Artwork Title: Self Portrait

Self Portrait, 1903

Oscar Bluemner

By Alfred Friendly, a reporter, managing editor and overseas correspondent for The Washington Post until his retirement. December 2, 1979 Forty-one years ago, as a fledgling reporter on The Washington Daily News, I wrote an obituary of the artist Oscar Bluemner whom, in youthful flamboyance, I called "The Man Who Saw Red." It was not much more than a brief account of an unsuccessful painter's suicide. The shortfall in that and in a few other obscure death notices written at the time was matched by a general indifference to him and his paintings during the last agony-filled years of his life. Not until more than four decades after Bluemner's death has justice been done him. An exhibition of 58 of his landscapes opened in mid-November at the Hirshhorn Museum and will continue through March 2 of next year. (Reviewed in Style, Nov. 21) Yet there is more to learn about that remarkable, restless, hag-ridden man and especially about the last picture he painted -- viewed, one hopes, only by ambulance men and coroner.No one titled it as such, but Bluemner himself must surely have thought of it as "Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Corpse." Few of his contemporaries in the world of art remain to remember him. But in his happy days he was one of the ringleaders of the famous 1913 New York Armory show that pioneered America's awareness of modern art. Five of his pictures were included, yet -- for he was a difficult and at times cantakerous man -- he knocked the show in a review he wrote of it, and probably for the right reason: Conservative American artists were over-represented while short shrift was given by to Cezanne and Van Gogh. In those early days, from about 1915 to 1926, Bluemner was given exhibitions at several well-esteemed galleries -- Stieglitz, Anderson, Bourgeois and Neumann -- and was himself almost a charter member of Alfred Stieglitz's "291" group. His friends included, besides the fine photographer and his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, such luminaries as Charles Demuth, John Marin and Francis Picabia. He was known in those days as "The Vermillionaire," when color, particularly red, obsessed him. ...Tragedy hit in 1926. Long privation and suffering brought insanity and death to his wife. There followed the dark years of Bluemner's life, but years now recognized as his most productive. He wandered up and down the Eastern seaboard, searching for the reddest town he could find in which to settle down and paint the color he adored. He picked South Braintree, Mass., where the factories of brick red, his favorite shade, made painting worthwhile. In the back yard of the small, red brick house he bought he raised beans for the sake of their scarlet blossoms. Receipts from earlier sales kept him going. The Whitney Museum had bought three canvasses and Duncan Phillips in Washington had taken two small paintings. Finally he went on relief, in the Public Works Art Project. One of the pictures he did during the life of that institution hung for many years in a first-floor corridor of the Labor Department Building, then at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue. A large canvas, it was titled "The Roosevelt Laundry," and showed red buildings against a red background. Over one of the structures was a sign" "New Deal Laundry." We Clean the Nation's Wash." The picture is now nowhere to be found, as is presumably the case with a hundred others from the PWAP that were hung in the building, many by once-destitute artis whose pictures today command thousands of dollars. The organizer of the current Hirshhorn exhibit, Judith Zilczer, declares she went on a wild-goose chase to find "The Roosevelt Laundry," but in vain. ...Walking out of the gallery one day, Bluemner was struck by an auto. Recovery was long, expensive and never complete. His poverty became blacker, compounded by illness that followed the accident.... Semi-paralyzed, laid low by heart disease and cancer, harried by insomnia, Bluemner still tried to paint. The ultimate blow fell: His eyesight began to fail. ...Only one painting was possible -- a portrait in a pigment more precious than his Chinese vermillion. On the night of Jan. 11, 1938, he placed on his dresser an envelope containing a little silver money he had somehow saved. He marked it, "for Cremation." Then he put a clean white sheet on his bed, undressed, lay down and cut his throat from ear to ear. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1979/12/02/portrait-of-oscar-bluemner-midas-with-a-crimson-touch/c89f323e-97cb-4271-9acb-b9ebd08c790c/?utm_term=.4de0068322c2]
Uploaded on Apr 1, 2018 by Suzan Hamer

Arthur is a
Digital Museum