Port Washington, 1912

Bluemner is most often celebrated for his extraordinary and voluptuous use of color. The artist had a lifelong interest in this area, abetted by his close study of Goethe’s 1810 treatise Farbenlehre. Bluemner envisioned color as anthropomorphic, associating each hue with human emotion and thought. 

In this example, the watercolor is applied with delicacy and subtlety. The sky lightly rendered in blue diagonals, the pathways with wavering, almost hesitant strokes, and the gentle modulation of the bushes at water’s edge contribute an overall tranquility. The figures and the outcroppings in the foreground, and the three trees at left are the only areas in which Bluemner allows the paint to saturate into the paper.

The landscape of Port Washington is alive with shimmering color. Although containing representational elements, the work is situated somewhere between abstraction and representation, and clarifies Bluemner’s concentration on color as the primary subject of his work.