Charcoal Abstract Drawings and Watercolors

A Striking, 1950s Mid-Century Modern Cubist Portrait of a Young Man by Noted Chicago Artist, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). A small gem, this charming studio portrait study is charc...

A Fabulous, 1951 Mid-Century Modern Abstract Portrait of a Man by Noted Chicago Artist, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). Artwork Size: 12 x 9 1/2 inches. Artwork is unframed, matted ...

"Conversation" intertwines the raw, emotive qualities of charcoal with the fluidity of watercolor. The juxtaposition of the two mediums and dimentions creates a dynamic interplay of ...

A Stylish, 1940s Art Deco Cubist Drawing of a Seated Female, "The Telephone Call", by Note Chicago Modern Artist, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-19940. A striking charcoal drawing executed...

(Comes framed in a maple floater frame, ready to hang.) This is one of a series we have posted on 1stDibs. The first got more clicks and saves on its first day than any of the many hundreds of artworks we have ever posted. If you search on "G. Campbell Lyman" on 1stDibs you can see others in this series. Here's a recent message from a 1stDibs buyer of a painting in this series, a seasoned collector: "Love your work. We collect colorists like Wolf Kahn and Jennifer Bartlett, whom I commissioned a piece from that is in the entrance of Mayo Clinic. We are old fans...

Artist : Kory Twaddle "Autumn Biogram of the Nelson" Newsprint, graphite, conté crayon pastel, charcoal, beeswax, cardboard, paper, gingko leaves, stickers, and Mixed Media on drawi...

Rocio Rodriguez July 8, 2013, 2013 pastel, oil pastel, charcoal and pencil on paper 18 x 24 in. This original oil oil pastel drawing on paper by Rocio Rodriguez features abstracted ...

Krzysztof Gliszczyński is Professor for painting on Academy of fine arts Gdansk. The artwork is unframed and will be shipped rolled in a tube Artist Statement In the 1990s I started collecting flakes of paint – leftovers from my work. I would put fresh ones in wooden formworks, dried ones in glass containers. They constituted layers of investigations into the field of painting, enclosed in dated and numbered cuboids measuring 47 × 10.5 × 10.5 cm. I called those objects Urns. In 2016, I displayed them at an exhibition, moulding a single object out of all the Urns. The Urns inspired me to redefine the status of my work as a painter. In order to do it, I performed a daunting task of placing the layers of paint not in an urn, but on a canvas, pressing each fresh bit of paint with my thumb. In the cycle of paintings Autoportret a’retour, the matter was transferred from painting to painting, expanding the area of each consecutive one. Together, the bits, the residua of paint, kept alive the memory of the previous works. It was a stage of the atomization of the painting matter and its alienation from the traditional concepts and aesthetic relations. Thus, the cycle of synergic paintings was created, as I called them, guided by the feeling evoked in me by the mutually intensifying flakes of paint. The final aesthetic result of the refining of the digested matter was a consequence of the automatism of the process of layering, thumb-pressing, and scraping off again. Just like in an archaeological excavation, attempts are made to unite and retrieve that which has been lost. This avant-garde concept consists in transferring into the area of painting of matter, virtually degraded and not belonging to the realm of art. And yet the matter re-enters it, acquiring a new meaning. The matter I created, building up like lava, became my new technique. I called it perpetuum pictura – self-perpetuated painting. Alchemical concepts allowed me to identify the process inherent in the emerging matter, to give it direction and meaning. In a way, I created matter which was introducing me into the pre-symbolic world – a world before form, unnamed. From this painterly magma, ideas sprung up, old theories of colour and the convoluted problem of squaring the circle manifested themselves again. Just like Harriot’s crystal refracted light in 1605, I tried to break up colour in the painting Iosis. Paintings were becoming symptoms, like in the work Pulp fiction, which at that time was a gesture of total fragmentation of matter and of transcending its boundaries, my dialogue with the works of Jackson Pollock and the freedom brought by his art. The painting Geometrica de physiologiam pictura contains a diagram in which I enter four colours that constitute an introduction to protopsychology, alchemical transmutation, and the ancient theory of colour. It this work I managed to present the identification of the essence of human physiology with art. But the essential aspect of my considerations in my most recent paintings is the analysis of abstraction, the study of its significance for the contemporary language of art and the search for the possibilities of creating a new message. For me, abstraction is not an end in itself, catering to the largely predicable expectations of the viewers. To study the boundary between visibility and invisibility, like in the work Unsichtbar, is to ask about the status of the possibilities of the language of abstraction. The moment of fluidity which I am able to attain results from the matter – matter...

