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Born in 1867 in Germany, Oscar Bluemner inherited a rich familial artistic tradition. His father was a master mason and his relatives had all trained as craftsmen or artisans; thus Bluemner was exposed to art and architecture from a young age. He received his first formal art instruction in 1871 and began his lifelong practice of drawing and painting directly from nature.

In spite of a promising architectural career, Bluemner decided to leave Germany’s oppressively conservative artistic climate for the vanguard aestheticism of America. He frequently relocated between Chicago and New York in search of work opportunities, settling permanently in Manhattan by 1900. He admired the simplicity and functionalism of Frank Lloyd Wright and aspired to create indigenous architecture rooted to the American soil.

By 1904 he abandoned architecture for painting and immersed himself in New York’s active art community, frequenting its galleries, museums, and auction houses. He witnessed firsthand some of the city’s foremost modern exhibitions, including a show of Impressionist paintings at Durand-Ruel and  “The Eight” at Macbeth Gallery.

In what would be a fateful meeting at the 291 Gallery in 1908, Bluemner befriended Alfred Stieglitz and joined a group of New York’s leading avant-garde. Max Weber had been instrumental in forming the circle known as the “291” group, including artists Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Charles Demuth, and Paul Strand. Bluemner’s association with Stieglitz – one of the most influential artists and art dealers of the twentieth century – proved instrumental. Stieglitz was the first to showcase Matisse, Cézanne, and Van Gogh in his gallery, lending tremendous support to young American painters, including Bluemner, by launching solo exhibitions of their work.  In 1913, five of Bluemner’s works were included in the famous Armory Show and he was one of sixteen artists featured in the 1916 Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters.

Throughout the 1910s and early 1920s, Bluemner created his own unique pictorial vocabulary that realized the convergence of Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism, and Expressionism. In search of subject matter, Bluemner sought inspiration in his local environment and what was familiar to him, drawing upon the landscapes, harbors, and factories of New York and New Jersey.

ROBERT BEAUCHAMP (American 1923-1995)

Robert Beauchamp was one of the earliest and most respected figurative painters to emerge from within the New York “Abstract Expressionist” School of the late 50’s. Arriving on the scene a few years after Jackson Pollock, Beauchamp choose to use figuration and narrative rather than pure abstraction, finding it inadequate to communicate his perception of the realities of the human condition. He  many ways prefigured renewed interest in the figure as subject matter in the late 80’s, an interest that has persisted into the 21st century.

Robert Beauchamp (he pronounced his name “Beecham”), was born in 1923 in Denver, Colorado. He studied art with Boardman Robinson at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. He served three years in the Navy during World War II, but then enrolled in the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He was soon to study for three years in both Provincetown and Manhattan with Hans Hofmann, the highly influential teacher of modern art.

Beauchamp’s first exhibit was at the Tanager Gallery in New York, followed by many shows at, among others,  the Walker Art Center, Monique Knowlton Gallery, Graham Gallery, Long Point Gallery, M-13, The Sun Gallery, and the East End Gallery.

ONE-MAN EXHIBITIONS 

Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York

University of Southern Florida at Tampa

French and Co., New York

Simone Stern Gallery, New Orleans

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Graham Gallery, New York

Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Univ. ot Utah, Salt Lake City

Obelisk Gallery, Boston

American Gallery, New York

East End Gallery, Provincetown, Mass.

Green Gallery, New York

Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles

Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago

Tanager Gallery, New York

IMPORTANT GROUP EXHIBITIONS 

“Ten Independents,” Guggenheim Museum, New York nstitute of International Education, Artists Abroad

 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

 Museum of Modern Art, New York

Carnegie International, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

The Walker Art Institute, Minneapolis

AWARDS 

Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1974

Boskot Foundation Grant, 1970

National Foundation ot Arts Grant, 1966

Gutman Foundation Grant, 1961

Fulbright Grant for Painting, Rome, 1959

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Arts Magazine, Oct. 1969

Art News, Oct.1969, April 1966

Show Magazine, June 1962

Time Magazine, May 25, 1962

TEACHING POSITIONS 

School of Visual Arts, New York

Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Cooper Union Art School, New York

University of California at San Diego

GUEST ARTIST 

University of Wisconsin at Madison

University of Illinois at Chicago

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

MUSEUM COLLECTIONS 

Hirshorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh

Denver Museum of Art, Denver

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Conn.

