Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1916 (Heft 48))

assertion that he has arrived; to him it would be a sacrilege to have one think he aspired to
nothing higher than his present achievements. He is now in the making: he says it will take
him twenty years to achieve his aim. Personally, I believe that his goal will have become
modified in less than a quarter of that time. As he progresses in his ability to handle his
medium, he will be confronted by other, and perhaps profounder, aesthetic complications.
His color now has a hardness and dryness which will undoubtedly pass away; and in his draw-
ing is a certain stiffness which also is due to disappear. He has set himself the task of doing a
certain thing. Whether or not he succeeds in his present aim is unimportant; but he will un-
questionably find himself en route. And this self-expression—this recreation of a highly
personal intellect and temperament—is, after all, the thing that counts.
Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American”:
At the Gallery of the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue, is an exhibition of paintings
and drawings, based upon New Jersey landscapes, by Oscar Bluemner. He has taken charac-
teristic features—mountains, rivers, bridges, railroad embankments, houses, factories, streets
and so forth—translated them into more or less conventionalized forms and constructed these
into a composition that represents a systematized abstraction.
I mean that, while each composition has its separate character, there is no suggestion of
intimate locality nor of personal feeling on the painter’s part. The character is expressed in
forms that as far as possible emulate the abstract generalization of a mathematical formula.
Or, to be more precise, an engineering formula, which covers the constructional principles,
and an architectural or aesthetic formula that provides for the attractiveness of form and color.
For Bluemner is an architect, trained in the principles of building and structural design, who
has a working comprehension of the relations of one mass to another in the matter of strains
and stresses and, moreover, has been a scientific student of color.
Consequently these abstractions have a concrete actuality. The artist is dealing with
facts, though he chooses to view them abstractly; and his paintings strike me as the most thor-
oughly comprehended, most ordered and most intelligible product of the desire to intellectualize
the sensations that I have seen. Their very logic clarifies the intention, which often in the case
of other painters, is so slight or fine-drawn or confused.
There is no mistaking the suggestion of these paintings. Bluemner would substitute for
the disorderliness of nature and its accompanying waste of energy a systematized efficiency,
based on the assumption of a scheme of superior invention.
The artist’s method of organization, which preserves the individuality of a scene or
person and seeks to organize the individuality to higher expressiveness, he would replace by an
invented mechanical precision.
The material efficiency, which the latter achieves too often at the expense of what is in-
dividually valuable, he would apply to the systematizing of the things of the spirit. The free
working of the spirit he affects to ignore, and would replace it by a motive power, based on an
abstraction and calculated at all costs to get material results. When you penetrate the idea
involved in the abstraction, it is the institutionalizing of life.
In the scenes of these pictures you cannot imagine human beings moving freely. They
would be drilled, regimented, coerced into formations; moving like automatons at the word of
command; a command imposed upon them by their subjection to an idea—an idea that repre-
sents in the final analysis the autocratic will of a few individuals. It is utterly alien to the
American idea of democracy.
J. Edgar Chamberlin in the “N. Y. Evening Mail”:
The Photo-Secession Gallery opens its season with a group of “paintings and drawings
based upon New Jersey landscapes,” by Oscar Bluemner, who seems to have looked longingly
and lovingly on the early work of Herbin, to judge by some of the tree forms he has painted.
Gaugin, too, seems to have been the inspiration for some of his color, so that the sophisticated
will realize this is an ultra-modern show at once.
Bluemner represents cities, such as Passaic, let us say, as an assemblage of bright red
factories—he is very strong on chimneys—and bright blue houses with tropical looking foliage
interspersed between and around them. He also shows us very “cubey” trees and houses in
violets, greens, reds and purples that would shock the average Jersey commuter into thinking
he had better change his habits if he came upon these pictures unexpectedly.

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