The artwork is unframed and will be shipped rolled in a tube Krzysztof Gliszczyński is Professor for painting on Academy of fine arts Gdansk. Krzysztof Gliszczyński born in Miastko in 1962. Graduated from the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts in 1987 in the studio of Prof. Kazimierz Ostrowski. Between 1995 and 2002 founder and co-manager of Koło Gallery in Gdańsk. lnitiator of the Kazimierz Ostrowski Award, con-ferred by the Union of Polish Artists and Designers (ZPAP), Gdańsk Chapter. Dean of the Painting Faculty of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts in the years 2008-2012. Vice Rector for Development and Cooperation of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts in the years 2012-2016. Obtained a professorship in 2011. Currently head of the Third Painting Studio of the Painting Faculty of the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts. He has taken part in a few dozen exhibitions in Poland and abroad. He has received countless prizes and awards for his artistic work. He is active in the field of painting, drawing, objects, and video. Artist Statement In the 1990s I started collecting flakes of paint – leftovers from my work. I would put fresh ones in wooden formworks, dried ones in glass containers. They constituted layers of investigations into the field of painting, enclosed in dated and numbered cuboids measuring 47 × 10.5 × 10.5 cm. I called those objects Urns. In 2016, I displayed them at an exhibition, moulding a single object out of all the Urns. The Urns inspired me to redefine the status of my work as a painter. In order to do it, I performed a daunting task of placing the layers of paint not in an urn, but on a canvas, pressing each fresh bit of paint with my thumb. In the cycle of paintings Autoportret a’retour, the matter was transferred from painting to painting, expanding the area of each consecutive one. Together, the bits, the residua of paint, kept alive the memory of the previous works. It was a stage of the atomization of the painting matter and its alienation from the traditional concepts and aesthetic relations. Thus, the cycle of synergic paintings was created, as I called them, guided by the feeling evoked in me by the mutually intensifying flakes of paint. The final aesthetic result of the refining of the digested matter was a consequence of the automatism of the process of layering, thumb-pressing, and scraping off again. Just like in an archaeological excavation, attempts are made to unite and retrieve that which has been lost. This avant-garde concept consists in transferring into the area of painting of matter, virtually degraded and not belonging to the realm of art. And yet the matter re-enters it, acquiring a new meaning. The matter I created, building up like lava, became my new technique. I called it perpetuum pictura – self-perpetuated painting. Alchemical concepts allowed me to identify the process inherent in the emerging matter, to give it direction and meaning. In a way, I created matter which was introducing me into the pre-symbolic world – a world before form, unnamed. From this painterly magma, ideas sprung up, old theories of colour and the convoluted problem of squaring the circle manifested themselves again. Just like Harriot’s crystal refracted light in 1605, I tried to break up colour in the painting Iosis. Paintings were becoming symptoms, like in the work Pulp fiction, which at that time was a gesture of total fragmentation of matter and of transcending its boundaries, my dialogue with the works of Jackson Pollock and the freedom brought by his art. The painting Geometrica de physiologiam pictura contains a diagram in which I enter four colours that constitute an introduction to protopsychology, alchemical transmutation, and the ancient theory of colour. It this work I managed to present the identification of the essence of human physiology with art. But the essential aspect of my considerations in my most recent paintings is the analysis of abstraction, the study of its significance for the contemporary language of art and the search for the possibilities of creating a new message. For me, abstraction is not an end in itself, catering to the largely predicable expectations of the viewers. To study the boundary between visibility and invisibility, like in the work Unsichtbar, is to ask about the status of the possibilities of the language of abstraction. The moment of fluidity which I am able to attain results from the matter – matter...

Frammento Casa di Famiglia Title: Fragment Artist: Marilina Marchica Dimensions: Artwork: 70x110 cm Frame: 80x120 cm Description: This is an original, non-reproducible piece by Mar...

Shizico spent three days painting this plein air in her sunlit garden. She applied 550 Ture Gold paint and Van Gogh Yellow creating a stunning backdrop which served as the canvas for...

Serbian artist Dordevic (or Djordjevic) Miodrag (1936 -), known as "Miodrag," designed this stunning abstract drawing. This work is a charcoal on paper depicting a brutalist abstract...