University of Mass. at Amherst

University of California

The Amer. Federation of Arts Purchase Fund

University of Texas

PRIVATE & CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Walter P. Chrysler

Walter K. Gutman

Richard Brown Baker

Jack Poses

Joseph H. Hirshorn

Leo Castelli

Robert Scull

Lawrence Shainberg

Maximillian Schell

Joan Baer

Estée Lauder

Dow Jones Corpopration

HANS BURKHARDT

(SWISS-AMERICAN 1904-1994)

An extremely prolific artist, Hans Burkhardt remained relatively silent in the Los Angeles art world, choosing to let his artworks express his feelings and thoughts (although the artist often lamented the close knit circle he left in New York).  A forerunner of abstracted, expressionist painting, unusual amid the more conservative Los Angeles figurative painters in the late 1930s, Burkhardt based his experimentation on a solid artistic foundation. Following the advice of his mentor, Arshile Gorky, who had often directed the young artist, “painting is not more than drawing with paint,” Burkhardt created sketches in pencil, pastel, or ink before beginning a canvas.  As a result, his compositions exhibit a strong sense of structure and design, even in their abstraction.

In a 1974 interview for the Archives of American Art, the artist explained that for him paintings evolve out of emotions and ideas—a process not unlike the Surrealist’s conception of the genesis of creative thought. Objects become symbols (for example, two nails transformed into lovers under a moonlit sky.) The symbolic and expressive content of these motifs derives from the artist’s deeply felt humanism and compassion.

Born in 1904, in Basel, Switzerland, Burkhardt grew up in an orphanage. In 1924 he wrote to his father, who had immigrated to the U.S., and that same year joined him, finding work in the furniture factory where his father was employed. During the evenings Burkhardt studied art at Cooper Union. After a year there, in 1928 Burkhardt left to attend the new Grand Central School of Art where he met Arshile Gorky.  Gorky only had four pupils, one of whom was Willem de Kooning.  Burkhardt and his mentor formed a fast friendship; the two shared a studio in the mod 1930s for almost a decade.  To support himself during the lean Depression years, Burkhardt continued to work as a furniture finisher.  Burkhardt finally relocated to Southern California in 1937 where he worked for a defense plant during World War II, and for MGM studios.

Burkhardt focused on the war, creating numerous anti-war paintings dealing with the horror of the concentration camps.  Throughout his career, the artist decried the evils of war with paintings devoted to the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam, even as late as Desert Storm in the 1990s.  Missiles, bombs, bloodied bodies, and ravaged landscapes referenced “collateral damage.”  Burkhardt’s numerous anti-war paintings are among his most critically celebrated works. Eventually the artist’s outlook changed to a new optimism that engendered paintings visualizing the “dream of one world.”

Despite the lack of a cohesive artistic community in Southern California, he became involved with several community arts organizations in the state, also coming into contact with a group of transplanted surrealists that included Man Ray, Knud Merrild, and Eugene Berman who no doubt encouraged Burkhardt’s expressive sensibilities.

He began to gain commercial support with his first one-man exhibition in 1939 at the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles, an event followed by yearly solo shows at the Circle Gallery, Los Angeles from 1940-1945.  In 1945, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art gave him a purchase award .

Although Burkhardt never graduated from college, he was asked to teach art classes at California State University at Long Beach in 1958. From then on he had a significant impact on developing California artists, with regular teaching positions at University of Southern California, University of California Los Angeles, Otis College of Art and Design, and California State University at Northridge.

