Peter Blume
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IN CONTEMPORARY American art, Peter Blume occupies a solitary place. Born in 1906, he has been painting professionally since 1925 and in that long time has produced less than seventy pictures in oil. The greater part of his energy, thought and talent has been spent creating a few major works--namely Parade ( 1930), South of Scranton ( 1931), Light of the World ( 1932), The Eternal City ( 1934-37) and The Rock ( 1945-48). No other living American painter has been quite so indifferent to time in achieving climactic images: the last two pictures named each took three years of unflagging concentration to complete. Yet a paradox of Blume's career is that, however deliberate and painstaking his program, he is constantly alert to chimerical suggestions, as much interested in fugitive impressions as in obsessive themes. This fact partly accounts for his art's vividness and power, quite apart from its unquestioned technical precision.
Blume came to this country from his native Russia when he was five. At fifteen he was attending classes in draftsmanship at the Educational Alliance and later studied at the Art Students League and the Beaux Arts Institute of Design. Not yet twenty, he was befriended by Charles Daniel and at the latter's gallery learned that his longing for crystalline lucidity in painting was shared by some of his elders, notably Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Preston Dickinson. In youth Blume was fascinated by the clean, hard contours of machinery and industrial forms. But a strong and private sense of fantasy was almost always felt in his work, as when in South of Scranton German sailors from the cruiser "Emden" (which Blume had seen anchored at Charleston) soar unbelievably high while performing their calisthenic exercises, or when in Light of the World figures stare weirdly at a marine light such as Blume had seen at Provincetown and thought of as a "blossom of the sea."
In 1932 Blume went to Italy as a Guggenheim Fellow and there was impressed by the vast array of art and archeological treasures and by the ubiquitous image of Il Duce. The result was The Eternal City, a masterwork of 20th-century American painting. Several years later Blume developed an animistic conception of nature and its relationship to man which reached its climax in The Rock, a picture wherein the masonry for Frank Lloyd Wright's superb Kaufmann house at Bear Run is wrested from the surrounding ground. The painter had traveled widely in the Mediterranean and the Orient and probably long since begun that imaginative accrual of visual episodes, both seen and subconsciously felt.
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