The Summer Bloom Series is an ongoing project that Shizico Yi returns to each summer, painting en plein air in her garden. She began gardening in 2015 to create a healing space for h...

Diptych. Paper size: 96.5 x 127 cm/38 x 50"" Image size: 91.5 x 122 cm/ 36 x 48"" Neill is inspired by the fluid geometric qualities of curve and line, in particular how the natura...

Bernardo Navarro Tomas (Cuba, 1977) 'New York City #10', 2017 mixed media on japanese paper 12.3 x 17 in. (31 x 43 cm.) ID: NAA-310 Hand-signed by author

The Summer Bloom Series is an ongoing project that Shizico Yi returns to each summer, painting en plein air in her garden. She began gardening in 2015 to create a healing space for h...

18 x 14 inch drawing on 20 x 16 inch Aquarelle Arches Paper 24 x 20 x .5 inches framed Thin profile black metal frame, 8 ply white mat Ralph Stout's works on paper reveal a drau...

The Summer Bloom Series is an ongoing project that Shizico Yi returns to each summer, painting en plein air in her garden. She began gardening in 2015 to create a healing space for h...

Landscape BW Original Drawing Mineral Oxide on Fabriano Paper 50x70 cm 2024 hand-made drawing one of a kind not reproducible CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY Framing options available

Landscape Black ad white abstract drawing mineral oxide on paper ( Canson Montaval Paper 300 gr.) large size 75x110 Frame Size 122 x91 cm by Marilina Marchica signed with certificate...

Arietta series 2 (Abstract drawing) Charcoal ink and pastel on paper - Unframed. Margaret Neill works for a time on a group of pieces in a series, using classic almost primal mater...

'Lily in Charcoal' 2023 From raw energy to sublime. 'Lily in Charcoal' is an expression piece combining an abstract charcoal drawing with a live lily emerging from a gash. The charc...

Manfred Schwartz (American, b. Poland, 1909-1970), Beach Seascape, Charcoal on Paper, with the artist's signature stamped lower right, unframed. 19.75" H x 25.25" W. Provenance: From...

Red Landscape Original Drawing Mineral Oxide on Fabriano Paper 50x70 cm 2024 hand-made drawing one of a kind not reproducible CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY Framing options available

Daniel Brice has exhibited throughout the United States including at The Riverside Museum of Art and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. He is a four-time “Artist in Residence” honoree at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. His work is in the collections of Allentown Museum, Ohio Wesleyan University, Smith College...

Lita Kenyon was born in Marinette, Wisconsin. She attended Columbia College for her BFA, and earned her MA from Northern Illinois University 1982. She’s been featured in Empty Mirror...

Rocio Rodriguez February 25, 2013, 2013 pastel, oil pastel and charcoal on paper 18 x 24 in. This original oil oil pastel drawing on paper by Rocio Rodriguez features abstracted rec...

Red Landscape mineral oxide on paper (canson Paper 300gr) 30x40 cm Original Art Authenticity certificate one of a kind Marilina Marchica, born in 1984, was born in Agrigento, where...

Abstract Composition is a Charcoal Drawing realized by Reynold Arnould (Le Havre 1919 - Parigi 1980). Good condition on a yellowed paper, included a white cardboard passpartout (3...

A Distinctive, 1950s Mid-Century Modern Cubist Figure Study by Noted Chicago Artist, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). A visually striking charcoal composite study of three figures, ex...

Lita Kenyon was born in Marinette, Wisconsin. She attended Columbia College for her BFA, and earned her MA from Northern Illinois University 1982. She’s been featured in Empty Mirror...

i remember Family House Title: Fragment Artist: Marilina Marchica Dimensions: Artwork: 72x56 cm Frame:43x60 cm Description: This is an original, non-reproducible piece by Marilina M...

Dovetail 1 (Abstract drawing) Charcoal on paper - Unframed. Neill creates works on canvas, linen and paper using a variety of mediums, including graphite, colored pencil, charcoal a...

Daniel Brice has exhibited throughout the United States including at The Riverside Museum of Art and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. He is a four-time “Artist in Residence” honoree at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. His work is in the collections of Allentown Museum, Ohio Wesleyan University, Smith College...

