translucency of Zakovsek’s skin, Schiele’s portrait is not just one of the external, but it bridges into the psychological and spiritual world of his subject, engaging the viewer into the unique situation of this sitter. By placing him as if floating in a deliberately vacant background, Schiele has defined his focus and allowed himself an opportunity to intricately explore a complex formal language, rendering flesh and fabric equally consequential as costumes of something more human underneath.

While it is the substance of Zavovsek’s skin which makes it significant, it is the blankness of his nudes that make them seductive and alluring. Particularly evident in the armless skirt-raised figure in the watercolor Girl with Black Hair from 1911 and others made for a circle of collectors of erotic art, the skin of young female nudes is marked by absence – simple charcoal lines form the contour details of anatomy, washes suggest hair or details of the fabric of her skirt. The only major marks to indicate skin quality are the flushing of the cheeks and labia, creating a blank space for projection of fantasy and evocation of the erotic without explicit participation or statement, harkening to a form of Eros associated with life-force and divine - rather than purely sexual - drives toward beauty and ecstasy. Despite Schiele’s talent to capture the very essence of character through every surface nuance, he chooses the tabula rasa of blank white thighs or an expanse of face broken with narrowed eyes, slashes for eyebrows, and rouged lips to create the illusion of innocent seduction, a woman naturally aroused for her viewer rather than the exploited child she may actually have been. It is a person reduced to a motif to allow for the highest gratification, yet preserving much of the spirit and individuality of the models in the distinction of features.

Unlike the sparsely-marked skin of his erotic nudes, a series of women drawn in an abortion clinic from 1910 explores skin in a lush, intrigued way. In Mother and Child, a rather lovely woman exposes her back, coyly turning over her left shoulder to show batting eyes and the contour of her cheek. Her black hair responds in a curved element compositionally balancing the hard lines of opaque black stockings which come mid-thigh, the figure cut off at the knees by the bottom of the paper. She seems held up or supported by the child figure, a twisted body echoing the curve of his mother’s spine, dark hands awkwardly poking in two curves below the ribs and above the pelvis. The child’s face is obscured from view and incongruously shrouded in sepia tones, which continue to his bare feet. The mother’s skin is loosely painted, following the masses of her body, at first glance appearing as fabric rather than her nudity. Her anatomy is personally specific while remaining formally generalized, the nipple on her left side forming a stylized symbol for a breast, her face seemingly a separate entity from the thick, almost grotesque fluidity of the flesh of her neck and the skin between her shoulders. By a simultaneous reductive and additive process of addressing the skin and the subject’s flowing form, Schiele releases her from judgment or misinterpretation, involving the viewer in a formal exploration charged with the peculiarity of this woman’s individual situation.

Where Schiele truly pulls no punches is in self-portraiture, perhaps the most intense and intriguing of the works in this exhibit. Two in particular stand out – Self-Portrait with Arm Twisted Above Head, 1910, and Self-Portrait with Red Eyes. Using a full-length mirror, Schiele forms a dialogue with the skin he is most familiar with, greens and sallow tones incriminating and accentuating his exaggerated features, particularly his sharply protruding ribcage. Schiele comes off as defiant and more than a bit deranged, hair raging out of his skull, wild eyes standing out sharply in contrast with the dark facial skin. His hands are the darkest, betraying indiscretions with a sense of guilt or perceived personal shortcomings, filled with the intensity and conflict of a man staring unflinching into himself. His red eyes speaks to vice, corruption, exhaustive and tireless passionate living, but with the stubbornness and impunity of youth that only the truly precocious could get away with.

Schiele presents a very modern vision of humanity at the turn of the century. In light of his dubious reputation as a pornographer or exploitative corrupter of the innocent, Schiele has created a remarkable depth of work with unique sensitivity and attenuation of detail to the most essential and viscerally significant. His work is simultaneously erotic, sexually-charged, and formally enlightened, preserving much of the dignity and grace of humanity in the face of its pathetic material reality trapped in the skin.

LINKS:

- NEUE Galerie, New York City