Weekend, April 3-4, 2021 – HE DESIGNED ONE OF THE MOST LOVELY BUILDING IN THE BRONX

By admin

327th Edition

WEEKEND EDITION

APRIL 3-4,  2021

OSCAR

BLUEMNER 

ARCHITECT

AND

ARTIST

He started as an architect and was caught in political corruption scandal, then was introduced to new artistic interpretations

Oscar Bluemner, Evening Tones, 1911-1917, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of James F. Dicke II and museum purchase made possible by the American Art Forum, the Julia D. Strong Endowment and the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2002.24

Former Bronx
Borough Courthouse

Between E. 161st St., Brook Ave., and Third Ave.

Oscar Bluemner (with Michael Garvin and Max Hausel)

1905-1914

The courthouse, a compact four-story mass of smooth granite, is divided almost evenly between a deeply rusticated two-story base and an upper portion where piers, pilasters and tall windows rise to a cornice and attic story.  A preliminary sketch shows a high dome and cupola, never built, which would have visually absorbed the upthrust and perhaps more satisfyingly resolved the relation of vertical and horizontal. To fit its site, the building is trapezoidal in plan, narrowing toward the side facing down Third Avenue. This façade is penetrated at ground level by a great arched portal scooped out of the heavy stonework. Above it, the façade retreats into a deep bay flanked by two colossal cylindrical columns, between which is poised Jules Eduard Roiné’s larger-than-life-sized marble statue of Justice. Behind her, on the rear wall of the recess, the arch of the lower portal is repeated as a window frame, surmounted by a lion’s-head keystone.

In this Third Avenue front, and its variations on the other sides of the courthouse, very familiar elements of Beaux-Arts classicism have been used with restraint to construct a powerful architectural emblem—the force and threat of the Law represented below, its rationality and self-control above. In compensation for its structural austerity, the Third Avenue façade is enlivened by sharply chiseled geometrical inventions. Intricate frames, stylized swags, and complicated broken pediments surround the windows, some of which puncture the wall with unusually deep, shadowy apertures. Thick bullet-headed finials top the attic. There is even a motif—a set of three classical guttae (or “drops”)—which appears with witty persistence in all sorts of unexpected positions. The total effect is strikingly modern, in the manner of Viennese and Parisian buildings of the period, and very unlike New York’s turn-of-the-century architectural ornament.

How did the Bronx come by this remarkable Beaux-Arts building? By accident.

In 1903, the first President of the borough, Louis Haffen, passed on the contract for a courthouse design, worth $40,000, to his political right-hand-man, Michael Garvin. (“If you have the pull,” Garvin acknowledged later, “you get the work.”) Haffen was only following the Tammany tradition of rewarding loyalty with fat public works assignments. But his friend (despite serving as Building Commissioner) proved to have such limited architectural skills that his plans were rejected by the New York Art Commission, which derided them as “egregious” and “despicable.” The unfortunate Garvin was forced to seek out an underemployed architect, offering to share fees and credit in return for an acceptable building.

That he turned to Oscar Bluemner, a German émigré who had been a prize student at Berlin’s Royal Academy, was a stroke of fortune for Bronx architecture. But not for Bluemner: when the drawings had been prepared, Garvin submitted them as his own work, and ignored both promised credit and payment. The outraged Bluemner sued and won, his testimony leading to an investigation, which eventually resulted in Haffen’s dismissal. Bluemner, however, was awarded only about one-quarter of the amount he felt he was owed, and forced to allow Garvin main credit for the building; in disappointment, he gave up his profession a short while later, and turned to painting. Official records—even those of the Landmarks Commission—continued to attribute the courthouse to Garvin.

Like its designer, the building itself suffered from the political environment. Construction, begun in 1905, was drawn out until 1914, and cost two million dollars, more than twice the original estimate. (Not coincidentally, Garvin remained as supervising architect through the project.)  By 1934 the county had found reasons to build a new courthouse, eventually leaving only a police court at the Third Avenue site. When the building was officially closed by the city in 1977, vandals undertook the stripping of its metalwork until all doorways and windows were sealed with concrete blocks (leveling off Bluemner’s deep embrasures). Although a 1981 designation as a landmark helped protect the courthouse from threatened razing, serious repairs have never been undertaken: the building is currently on the Landmarks Conservancy’s most endangered list. And lively plans for occupancy by community design and museum groups were thwarted when the courthouse was sold to a private developer for a derisory $130,000.

But things may be looking up. The new owner has performed a much-needed exterior cleaning—the Tammany-purchased granite having begun to yellow even before the building was completed—and found a tenant. Meanwhile, after revival of critical interest in his paintings led to a 2005 show at the Whitney Museum, the imaginative Oscar Bluemner is at last being acknowledged as author of this sophisticated public building.

David Bady

Photographs:
Lehman College Art Gallery and David Bady

AFTER ARCHITECTURE, A CAREER IN ART

Oscar Bluemner, Self-Portrait, 1933, oil on panel, 19 3/4 x 14 3/4 in. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

Sunset

Early life

Bluemner was born as Friedrich Julius Oskar Blümner in Prenzlau, Germany, on June 21, 1867. He studied painting and architecture at the Royal Academy of Design in Berlin.

Old Canal Port

Painting

In 1908 Bluemner met Alfred Stieglitz, who introduced him to the artistic innovations of the European and American avant-garde. By 1910, Bluemner had decided to pursue painting full-time rather than architecture.

He exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show. He said that the Americans’ contribution failed to match that of the Europeans because the American selection process reflected rivalries and compromises rather than curatorial judgment, resulting in a “melée of antagonistic examples”. Then in 1915 Stieglitz gave him a solo exhibition at his gallery, 291. Despite participating in several exhibitions, including solo shows, for the next ten years Bluemner failed to sell many paintings and lived with his family in near poverty. He created paintings for the Federal Arts Project in the 1930s.

Morning Light

Fourth, not so much Counterintuitive, but rather not noticed – the lack of freight railways in the City.

Later life

After his wife’s death in 1926, Bluemner moved to South Braintree, Massachusetts. From there in 1932 he contributed a letter to an ongoing debate in the New York Times on the question “What is American Art?”. He wrote:

America sells its shoes, machines, canned beef and so forth in Europe and all over the world not because they have an American style or are wrapped in the American flag, but simply because they are best. Thus also, the French export their paintings and birth-control, and the Germans export sauerkraut and prima donnas, because those things, each, are best. Today, for quality, nationalism, as a race-attribute, means nothing; chemistry, astronomy, or engineering admit, nowhere, of any national flavoring, nor do higher things like religion or philosophy.

Let us, here, make progressive and best painting, each one as he is fit to do, and merely ask: What and when is painting, in a critical sense? … How can the people agree on what is American style, if the painters themselves, and by their work, disagree profoundly as to what real painting itself is! And there is, and always was, nothing more contemptible, ridiculous and, to art, disastrous, than patrioteering, which thinly veils profiteering.

Ideally, art, pure, is of a sphere and of no country; the first real artists, always and everywhere, have either been importers or immigrants bringing the light with them. El Greco, an immigrant … defied the Spanish professors … ; we, now, call his work more truly Spanish than that of his local contemporaries. And in the same sense, the future will not fail to stamp that of our own work as peculiarly American in which the living painter, here, has injected no conscious thought of his hailing from Hoboken or Kankakee, and every consideration of pure and modern painting and of the supreme quality he maybe capable of.

He had a successful one-man show in 1935 at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York City. In the New York Times, Edward Alden Jewell called it Bluemner’s “apotheosis”. He wrote:

He is very much alive and has been working of late … with robustious [sic] results. These twenty-eight canvases bear the generic title , “New Landscape Paintings.” That is because Mr. Blkuemner feels that some degree of “representation” is essential if abstract ideas are to be put over with entire success. However, the artist more fully and more exactly classifies them as “compositions for color themes.” He might, if he chose, even call them “color music” without risking the opprobrium that usually attends excursions into so hazardous a field. … These startling pictures build harmonies and rhythms that depend as a rule on simple statement. Here we find none of the overtones and undertones that some other artists have employed in projecting visual music. Bluemner relies for his effect upon plain, resonant chords. Though modulations of tone occur, these seem of secondary importance in his scheme. There is decidedly something in this new, bold, exclamatory style.

Bluemner committed suicide on January 12, 1938

Oscar Bluemner’s “Abruzzi Mountains,” is a 1922 watercolor. (Stetson University)

Legacy

Stetson University holds more than 1,000 pieces of Oscar Bluemner’s work bequeathed in 1997 by his daughter, Vera Bluemner Kouba. In 2009 the Homer and Dolly Hand Art Center at Stetson opened with a primary mission of housing a providing exhibition space for the Kouba Collection.[11] Often overlooked in his lifetime, Bluemner now is widely acknowledged as a key player in the creation of American artistic Modernism, with better-known colleagues such as Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin.[

LEFT: STETSON UNIVERSITY
RIGHT: Oscar Bluemner, Last Evening of the Year, c. 1929. Oil on board mounted on wood, 13 3/4 × 9 3/4 in. (34.9 × 24.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art; gift of Juliana Force 31.115

Painting of factories at Paterson by overlooked Armory Show artist Oscar Bluemner.

FROM ANDY SPARBERG, OUR RAIL PROFESSIONAL:

I would like to take the liberty of adding some information about the Penn Station project. Besides establishing a New York City station, the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) also wanted to create through train operation between Boston and Washington, today’s Amtrak Northeast Corridor service. The Hell Gate Bridge, which connected the PRR to the New Haven Railroad, was part of the overall Penn Station grand scheme and made this route possible, unchanged today.

Another piece of overall project was Sunnyside Yard, which allowed long distance PRR trains terminating in New York to simply continue east, enter the yard for servicing and cleaning, and then return to Penn Station for southward or western trip. That practice continues today. The overall track layout reduced the number of stub-end tracks in Penn to four (today’s tracks 1-4). Tracks 5 through 21 are all through-running tracks. That’s why Penn is not called a “terminal”, but a “station.”

Prior to the Hell Gate Bridge, Washington-Boston through train cars were floated around Manhattan, on barges between Jersey City and The Bronx, which was expensive and time-consuming

. Andy Sparberg

WEEKEND PHOTO OF THE DAY

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FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

CHAPEL OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE 
GOOD SAMARITAN GERMAN LUTHERAN CHURCH
IN 1969

GLORIA HERMAN, MITCH HAMMER, NINA LUBLIN, JAY JACOBSON AND ED LITCHER
MADE GREAT EFFORTS TO GET IT RIGHT.
JOYOUS EASTER GREETINGS!

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff
All image are copyrighted (c)

Sources
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM
WIKIPEDIA
STETSON UNIVERSITY

FUNDING PROVIDED BY ROOSEVELT ISLAND OPERATING CORPORATION PUBLIC PURPOSE GRANTS CITY COUNCIL REPRESENTATIVE BEN KALLOS DISCRETIONARY FUNDING THRU DYCD

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