Work on paper Black plastic frame with glass pane 31,5 x 41 x 2 cm

A Dynamic, 1945 Mid-Century Modern Cubist Studio Scene, Artist's Sketch Class by Noted Chicago Painter, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). Artwork size: 11 x 8 1/2 inches, unframed, mo...

Daniel Brice has exhibited throughout the United States including at The Riverside Museum of Art and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. He is a four-time “Artist in Residence” honoree at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico. His work is in the collections of Allentown Museum, Ohio Wesleyan University, Smith College...

A large charcoal-on-paper rendering by arguably one of America's most influential artists. It comes from the pioneering Allan Stone Galleries, who ...

Agostino Ferrari was born in Milan on 9 November 1938. He commenced his career as as professional artist in 1959. In 1961 he held his first one-man show at the Galleria Pater, in Mil...

Artist unknown "Red Vessel" c. 1980s Acrylic and charcoal on paper 22"x30 unframed Unsigned Very Good Condition - Minor wear consistent with age history.

Professor George De Goya. PhD. MA. FRSA. Born In Budapest, 1915-1992, related to the Spanish artist Goya on his mother’s side. Educated in Budapest and France where he received a de...

Bernardo Navarro Tomas (Cuba, 1977) 'Untitled', 2017 mixed media on japanese paper 12.3 x 17 in. (31 x 43 cm.) ID: NAA-306 Hand-signed by author

Arthur Berridge (British, 1902-1957) Abstracted figures #2 1950 Blue crayon 14.1/2 x 21.1/2 in. (36.8 x 54.7 cm.) Provenance: David Lay, Penzance Born in Leicester in 1902, Ber...

Manifest 1 (Abstract Drawing) Charcoal and water on paper. Unframed. Margaret Neill works for a time on a group of pieces in a series, using classic almost primal materials such as...

Lisa Fellerson’s paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scrapping, and gouging acrylic ...

i remember Family House Title: Fragment Artist: Marilina Marchica Dimensions: Artwork: 72x56 cm Frame:43x60 cm Description: This is an original, non-reproducible piece by Marilina M...

Lisa Fellerson’s paintings provoke an interplay and tension between line, shape, and color. With no preconceived idea in mind, she begins by dripping, scrapping, and gouging acrylic ...

Carl Hofer (German, 1875 – 1955) Einflusterung (Whispering) Charcoal and pencil on paper Signed and inscribed ‘Einflusterung’ (lower middle) 17.1/4 x 13.3/8 in. (43.8 x 34 cm.) Provenance: These works come from the artist’s second wife Elizabeth and from then by descent. Carl Hofer was a German expressionist painter and the director of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. One of the most important painters of the Expressionist movement, his work was among those that was considered degenerate art by the Nazis. He studied in Karlsruhe under Hans Thoma. He first visited Paris in 1899 making acquaintance with Julius Meier-Graefe. In 1902 he studied in Stuttgardt and became friends with the sculptor Hermann Haller...

Jane Freilicher Untitled I, 1958-59 Signed lower right Charcoal on paper 11 1/2 x 8 3/4 inches Provenance: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Jane Freilic...

Donald Baechler Untitled (Rose), 2015 Original Graphite drawing on archival bond paper. Framed, with museum provenance Signed and dated in graphite pencil on the front Provenance: Do...

Executed in 1930, this abstract yet representational biomorphic charcoal work by African American Artist Charles Henry Alston prefigures his ...

Mark Pomilio’s current research has focused on creating images, which embody principles of geometry, fractals, cloning and single-cell manipulation. These interests have led to invit...

Portrait is an original drawing in charcoal and watercolor on paper realized by Leo Guida in the 1970s. Good condition. Leo Guida (1992 - 2017). Sensitive to current issues, artis...

A Distinctive, 1950s Mid-Century Modern Cubist Portrait Study of Two Young Men by Noted Chicago Artist, Harold Haydon (Am. 1909-1994). A visually striking charcoal male portrait stu...

David Mellen (b. 1970, Chicago, IL, USA) attended the American Academy of Art and exhibited his work in his hometown of Chicago until 1994, when he moved to Europe. Over the next fi...

This original vintage painting by Charles Ragland Bunnell (1897-1968), titled Quitting Time from Bunnell's Black and Blue Series from 1941, exemplifies his unique Abstract Structure ...

DONALD SULTAN Signed, titled & dated in pencil along the left edge of the paper. In excellent condition Provenance: McIntosh/Drysdale, Washington, D.C. 1988; Private Collection, Bethesda, Maryland; Private collection, San Diego, CA Exhibition History: The Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. "Donald Sultan: In The Still Life Tradition" May 10-July 7...

