Bluemner Back in Bloom in the Bronx

Oscar Bluemner's Bronx Borough Courthouse

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

The rediscovery of a major work by an esteemed artist is rare, but rarer still if in a medium not associated with the maker. In fact, when Timothy Williams of the NY Times wrote on Mar. 6 that the long-derelict Bronx Borough Courthouse---a 1906 Beaux-Arts gem in the gritty Morrisania section---will be restored and recycled for the Bronx Academy of Promise Charter School, its architect, Oscar Bluemner, wasn't identified as a pioneering American modernist painter.

Bluemner's vibrant Expressionist landscapes, heavily influenced by his German contemporaries and now coveted by cult collectors, were the subject of an underappreciated 2005 Whitney Museum retrospective. In the exhibition catalog, veteran Whitney curator Barbara Haskell retraced the scandalous saga of the Bronx Borough Courthouse, decisive in Bluemner's abandoning architecture---a profession he found (with good reason) irredeemably corrupt---for painting. The trouble was that although Bluemner was a far better artist than architect, self-destructive tendencies sabotaged his success in that new calling.

Bluemner (1867-1938) was born in Prussia and studied architecture in Berlin before immigrating to the US at the onset of an economic depression, typical of the bad luck that dogged him. Trained in the conventional Classical manner, he lacked the flair of America's preeminent turn-of-the-century architect, Stanford White, and turned out competent if forgettable designs, save one Meisterwerk, his Bronx Borough Courthouse. Triumphing over an ungrateful wedge-shaped site, Bluemner's suave but imposing scheme---clad in Tennessee marble and fronted by a pair of monumental columns flanking an allegorical statue of Justice---outdid the concurrent last-gasp Classicism of Washington, DC.

The big catch: Bluemner was forced to ghost for Michael Garvin, a hack architect backed by Tammany Hall, New York's corrupt Democratic machine. Garvin hogged credit for the courthouse, an incensed Bluemner sued, but after a protracted Pyrrhic victory he gave up architecture in disgust and turned to painting full time. Alas, his knack for alienating even avid proponents (especially his influential dealer, Alfred Stieglitz) sabotaged a blazing talent. Architects still need upfront patronage in a way artists haven't since the rise of the bourgeois art market four centuries ago. The sad tale of Bluemner (who committed suicide after a Job-like pile-up of personal and professional blows) reminds us that art in any medium is never easy.