Oscar Bluemner: Suns and Moons

Oscar Bluemner immigrated from Germany to the United States in 1892 as a twenty-five-year-old graduate of Berlin's prestigious Royal Technical Academy and a winner of its royal medal in architecture. By 1927, when he began his Suns and Moons series, he had switched his profession from architecture to painting and had been a member of Alfred Stieglitz's legendary circle of modernists for more than a decade. His Suns and Moons series marked a watershed moment in his career when he fused the aesthetic vocabulary he had developed up to that point with a new commitment to portraying human relationships. What remained fundamental to his vision was the German romantic philosophy that one of art's aims was to portray inner consciousness and that color, independent of subject matter, could communicate the artist's moods and personality. (1)

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Bluemner began his Suns and Moons against a backdrop of poverty, personal loss, and relocation. His wife, Lina, had died nine months earlier, and he had moved into a damp, unheated bungalow in South Braintree, Massachusetts, with his two children.

His initial response to his wife's death was paralysis and guilt that his self-absorption in art had left him inattentive to her needs. He confessed that "I thus destroyed the highest, her love for me for the sake of painting. I could not help it. It is tragedy." (2) He sought solace from this "terrible contact with the mystery" of life in the propositions of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) regarding the duality of life and death, spirit and matter. (3) Adapting Hegel's ideas to his own life, Bluemner found comfort in the realization that "between me and all things there lies death, in the death of space and time all things exist, all life lives." (4) To pictorially realize this duality, Bluemner chose images of suns and moons radiating their fiery orbs of color onto earthbound houses. From the beginning, Bluemner's work had incorporated images of nature and architecture. But always before, architectural forms had dominated. Now, he equalized the relationship, fusing ecstasy and order, nature and the manmade into a "single, isolated, emotional, ecstatic moment." (5) Convinced that all things consisted of polar oppositions, Bluemner transformed his watercolors into symbols of the enduring drama between what he called the "Ego" and the "Other." (6) Wedding glowing colors to unified, simple forms that overlapped in a shallow proscenium space, he created a portrait of nature's interlocking energies that visually testified to the elemental polarities of body and soul, life and death, ecstasy and terror, male and female, yin and yang.

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In using suns and moons as his subject matter, Bluemner followed in a long tradition of northern romantic painters from Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840) to James Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) who used these motifs as archetypal symbols of God or the universal creative force. The nineteenth-century American landscape painters Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) and Thomas Cole (1801-1848) had similarly called upon soft diffuse light to suggest a transcendent connection to the Absolute. In the twentieth century this symbolism was revitalized by artists of Stieglitz's circle, such as Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Arthur Dove (1880-1946), who used images of suns and stars to evoke the fecundity and procreative forces of nature and the penetration of the life force into all matter. Like their work, Bluemner's "visions of ecstasy," as he called his Suns and Moons, gave potent visual evidence to the possibility of rebirth, transcendence, and synthesis. (7)

Fundamental to Bluemner's aesthetic was his belief that colors were psychic agents akin to music in their ability to shape and provoke mood. (8) Early in his painting career, he had studied the optical color systems of theorists such as Michel Eugene Chevreul (1786-1889), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), among others, constructing experimental color wheels, diagramming theoretical color charts, and analyzing the effects of pure and broken complementary colors. By the mid-teens he had rejected these optical color systems in favor of the psychological approach to color propounded by German color theorists, in particular Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). As he began his Suns and Moons, he reasserted the link he had earlier made between colors and psychological characteristics:

Blue: Yearning Sky Sea
Green: Plants Soaring
Yellow: Sunlight, Warmth, Front, Day
Deep Orange-Brown: Melancholy, Mystic, Evening, Depth
Red: Fire, Excitation, House ... = Man, Desire, Rage
Violet: Solemn mystic
Black: Night, Death, Malice, Shadow, Cavity, Sleep
White: Snow, Cold, Depth, Polarscapes, Seriousness (9)

In translating his color symbolism into concrete form, Bluemner relied on a simple palette, usually two or three colors, each identified with a distinct shape. (10) So strongly did he feel the importance of chromatic clarity that he dismissed the watercolors of John Marin (1870-1953) because of their atmospheric quality, observing that "Marin burns in his lines ... floats them on with buckets of water," whereas "I hammer the colors forcefully together." (11) For Bluemner, the issue was as important philosophically as it was aesthetically. As he declared, "Any two pure full complementary colors exert an elementary contrast of powers similar to the conception of Yin and Yang." (12)