Abstract work of art. Charcoal, pencil, pastel, and acrylic on paper.

Oscar Bluemner was a German and an American, a trained architect who read voraciously in art theory, color theory, and philosophy, a writer of art criticism both in German and English, and, above all, a practicing artist. Bluemner was an intense man, who sought to express and share, through drawing and painting, universal emotional experience. Undergirded by theory, Bluemner chose color and line for his vehicles; but color especially became the focus of his passion. He was neither abstract artist nor realist, but employed the “expressional use of real phenomena” to pursue his ends. (Oscar Bluemner, from unpublished typescript on “Modern Art” for Camera Work, in Bluemner papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, as cited and quoted in Jeffrey R. Hayes, Oscar Bluemner [1991], p. 60. The Bluemner papers in the Archives [hereafter abbreviated as AAA] are the primary source for Bluemner scholars. Jeffrey Hayes read them thoroughly and translated key passages for his doctoral dissertation, Oscar Bluemner: Life, Art, and Theory [University of Maryland, 1982; UMI reprint, 1982], which remains the most comprehensive source on Bluemner. In 1991, Hayes published a monographic study of Bluemner digested from his dissertation and, in 2005, contributed a brief essay to the gallery show at Barbara Mathes, op. cit.. The most recent, accessible, and comprehensive view of Bluemner is the richly illustrated, Barbara Haskell, Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color, exhib. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2005.]) Bluemner was born in the industrial city of Prenzlau, Prussia, the son and grandson of builders and artisans. He followed the family predilection and studied architecture, receiving a traditional and thorough German training. He was a prize-winning student and appeared to be on his way to a successful career when he decided, in 1892, to emigrate to America, drawn perhaps by the prospect of immediate architectural opportunities at the Chicago World’s Fair, but, more importantly, seeking a freedom of expression and an expansiveness that he believed he would find in the New World. The course of Bluemner’s American career proved uneven. He did indeed work as an architect in Chicago, but left there distressed at the formulaic quality of what he was paid to do. Plagued by periods of unemployment, he lived variously in Chicago, New York, and Boston. At one especially low point, he pawned his coat and drafting tools and lived in a Bowery flophouse, selling calendars on the streets of New York and begging for stale bread. In Boston, he almost decided to return home to Germany, but was deterred partly because he could not afford the fare for passage. He changed plans and direction again, heading for Chicago, where he married Lina Schumm, a second-generation German-American from Wisconsin. Their first child, Paul Robert, was born in 1897. In 1899, Bluemner became an American citizen. They moved to New York City where, until 1912, Bluemner worked as an architect and draftsman to support his family, which also included a daughter, Ella Vera, born in 1903. All the while, Oscar Bluemner was attracted to the freer possibilities of art. He spent weekends roaming Manhattan’s rural margins, visiting the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey, sketching landscapes in hundreds of small conté crayon drawings. Unlike so many city-based artists, Bluemner did not venture out in search of pristine countryside or unspoiled nature. As he wrote in 1932, in an unsuccessful application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, “I prefer the intimate landscape of our common surroundings, where town and country mingle. For we are in the habit to carry into them our feelings of pain and pleasure, our moods” (as quoted by Joyce E. Brodsky in “Oscar Bluemner in Black and White,” p. 4, in Bulletin 1977, I, no. 5, The William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut). By 1911, Bluemner had found a powerful muse in a series of old industrial towns, mostly in New Jersey, strung along the route of the Morris Canal. While he educated himself at museums and art galleries, Bluemner entered numerous architectural competitions. In 1903, in partnership with Michael Garven, he designed a new courthouse for Bronx County. Garven, who had ties to Tammany Hall, attempted to exclude Bluemner from financial or artistic credit, but Bluemner promptly sued, and, finally, in 1911, after numerous appeals, won a $7,000 judgment. Barbara Haskell’s recent catalogue reveals more details of Bluemner’s architectural career than have previously been known. Bluemner the architect was also married with a wife and two children. He took what work he could get and had little pride in what he produced, a galling situation for a passionate idealist, and the undoubted explanation for why he later destroyed the bulk of his records for these years. Beginning in 1907, Bluemner maintained a diary, his “Own Principles of Painting,” where he refined his ideas and incorporated insights from his extensive reading in philosophy and criticism both in English and German to create a theoretical basis for