Vermillionaire

He calls himself "the Vermillionaire" because of all bright colors he likes the reds best. Vermilion was therefore the predominant color in the most vivid art exhibition of the season which opened last week at New York's Marie Harriman Gallery. On view were a succession of carefully drawn studies that might be landscapes, trees, sky, the ends of old houses and narrow streets, but were actually elaborately conceived studies in pure color, psychologically akin to the huge abstractions of Pablo Picasso.

No matter how gay the canvases, they paled beside the personality of the painter. Still unknown to the general public, Oscar Florianus Bluemner has been a pet of the U. S. art world for 25 years. His friends jammed the gallery last week. Fellow artists, retired critics, dealers, fell over each other in their eagerness to tell newshawks about his cat Jochen, his accent, his cigars, his career as portraitist, architect, bartender, philosopher.

Oscar Florianus Bluemner comes from Hanover, Germany. His father was an architect who had built up a nice practice in Italianate brick churches in the south Tyrol. At the age of 18 Oscar Bluemner gave his first portrait exhibition in Berlin, shortly afterward won medals at the Royal Academy where he was studying painting and architecture. In 1892 an artistic argument with the All Highest, Wilhelm II, caused him to leave Germany suddenly for the U. S. For two years he lived in Bowery flophouses, working as a bartender when he could, selling packets of needles on the sidewalk at other times.

Then came a wave of prosperity. He resumed his profession of architect, practicing for 20 years in an office on Manhattan's 42nd Street. As a painter he exhibited in the Armory Show of 1913 that introduced Matisse, Picasso and the French moderns to a baffled U. S. public. Since 1929 the Whitney Museum has bought three of his canvases. Since his architectural practice evaporated he has never made much money, but he has not lacked critical appreciation.

Now at the age of 67 he lives in what he likes to call "the last house in South Braintree, Massachusetts" with his musical daughter Vera, his son Robert, a black cat and a pair of bluebirds. Forty-three years in the U. S. have not changed an accent that would make the fortune of any

German comedian. His enormous Gladstone collars generally have the patina of an ancient manuscript. He hates beds and regular meals, cooks what he wants when he is hungry and sleeps on the attic floor rolled up in a blanket. To counteract his habit of forgetting things his watch, his pocketbook, fountain pen, keys, etc. are attached to his clothes by an intricate system of safety pins and odd bits of string. He knows Goethe's Faust by heart, writes and speaks Latin fluently, discourses familiarly on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Spengler, hates beer.

With the greatest of gusto and good humor he ceaselessly tries to explain his theories of the emotional value of color, and in particular his fondness for brilliant reds. Slow-witted listeners generally retire baffled, content that the "Vermillionaire's" colors, whatever they may mean, are pure, shrewdly chosen, and form most decorative patterns.

Art is far from his only interest. Blue eyes flashing, waving the smouldering butt of a frayed cigar, Oscar Florianus Bluemner last week delivered himself of his mature opinion of nudism with rich guttural gusto:

"It iss nudding but a frustrated sexual urch! Men und vimmin running around poodle-naked und throwing medicine balls! Ridiculous! Now you take me. Effery morning of my life at seven o'clock in de morning I valk down de railroad traggs in Sout' Braintree Massajusetts until I am in de voods. And den I sid on a rock, and take off all my glothes and schmoke a tsigar and rhead Omar Kayyam. But do I have to choin a Verein? Do I haf to have a Praesident und a Honorary Praesident?"

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