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THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 1959.
Art: Early Avant-Garde

Oscar Bluemner's Work is Shown in Exhibition at Graham Gallery
By Dore Ashton

As a participant in the first wave of defiant avant-gardism in this country before World War I, Oscar F. Bluemner stands permanently along with Stieglitz, Marin, Dove, Hartley and a dozen others-in modern American art history.

The Graham Gallery, 1014 Madison Avenue, at Seventy-seventh Street, adds a document to that history with an exhibition of Bluemner's water-colors and drawings, from early classical sketches of picturesque landscapes to experimental compositions in which Bluemner aligned himself with the European expressionist movement.

Bluemner was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1867 and came to the United States in 1892. Thorough as he was he kept a "Hausbuch," or annotated sketchbook, in which every painting he made was carefully registered in a small sketch-signed, dated, and sometimes even the time of day in which it was painted indicated.

From these small sketches we can reconstruct his stylistic route. In 1910, he was still making fine pencil sketches, including one of Harlem Harbor showing a moored sailing vessel. In 1911, his Port Washington, East Hampton and Paterson landscapes took on a Fauvist character. The reds that were to mean so much to him later begin to appear detached from the objects he represent. By 1914, Bluemner was in full swing, painting angular, abstracted scenes that show his concurrence with cubist theories then prominent in Europe.
Eventually, Bluemner developed his own mystic style in which splinter shapes, hard surfaces and enamel-like intensity of color set him off from Arthur Dove, the contemporary with whom he had the most in common. He was interested, as were others during that period, in the psychological effects or color, saying "color creates its own form," and admonishing his viewers: "Look at my work in a way as you listen to music."

In his work of 1919, for instance, there are brilliant contrasts of red and green forms, and large columnar shapes that work within the composition in a totally abstract context. The trouble was that Bluemner never quite rose above his theories in his paitings. The harsh outlines and blatant color juxtapositions are too often dogmatic and forced. After all this time, Bluemner has earned his place in history, but it is in the second rank of early American Abstract painters.