his art. Sometime between 1908 and 1910, Bluemner’s life as an artist was transformed by his encounter with the German-educated Alfred Stieglitz, proprietor of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men were kindred Teutonic souls. Bluemner met Stieglitz at about the time that Stieglitz was shifting his serious attention away from photography and toward contemporary art in a modernist idiom. Stieglitz encouraged and presided over Bluemner’s transition from architect to painter. During the same period elements of Bluemner’s study of art began to coalesce into a personal vision. A Van Gogh show in 1908 convinced Bluemner that color could be liberated from the constraints of naturalism. In 1911, Bluemner visited a Cézanne watercolor show at Stieglitz’s gallery and saw, in Cézanne’s formal experiments, a path for uniting Van Gogh’s expressionist use of color with a reality-based but non-objective language of form. A definitive change of course in Bluemner’s professional life came in 1912. Ironically, it was the proceeds from his successful suit to gain credit for his architectural work that enabled Bluemner to commit to painting as a profession. Dividing the judgment money to provide for the adequate support of his wife and two children, he took what remained and financed a trip to Europe. Bluemner traveled across the Continent and England, seeing as much art as possible along the way, and always working at a feverish pace. He took some of his already-completed work with him on his European trip, and arranged his first-ever solo exhibitions in Berlin, Leipzig, and Elberfeld, Germany. After Bluemner returned from his study trip, he was a painter, and would henceforth return to drafting only as a last-ditch expedient to support his family when his art failed to generate sufficient income. Bluemner became part of the circle of Stieglitz artists at “291,” a group which included Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove. He returned to New York in time to show five paintings at the 1913 Armory Show and began, as well, to publish critical and theoretical essays in Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work. In its pages he cogently defended the Armory Show against the onslaught of conservative attacks. In 1915, under Stieglitz’s auspices, Bluemner had his first American one-man show at “291.” Bluemner’s work offers an interesting contrast with that of another Stieglitz architect-turned-artist, John Marin, who also had New Jersey connections. The years after 1914 were increasingly uncomfortable. Bluemner remained, all of his life, proud of his German cultural legacy, contributing regularly to German language journals and newspapers in this country. The anti-German sentiment, indeed mania, before and during World War I, made life difficult for the artist and his family. It is impossible to escape the political agenda in Charles Caffin’s critique of Bluemner’s 1915 show. Caffin found in Bluemner’s precise and earnest explorations of form, “drilled, regimented, coerced . . . formations . . . utterly alien to the American idea of democracy” (New York American, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48 [Oct. 1916], as quoted in Hayes, 1991, p. 71). In 1916, seeking a change of scene, more freedom to paint, and lower expenses, Bluemner moved his family to New Jersey, familiar terrain from his earlier sketching and painting. During the ten years they lived in New Jersey, the Bluemner family moved around the state, usually, but not always, one step ahead of the rent collector. In 1917, Stieglitz closed “291” and did not reestablish a Manhattan gallery until 1925. In the interim, Bluemner developed relationships with other dealers and with patrons. Throughout his career he drew support and encouragement from art cognoscenti who recognized his talent and the high quality of his work. Unfortunately, that did not pay the bills. Chronic shortfalls were aggravated by Bluemner’s inability to sustain supportive relationships. He was a difficult man, eternally bitter at the gap between the ideal and the real. Hard on himself and hard on those around him, he ultimately always found a reason to bite the hand that fed him. Bluemner never achieved financial stability. He left New Jersey in 1926, after the death of his beloved wife, and settled in South Braintree, Massachusetts, outside of Boston, where he continued to paint until his own death in 1938. As late as 1934 and again in 1936, he worked for New Deal art programs designed to support struggling artists. Bluemner held popular taste and mass culture in contempt, and there was certainly no room in his quasi-religious approach to art for accommodation to any perceived commercial advantage. His German background was also problematic, not only for its political disadvantages, but because, in a world where art is understood in terms of national styles, Bluemner was sui generis, and, to this day, lacks a comfortable context. In 1933, Bluemner adopted Florianus (definitively revising his birth names, Friedrich Julius Oskar) as his middle name and incorporated it into his signature, to present “a Latin version of his own surname that he believed reinforced his career-long effort to translate ordinary