Christie’s 19 November 2014
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JERSEY SILKMILLS
$2,500,000 - $3,500,000
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NRA
$700,000 - $1,000,000
Christie’s 5 DECEMBER 2013
OSCAR BLUEMNER | Surprise (May Moon)
Estimate: $400,000-600,000
Surprise (May Moon) was executed by Oscar Bluemner in 1927 (illustrated left), a key moment in the artist’s career, as he was experiencing an important shift in his style. Following the passing of his wife the previous year, Bluemner moved his family from Elizabeth, New Jersey, to South Braintree, Massachusetts. His artworks reflected this emotionally turbulent time and he focused on motifs of suns and moons, seeing them as symbols of God or a universal creator. Surprise (May Moon) is one of a series of eighteen extraordinary works known as Oscar Bluemner’s Sun and Moon series that offer a life affirming depiction of nature and its spiritual force. Here Bluemner masterfully utilizes color to shape and stimulate mood and to convey a range of powerful emotions in a single image. These important watercolors were the successors to Georgia O’Keeffe’s Evening Star series and a precursor to Arthur Dove’s exploration of similar iconography in the 1930s.
Christie’s NOVEMBER 30, 2011
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Oscar Bluemner’s Illusion of a Prairie, New Jersey (Red Farm at Pochuck), (estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000), is a powerful symphony of form and color and a seminal work that was exhibited in the artist’s first one-man show at Alfred Stieglitz’s celebrated avant-garde gallery, “291.” Painted in 1915, this masterwork is also one of the earliest, large-scale (30 x 40 in) paintings to manifest Bluemner’s fully developed and highly personal visual lexicon. He masterfully employs color as expression and reduces the landscape in order to capture his emotional response to the setting. He simplifies trees, river, hills and buildings, rendering them with broad, emotive brushwork. Illusion of a Prairie, is an early triumph and a powerful, dramatic composition that manifests Bluemner’s fully developed artistic vision, one that was both thoroughly unique and decisively modern.
Sotheby's April 26, 2014
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Sotheby's April 26, 2014
OSCAR BLUEMNER
HUDSON RIVER
Sotheby's October 2, 2014