His work is in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco; the British Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Guggenheim Museum; the Kunstmuseum, Basel; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; and the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon.

An exemplary American modernist, Helen Seibert (1914-1987) was tutored in the Oberteuffer’s New York City Academy in the early 1930’s. Soon thereafter, for one incredibly fruitful year, she was the only student of Arthur Dove (at Duncan Phillips’s suggestion. As she worked she was inspired by Picasso and Mondrian, both of whom she knew personally.

After her marriage in 1936 at age 22 to Charles van Wyck Brooks, two years her junior, son of the great literary lion of New England, Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963—Duncan Phillips’ best friend), she explored Europe close to the outbreak of war from 1937-1938, where she was introduced to literary and artistic geniuses, including Picasso and Braque, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and Gertrude Stein, and her circle. She was associated in New York with An American Place, Alfred Steiglitz’s nursery of American modernism.

On return to the United States, the couple moved to California,  staying at Mabel Dodge’s salon in Taos, New Mexico along the way. They settled in Marin County in 1940; there Helen would create unique modernist and post-cubist masterpieces.

She was 35 years old in 1949 when her career was cut short by schizophrenia, untreatable at the time–but she had already shown work in a major museum exhibition–the 1946 group exhibition at the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor.  Her career was filled with promise.

Against a tragic personal background and a brief career, Siebert nevertheless figures importantly in the history of arts and letters in the United States by virtue of her sophisticated aesthetic achievement and fresh synthesis of abstraction and figuration accomplished well before the dawn of the 1950’s on the West coast.

Ken Gould was a plenipotentiary in the psychedelic art scene in Boston.  A Massachusetts native, he eventually burned out and took on the role of a grown-up, studying engineering and architecture to become a serious contractor of skyscrapers in Manhattan!  He got high every way he could.  His toothy Cheshire cat smile is both a personal attribute and a signature of his charming self-portrait watercolors, the smile alone wearing a broad brimmed hat.

These archetypical works belong to the unique and important era of the 1960s. They are rare, and have never been on the market before, collected in a smoke-filled room during a shipment into Cambridge of “Tijuana Red.”

Painter, stained glass artist, and printmaker Charles Crodel was born in 1894 in Mareseille.  His family moved to Germany and he studied at the University of Jena and was a member of the board of the Jena-Union, the famed forum of the Bauhaus. He became a close friend of the artist Gerhard Marcks. His prints were acquired in the 1920s by the National Gallery, Berlin and the Bibliothèque National, Paris.

From 1927 he taught printing and mural painting at the “Burg Giebichenstein”–the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Halle, until 1933 when he was dismissed under the rising Nazi regime. He continued to teach in private circles at the house of Paul Frankl, the famous Hungarian art historian (1878-1962).

In the prewar years his murals at Halle and Bad Lauchstadt dedicated to Goethe were destroyed in 1933 and 1936 respectively. Emigrés began to buy his work, and as a result paintings and prints by Crodel may now be found in Louisville, Kentucky, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Luther College.

In Germany Crodel worked in a pottery business that had been acquired in a forced sale from a Jewish owner by a man named Bollhagen, and although Crodel was termed a “degenerate’ artist by the Nazi regime, he managed to survive WWII in Germany, teaching at Halle, Dresden, Berlin, and Munich.

He eventually visited the United States and taught at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

 Brust was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1897, and as early as 1913 was apprenticed as a lithographic printer. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Offenbach with teachers Rudolf Koch and Richard Throll, among others.

From 1919 he was a freelance artist–until 1931 when he settled in Berlin. In 1933 his portrait of Hitler was exhibited in the Berlin Secession exhibition, Hamburg, but later in 1933 he was denounced as a ‘Kulturbolschewist’  and was no longer able to exhibit his work until after the war. A 1937 article in the journal Gebrauchsgraphik features his work for posters and covers for the magazine Die Sirene (1935). Much of his work was destroyed in bombing raids. From 1949 he became the picture editor at the publisher Martens, Munich.