Montclair Art Museum Presents "Oscar Bluemner's America: Picturing Paterson, New Jersey"

Jan. 17, 2013 - PRLog -- Oscar Bluemner’s America: Picturing Paterson, New Jersey focuses on Oscar Bluemner’s representations of Paterson, New Jersey, a once-thriving manufacturing center that became a cauldron of social, political, and economic upheaval in the early 20th century. It was originated by Stetson University in De Land, Florida, and is on view at the Montclair Art Museum (MAM) February 17 ­– June 16, 2013. It is curated by Roberta Smith Favis, curator of the Vera Kouba Bluemner Collection at Stetson University.

The Bluemner show is running concurrently with a major exhibition titled The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913, marking the 100-year anniversary of the famous and controversial 1913 exhibition of modern art at the 69th Regiment Armory building in New York City. Oscar Bluemner contributed to the Armory Show as both exhibitor and critic; his painting Hackensack River (1912) is on view in The New Spirit.

German-born and educated, Bluemner (1867–1938) had come to America in 1892. During the years covered in this exhibition (1910–1917), he was self-consciously transforming himself from an architect into a painter. A 1912 trip to Europe exposed him to the avant-garde artistic innovations of cubism, futurism, and various strains of German expressionism that would soon be on display at the 1913 Armory Show. The trip catalyzed a dramatic change in Bluemner’s artistic language from fairly direct naturalism to a style informed by modernist thought and experimentation. Bluemner’s works in this exhibition show a profound personal sensitivity to color and a dedication to the communication of feeling through landscape.

Now defined as an American modernist painter, Bluemner neglected Paterson’s most picturesque natural feature, the striking waterfall that is now the centerpiece of America’s newest national park, in favor of the gritty surroundings of factories and workmen’s cottages in the industrial city. Living in New York City during the early 1910s, he preferred to select his subjects from the quasi-industrial, quasi-rural regions that encircled the metropolis and were easily accessible by ferry, streetcar, or train—literally the point of transition between the big city and the more remote countryside. He followed the pathways along the Passaic River to study the red brick factories that dominate many of his views, and trekked along the towpath of the Morris Canal to draw the humble structures scattered around the base of Garrett Mountain. Paterson, for this artist, was above all identified with “the intimate landscape of our common surroundings,” “the portions of towns where the laboring people exist,” and the democratic essence of America.

The Silk Strike of 1913 took place just as Bluemner was engaged in developing his images of the city. His empathy with the struggling immigrant textile workers, some of whom hailed from his own boyhood home of Elberfeld, Germany, undergirds the iconic forms and blazing colors of the latest and most emphatically modernist works in the exhibition. The 1913 strike, one of the most famous in American labor history, lasted five months and eventually involved almost 2,500 workers at nearly 300 mills. The strike precipitated a three-pronged political alliance: the striking silk workers, the International Workers of the World (IWW) organizers, and a group of Greenwich Village artists and intellectuals that included some of the same figures who participated in or supported the Armory Show. Their actions culminated in the Paterson Strike Pageant in Madison Square Garden on June 7, 1913. The pageant generated considerable publicity, but no profits, and the conditions of the workers continued to deteriorate. Eventually hunger forced most of the strikers back to work, but the silk industry and the town itself never recovered. When Oscar Bluemner was revising his images of Paterson in 1915 and 1916, the brief optimism of 1913 had been shattered and the silkmills themselves were doomed.

Related Programs
Painting the Red City: Oscar Bluemner’s Portrayals of Paterson, New Jersey
with Curator, Dr. Roberta Smith Favis
Thursday, March 7, 7 p.m.
$12 Members, $15 Nonmembers
Advance tickets are available online at montclairartmuseum.org, in The Store at MAM, or by calling 973-259-5137.

Dr. Roberta Smith Favis is curator of the current exhibition Oscar Bluemner’s America: Picturing Paterson, New Jersey. The works in the exhibition come from the Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection, bequeathed by the artist’s daughter to Stetson University in 1997. Favis’s lecture will focus on the intersection of the artistic career of American modernist Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) and the history of Paterson, New Jersey, during the turbulent years surrounding the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. Bluemner’s depictions of Paterson combine an evolving modernist aesthetic with personal, social, and political concerns. Favis will discuss the German-born artist’s changing and often contradictory politics of color, in which blazing red factories could evoke both the preferred color of the radical labor and the red-blooded hue of the American flag.

Free First Thursday Nights at MAM
The Museum is open the first Thursday of the month (October –June) from 5 to 9 p.m., with free admission to the galleries, unique programming, and a full-service bar with special First Thursday Night prices. Free First Thursday Nights are made possible by a generous grant from the Roche Foundation and offered in partnership with Egan & Sons. See montclairartmuseum.org (http://www.montclairartmuseum.org) for more details.

Exhibition Website
The Museum will maintain a site dedicated to the exhibition for journalists seeking further information, including a checklist, images, and related events and programs. Please visit montclairartmuseum.org/press-room.php (https://www.montclairartmuseum.org/press-room.php).

Group Tours
Group tours may be booked by calling 973-259-5136 or by emailing tours@montclairartmuseum.org.

Sponsorship
Oscar Bluemner’s America: Picturing Paterson is presented with generous support from The Vance Wall Foundation, Bobbi Brown and Steven Plofker, Tracy Higgins and James Leitner, Jacqueline and Herb Klein, Richard and Roberta Polton, Toni LeQuire-Schott and Newton B. Schott, Jr., Margo and Frank Walter, and Joan and Donald Zief.

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The Montclair Art Museum (MAM) presents exhibitions and programs that reflect its collection of historic and contemporary American and Native American art. MAM's Yard School of Art offers classes for people of all ages.