Among the paintings the poverty-stricken Bluemner reworked in 1917 was “Jersey Silkmills (Paterson),” 1911, in which the site of a famous strike was delineated in brilliant red, nestled among blue and green foliage. Private collection.

Soon after graduating, dismayed by the militarism andconservative art and architecture views of Kaiser Wilhelm II, heleft Germany for the United States. As he later wrote, he “ran awaya rebel” from a society that was “too hard and sterile fromtradition for so tender a plant as a still vague thought of a newstyle,” to a nation open to aesthetic experimentation.

For two decades in this country, Bluemner worked as an architect, starting with a brief stint as a draftsman at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Later, in Chicago and New York, he specialized in what he called “pictorial architecture” – urban buildings and country homes integrated into the landscape and sensitive to color and light.

His major achievement was a 1904 design for the Bronx County courthouse, for which a Tammany Hall architect claimed credit, triggering a notorious scandal. Bluemner’s successful law suit against the architect and his political activities in opposition to Tammany Hall helped spark citywide reform movements. Although he was vindicated as the rightful architect of the Bronx courthouse in 1906, he was not paid for his efforts until 1911.

Disillusioned with the business side of architecture, Bluemner turned increasingly to painting, resolving to design buildings only when his finances required it. Becoming friendly with art impresario Alfred Stieglitz, who was similar in age and cultural heritage, Bluemner contributed essays to Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work and Stieglitz organized Bluemner art exhibitions in his galleries.

As part of the Stieglitz circle of Modernists, Bluemner shared with Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley and John Marin a vivid yet detached affinity for everyday American scenes: villages, factories, tenements, barns, hills, canals, trees. What set Bluemner apart was his use of hot, contrasting colors and the architectural rigor of his compositions. Stieglitz told Bluemner that “The work is virile – it’s your own – and it’s damn good.”

Haskell stresses that “Bluemner brought with him from Germany two core philosophical tenets: art as an expression of inner consciousness and color as its agent.” Haskell suggests that a turning point came in 1911 when Bluemner saw Stieglitz’s exhibition of the work of Paul Cezanne. “In the French artist’s work,” she writes, “Bluemner encountered a model of formal rigor and geometric simplicity that could balance the expressive color harmonies he admired in [Vincent] Van Gogh.”

Of works such as “Aspiration (Winfield),” 1911 (repainted 1916-17), exhibition curator Barbara Haskell says, “The effect was of looking at nature through a prism, the refracted light beams of which bisected forms into color zones.” Private collection.

With Stieglitz’s support, in 1912 Bluemner took a seven-mothtrip through Europe, during which he saw important, eye-openingsurveys of avant-garde art in England, France and Germany.Returning to the United States, he began to create more abstractworks that emphasized bold structural clarity and vivid colors thathe regarded as agents of subjective expression.

Five paintings and watercolors were included in the landmark Armory Show of 1913, and in 1915 he had a solo show of paintings at Stieglitz’s “291” gallery. Works such as “Space Motive – A New Jersey Valley (Wharton),”1913-14, “Meditation in a Town, New Jersey (Stanhope),” 1914, and “Motive of Space and Form – A New Jersey Village (Montville),” 1915, mystified potential buyers and critics alike, and he sold few works.

“To an audience still adjusting to Cubism and Futurism, the angularity, jarring color and lack of painterly gesture in Bluemner’s canvases were disquieting,” writes Haskell. “Critics interpreted his work as malevolent and inhumane.” Bluemner’s outspoken defense of German culture, during the early years of World War I, also disturbed people.

Dissatisfied with the commercialism of urban living and seeking to save money by living in an area with more immediate access to landscape motifs, in 1916 Bluemner moved with his wife and two children to Bloomfield and later Paterson, N.J. For years the family faced financial hardships; they were evicted from one home and moved frequently to avoid creditors.

During this trying time, Bluemner, unable to afford fresh canvases, was forced to rework earlier paintings. The results were splendid, although buyers continued to be hard to come by. “Aspiration (Winfield),” 1911 (repainted 1916-17), a Cubist-infused composition features a broad road, brilliant red-roofed houses and a suggestion of rounded tree forms. He applied a fauvist palette of yellow, blue, red and green to “Evening Tones (Bronx River at Mount Vernon),” 1911 (repainted 1913 and 1916-17).

The artist took a particular interest in Paterson’s textile mills, where a famous strike had taken place in 1913. He utilized a brilliant fauvist palette in these factoryscapes, such as “Expression of a Silktown, New Jersey (Patterson Centre),” 1915. A vivid red factory nestles among blue and green foliage in the reworked “Jersey Silkmills (Paterson),” begun in 1911 and repainted in 1917. As art historian Roberta Smith Favis has observed, “For Bluemner, the red brick factories of America provided a color scheme that could be used both to express his sympathies for the workers who toiled there and to underscore what he perceived as the distinctively American quality of red brick.”

