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.