Peter Blume

Peter Blume (b. Russia, 1906-1992)

Peter Blume was born in Russia and moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York, when he was five. Blume showed an aptitude for art at an early age and began attending art classes when he was twelve. While still in his teens, he applied to the National Academy of Design but was rejected. He was, however, admitted to the beginner's class at the Educational Alliance in 1921 and studied there while working at odd jobs in engraving and lithography.

In 1924 Blume sold two watercolors and thereafter decided to devote all his time to painting. He had his first one-man show in 1930. Two years later he won a Guggenheim fellowship and traveled to Italy with his wife, Grace Douglas Craton, known as Ebie, whom he married in 1931. They returned and settled in Sherman, Connecticut, where Blume remained for the rest of his life. In 1934 the twenty-eight-year-old unknown artist’s canvas “South of Scranton” (1931; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) won first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition, considered the most prestigious art exhibition in the world at the time.

After three years of effort Blume completed his most famous work, “The Eternal City” (1937; Museum of Modern Art, New York). The duration of that project was typical for Blume, a careful and meticulous painter who is known for the extended length of time he spent on each canvas. Blume incorporated a number of different styles in his work, yet his paintings contain a narrative element and he has often been categorized as a Surrealist or a Magic Realist.

Boulders of Avila, 1976

Oil on canvas, 49 1/8 x 73 in. (124.8 x 185.4 cm)

Signed and dated (lower right): PETER BLUME 1976

Special Projects, Friends Purchase, and Charles F. Smith Funds (1982.22) Art © Estate of Peter Blume/Licensed by VAGNA, New York, N.Y.

“Boulders of Avila” is the monumental culmination of a series of works Blume had begun in the late 1960s that feature huge boulders and a couple enjoying a picnic in their midst. There is a strange unearthly quality to the painting that is typical of Blume’s work. The artist's style has been described as an amalgamation of Realism, Precisionism, and Surrealism and his subject matter has been labeled purely imaginative. Boulders of Avila, however, is based not on fantasy but rather on Blume's travels in Spain.

In the late 1960s Blume and his wife, Ebie, traveled by car throughout Spain. Blume was captivated by the sweeping plateau surrounding the fortified medieval stronghold of Avila northwest of Madrid with its scattering of great boulders left by retreating glaciers. (1) In the various oil studies done before the final 1976 version, the images of the rocks grow larger and more threatening. The artist noted that "huge boulders are heaped about just as the receding glacier left them. Those boulders have been through something: an experience." (2)

On this memorable first visit to Avila in the spring, it suddenly snowed, to the complete surprise to the two travelers. This ominous change in the weather condition is captured in the purple-blue forbidding sky shown in the distance in “Boulders of Avila”. The majority of the rocks are smooth and huge, as if ground down by the retreating glacier that randomly left them behind. The shape of the topmost rock at the left is reminiscent of the huge shattered rock in Blume’s painting of 1948 entitled The Rock (1948; Art Institute of Chicago). “The Rock” took more than seven years to complete and shows a construction site in which the central object is the jagged rock that seems to represent the eternal forces of destruction that eventually effect us all. No doubt this monumental painting influenced later works, such as “Boulders of Avila”, in which Blume depicts the resilience of the rocks even in the face of glaciers and other cataclysmic natural phenomena.

The surface texture of the “Boulders of Avila” is very thick. Blume mixed his paint with fine marble dust and applied it with a palette knife rather than a brush to add to the sculpted surface effect. The dense surfaces of the rocks resemble the rough meshed texture of the skin of a cantaloupe.

All Blume's compositions have an enigmatic quality that is the result of his inclusion of elements that were of particular visual or emotional significance to him. Thus the images are highly personal and challange the viewer's interpretive skills. Even if they are not easy to understand or explain, Blume's paintings offer incredible richness of design and are stimulating simply by virtue of their provocative imagery. Working in a highly original manner, oblivious to the constantly changing trends in contempory art, Blume dealt with such themes as the continuity and constant renewal of life and the important role gesture plays.

KK

Bibliography:

Dorothy C. Miller and Alfred H. Barr Jr., “American Realists and Magic Realists”, exhib. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943); Charles E. Buckley, “Peter Blume Paintings and Drawings in Retrospect”, 1925-1964, exhib. cat. (Manchester, N.H.: Currier Gallery of Art, 1964); Greta Berman and Jeffery Wechsler, “Realism and Realities: The Other Side of American Painting, 1940-1960”, exhib. cat.(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982); Frank Anderson Trapp, “Peter Blume” (New York: Rizzoli, 1987).

NOTES:

1. Blume’s trip is chronicled in Trapp, “Peter Blume”, p. 125.

2. “Peter Blume: 'From the Metamorphoses': Recent Paintings and Drawings”, exhib. cat. (New York: Terry Dintenfass Gallery, 1980, unpag.