Vibrant Paintings Of Modernist Peter Blume At Wadsworth

Peter Blume was a modernist, which in his case meant all kinds of things. Blume did surrealism, magical realism, precisionism. But at the new Peter Blume exhibit at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, what hits visitors in the face most powerfully aren’t the shapes or the figures in his paintings — it’s the color.

“There’s almost a rainbow in every painting,” said curator Erin Monroe of Blume’s work from 1930 onward. “He’s very savvy with color. It’s electrified and unsettling and unusual.”

To emphasize this, Monroe, who imported the exhibit from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, hung Blume’s “Summer” immediately in front of an entrance door. The 1966 work, part of a “Four Seasons” series Blume did not finish, shows a wildly multicolored cultivated field with an unnaturally green grazing area in the foreground. In the ’60s, some may have thought this explosion of wild hues showed Blume delving into psychedelia, but Blume explained that he was depicting a tulip field.

In “Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis,” even paintings with political or historical allegories stand out for their dynamic color schemes. “Eternal City” (1934-37) depicts a crumbling Rome, with the head of Benito Mussolini looming in the foreground, extending over the deteriorating catacombs as a frowning Jack-in-the-box. Mussolini’s head is an intense emerald-green, his lips a vivid red, the Jack-in-the-box bellows vibrantly yellow with a crimson Chinese pattern. To the left, fuchsia brickwork frames a dark wall in which a shrine to Jesus shines, but the grieving Christ is surrounded by a halo of silver and gold military epaulets. In the sun-washed background, thuggish soldiers suppress common folk. In the murky foreground, more commoners toil under Mussolini’s angry stare.

“It’s almost a hallucination, so alive with different vignettes you would never have seen all at once,” said Monroe, the Robert H. Schutz Jr. assistant curator of American Paintings and Sculpture. “The notion of oppressive leadership, war-torn areas, cultural artifacts are being ruined. It’s an irreplaceable loss. But the people keep going, they keep persevering.”

“Tasso’s Oak,” a modern-day, skewed retelling of an Italian folk tale, is in the exhibit, its first public showing since Bloom finished it in 1960. It shows a dead oak tree propped up by a brick under structure and metal center beam, with one lively branch jutting out of the bottom. Around the tree sit people of all ages: a baby in a sky-blue jumper, a girl frolicking in a yellow dress, two nuns in white wimples, a young woman in vivid red, her little helper in grassy green, a young couple in warm browns, an old woman in intense blue. The red sky is contrasted against the green center beam and the backdrop of an Italian city in muted old tones of corroded copper, gray and orange.

“Winter,” a 1964 oil and the second of the three seasonal paintings that were finished, shows an impossible landscape of a downed tree and jagged boulder jutting out of a smooth coating of snow and a lively variety of multicolored birds. “Hadrian’s Villa,” from 1958, is a view of Italian villagers picking olives from a tree.

“Nature and Metamorphosis” is noteworthy for the number of studies that accompany many of the paintings, which show Blume’s lengthy, sometimes years-long compositional process, and the evolution of those dramatic color schemes. “Tasso’s Oak” is accompanied by a full-size brown study. “Recollection of the Flood,” a musing on the survival instinct of displaced people, was created over a two-year period following the 1966 flooding of the Arno River in Italy. In the gallery, the finished artwork is flanked by three studies, on which Blume shifts and adjusts his figures and his colors.

Blume, who was born in modern-day Belarus, lived and worked in Sherman. The only painting in the exhibit owned by the Atheneum is “The Italian Straw Hat,” a 1955 oil showing a fictionalized view from the window of his studio in Sherman. Scenes of the town are scattered among the window views. Inside the room can be seen evidence of Blume’s position in the Connecticut art world: a mobile made by his fellow artist friend, Alexander Calder.

‘Visions From Home’

A companion exhibit to “Nature and Metamorphosis,” curated by Monroe, focuses on other artists who lived and worked in The Nutmeg State. “Visions from Home: Surrealism in Connecticut” is made up almost entirely of items in the Atheneum’s collection.

The exhibit is dominated by work by Calder, the Roxbury resident whose massive red sculpture “Stegosaurus” looms large outside the museum. Calder’s 1936 stabile “Praying Mantis” sits beside a smaller construction, “Little Blue Panel” from 1934, which is being shown for the first time electrified to allow the elements to rotate. Another small Calder is “Spider and the Fly,” a brass-wire construction of a flower, a spider and a fly that Calder created as a cynical wedding gift.

Works by the husband-and-wife artists Yves Tanguay and Kay Sage, who lived in Woodbury, hang side-by-side, comparing their very different styles in surreal dreamscapes: his soft, almost anthromorphic figures, hers scaffolding-like hard-edged wooden structures.

Automatism is represented by Arshile Gorky of Sherman, whose work is contrasted with that of his friend surrealist Andre Masson, who lived in New Preston during the Nazi occupation of France. “The Chess Queens” by Bridgewater resident Muriel Streeter, the wife of famed gallerist Julien Levy, plays off her relationship with Dorothea Tanning, the artist and wife of Max Ernst.

Through all the works in the show runs a common thread of Nellie Howland, an Atheneum executive who worked for legendary director A. Everett “Chick” Austin. Many artworks in the exhibit were created for her. Pavel Tchelitchew of Weston and Man Ray created portraits of her; Gorky drew her a Christmas card, Calder made her presents.

“PETER BLUME: NATURE AND METAMORPHOSIS” will be at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford, until Sept. 20. “Vision from Home: Surrealism in Connecticut” will be up until Oct. 20. thewadsworth.org.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the town where Blume and Gorky lived and worked.