perceptions into the more timeless and universal languages of art” (Hayes 1982, p. 189 n. 1). In 1939, critic Paul Rosenfeld, a friend and member of the Stieglitz circle, responding to the difficulty in categorizing Bluemner, perceptively located him among “the ranks of the pre-Nazi German moderns” (Hayes 1991, p. 41). Bluemner was powerfully influenced in his career by the intellectual heritage of two towering figures of nineteenth-century German culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A keen student of color theory, Bluemner gave pride of place to the formulations of Goethe, who equated specific colors with emotional properties. In a November 19, 1915, interview in the German-language newspaper, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (Abendblatt), he stated: I comprehend the visible world . . . abstract the primary-artistic . . . and after these elements of realty are extracted and analyzed, I reconstruct a new free creation that still resembles the original, but also . . . becomes an objectification of the abstract idea of beauty. The first—and most conspicuous mark of this creation is . . . colors which accord with the character of things, the locality . . . [and which] like the colors of Cranach, van der Weyden, or Durer, are of absolute purity, breadth, and luminosity. . . . I proceed from the psychological use of color by the Old Masters . . . [in which] we immediately recognize colors as carriers of “sorrow and joy” in Goethe’s sense, or as signs of human relationship. . . . Upon this color symbolism rests the beauty as well as the expressiveness, of earlier sacred paintings. Above all, I recognize myself as a contributor to the new German theory of light and color, which expands Goethe’s law of color through modern scientific means (as quoted in Hayes 1991, p. 71). Hayes has traced the global extent of Bluemner’s intellectual indebtedness to Hegel (1991, pp. 36–37). More specifically, Bluemner made visual, in his art, the Hegelian world view, in the thesis and antithesis of the straight line and the curve, the red and the green, the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation and the calm. Bluemner respected all of these elements equally, painting and drawing the tension and dynamic of the dialectic and seeking ultimate reconciliation in a final visual synthesis. Bluemner was a keen student of art, past and present, looking, dissecting, and digesting all that he saw. He found precedents for his non-naturalist use of brilliant-hued color not only in the work Van Gogh and Cezanne, but also in Gauguin, the Nabis, and the Symbolists, as well as among his contemporaries, the young Germans of Der Blaue Reiter. Bluemner was accustomed to working to the absolute standard of precision required of the architectural draftsman, who adjusts a design many times until its reality incorporates both practical imperatives and aesthetic intentions. Hayes describes Bluemner’s working method, explaining how the artist produced multiple images playing on the same theme—in sketch form, in charcoal, and in watercolor, leading to the oil works that express the ultimate completion of his process (Hayes, 1982, pp. 156–61, including relevant footnotes). Because of Bluemner’s working method, driven not only by visual considerations but also by theoretical constructs, his watercolor and charcoal studies have a unique integrity. They are not, as is sometimes the case with other artists, rough preparatory sketches. They stand on their own, unfinished only in the sense of not finally achieving Bluemner’s carefully considered purpose. The present charcoal drawing is one of a series of images that take as their starting point the Morris Canal as it passed through Rockaway, New Jersey. The Morris Canal industrial towns that Bluemner chose as the points of departure for his early artistic explorations in oil included Paterson with its silk mills (which recalled the mills in the artist’s childhood home in Elberfeld), the port city of Hoboken, Newark, and, more curiously, a series of iron ore mining and refining towns, in the north central part of the state that pre-dated the Canal, harkening back to the era of the Revolutionary War. The Rockaway theme was among the original group of oil paintings that Bluemner painted in six productive months from July through December 1911 and took with him to Europe in 1912. In his painting journal, Bluemner called this work Morris Canal at Rockaway N.J. (AAA, reel 339, frames 150 and 667, Hayes, 1982, pp. 116–17), and exhibited it at the Galerie Fritz Gurlitt in Berlin in 1912 as Rockaway N. J. Alter Kanal. After his return, Bluemner scraped down and reworked these canvases. The Rockaway picture survives today, revised between 1914 and 1922, as Old Canal, Red and Blue (Rockaway River) in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C. (color illus. in Haskell, fig. 48, p. 65). For Bluemner, the charcoal expression of his artistic vision was a critical step in composition. It represented his own adaptation of Arthur Wesley’s Dow’s (1857–1922) description of a Japanese...

The paper of the work is not yellowed, there is a applied yellowed primer under the drawing Krzysztof Gliszczyński is Professor for painting o...