Oscar Bluemner
1867–1938
Oscar Bluemner worked as an architect, initially in Germany and later in the United States, before turning to painting full time in 1911. By then he was already a frequent visitor to Alfred Stieglitz’s pioneering 291 gallery in New York, and eventually became a member of its inner circle of modern artists. The paintings he debuted in his 1915 inaugural exhibition at 291 married prismatic, architectonic forms with boldly saturated colors that combined his training as an architect with his desire to “bring the colors of things to enormous splendor.” His belief that colors could stir feelings and mood, much as music does, led him to develop a system of symbolism that identified specific colors with psychological states.
In A Situation in Yellow Bluemner combined predominantly yellow and black colors (identified with light and sorrow, respectively) with images of nature and man-made forms to portray what he believed were the fundamental polarities of body and soul, life and death, and male and female.
By 1930 he was using images of houses and trees as surrogates for what he called the “Ego and the Altera [the other] . . . the Duality in ourselves as well as in Nature.” Treating these opposing forces as protagonists, he set the scene in A Situation in Yellow as an archetypical drama between “man . . . Ego” (represented by houses) and “she . . . non Ego” (represented by trees). In this work, as in others he made after 1933, Bluemner affirmed his admiration for Northern Renaissance masters by signing his work with the pseudonym Florianus, a Latinized version of the name Bluemner, meaning flower or blossom.
Introduction
Oscar Bluemner (June 21, 1867 – January 12, 1938), born Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner and after 1933 known as Oscar Florianus Bluemner, was a Prussian-born American Modernist painter.
Wikidata identifier
Q215773
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 23, 2025.
Country of birth
Germany
Roles
Artist, architect, painter
ULAN identifier
500027801
Names
Oscar Bluemner, Oscar Bluemmer, Florianus Bluemner, Oscar Julius Bluemner, Oscar Florianus Blümner, Oscar Florianus Bluemner
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 23, 2025.
