Oscar Bluemner

Artist Biography

Oscar Bluemner was born in Germany and first exhibited his artwork, a series of portraits, in Berlin at the age of eighteen. In 1892 Bluemner left Europe for the United States. Upon arriving in Chicago he was enlisted to produce designs for the World’s Columbian Exposition. He intended to become an architect, not a painter, but after failing to find success in Chicago and then in New York, he turned to his first love: art. Bluemner spent years obsessively sketching from nature in and around Long Island and New Jersey. In 1910, he met Alfred Stieglitz, who helped solidify him in his artistic career. In a letter written by Stieglitz to Bluemner in January 1919, Stieglitz sums up the power Bluemner’s images inevitably convey: “The work is virile – it’s your own – and it’s damn good.”

After exhibiting in the 1913 Armory Show, Stieglitz gave Bluemner a one-man show at his gallery 291, where he exhibited regularly until 1928, among exhibitions at numerous other New York galleries during his lifetime. Bluemner’s work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Phillips Collection, the Newark Museum, among others.