A fauvist palette of bright yellow, blue, red and green animates “Evening Tones (Bronx River at Mount Vernon),” 1911 (repainted 1913 and 1916-17). Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Bluemner gradually expanded his pictorial vocabulary ofoverlapping shapes, bold contours and strong contrasts of color andtone. He focused on depicting his local environment. “Red Port inWinter,” 1922, reflects the balance between equilibrium and freedomthat Bluemner learned from his study of Asian art. It alsodemonstrates his penchant for blocky architecture and the colorred, offering a scene of desolation and perhaps abandonment,presaging later work. As Haskell notes, “By rendering ’empty’ spacewith as much intensity as the object in it, he approximated Asianart’s depiction of space as alive and active.”

Their life of poverty contributed to the death of Bluemner’s wife in 1926. The grieving artist moved with his children to South Braintree, Mass., where he sublimated his despair in symbolic paintings and watercolors marked by a sense of tranquility and isolation.

Among the highlights of his late output are paintings of suns and moons, symbols, he said, “of God or the universal creative force.” Bluemner’s celestial images are reminiscent of earlier watercolors by Georgia O’Keeffe and anticipated Dove’s later imagery. The exhibition at the Whitney features an entire room filled with “moons,” each on the small side but interesting and compelling. All are watercolors, dating to 1927.

In “Midsummer Moon” and “Silver Moon,” concentric bands of color radiate from a central bright orb onto broadly composed landscapes. The latter, especially, conveys a sense of fantasy and unreality, characteristic of the work of Charles Burchfield. “November Moon” and “Eye of Fate” offer colorful, even more abstract images. An oil, “Moonlight on a Creek,” 1928-29, featuring multihued vertical shapes, puts one in mind of the work of Joseph Stella.

When displayed at Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery in 1928, the moonscapes solidified Bluemner’s place as a gifted Modernist, but they generated few sales. He fared better with a critically acclaimed Whitney Studio Galleries exhibition of small-scale oils in 1929.

As he aged, Bluemner’s isolation and angst increased. His elegiac “Compositions for Color Themes” melded striking primary colors and clearly delineated forms bathed in artificial, theatrical light, suggesting both intimacy and sorrow. Houses and trees served as male and female actors in poignant dramas of alienation, loneliness and longing.

“Midsummer Moon,” 1927, features concentric bands of color radiating from a central core onto various contrasting, deeply hued forms. Private collection, courtesy Guggenheim, Asher Associates, Inc.

Among the more freely painted standouts of his later yearsare “Last Evening of the Year,” 1928-29, and “Blue Day,” 1930, ineach of which red buildings stand out. Vivid reds, blues and greensanimate “Azure,” 1933, a strong, semiabstract composition.

Several late nocturnes evoke the artist’s dark moods of danger and foreboding. The eyelike windows in “A Light Yellow (First Snow or Sylvester Night),” 1930, give the yellow buildings personalities a la Burchfield. More somber and mysterious are “In Low Key,” 1932 and “A Situation in Yellow,” 1933. Bluemner probably had these works in mind when he wrote that “I compose mainly of lemon yellow and black to stir up an exquisite sensation; or by the use of deep violet and gray I produce a melancholy note.” Thus, as Favis puts it, “colors establish the emotional key of the paintings.”

Critics were enthusiastic about Bluemner’s late work, divining in it the self-expression through color and form that had characterized his art from the beginning. But it failed to sell.

About the same time, the artist’s health began to deteriorate. An automobile accident in 1935 was followed by stomach, eye and heart diseases and then nerve-induced insomnia and paralysis. Suffering from chronic pain and unable to see, walk or sleep, Bluemner committed suicide by slashing his throat in Braintree in 1938.

Curator Haskell acknowledges that she set out in the Whitney show to reposition Bluemner within the pantheon of major figures of early Twentieth Century American art. With the aid of an excellent catalog, she has succeeded admirably.

Bluemner’s work, as documented at the Whitney, is crisp, colorful, idiosyncratic and appealing. He clearly deserves recognition as one of the finest Modernists, and therefore as a prominent player in the annals of American art.

Curator Haskell provides an excellent survey of the artist’s life and the evolution of his oeuvre in the exhibition catalog, viewed within the context of the aesthetic currents of European and American Modernism. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art painting conservator Ulrich Birkmaier offers insights into Bluemner’s materials and techniques. There are selected writings by the artist, a chronology, exhibition history and a bibliography. The 240-page illustrated volume sells for $70 (hardcover) and $39.95 (softcover).

The Whitney Museum of American Art is at 945 Madison Avenue. For information, 800-944-8639 or .