American painter and sculptor. His parents emigrated to the USA and settled in Brooklyn, New York, c. 1912. He studied art from the age of 13 at evening classes, then at the Educational Alliance, the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and the Art Students League. By 1926 he had a studio in New York. Blume’s admiration for Renaissance technique largely inspired his working method: making drawings and compositional cartoons and then painstakingly transferring the images to canvas, a craftsmanlike approach that resulted in a surprisingly small body of work.
Blume’s early work shows the influence of the Precisionists and was exhibited by Charles Daniel (one of the first to exhibit modernist American painting). In 1934 Blume won first prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition with the surreal South of Scranton (1930–31; New York, Met.). A year in Italy on a Guggenheim grant (1932) inspired his only political painting, Eternal City (1934–7; New York, MOMA), in which Mussolini is characterized as a garish jack-in-the-box.
The figurative and literary elements of Blume’s work continued into his later career despite the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism. His pervading themes deal with discontinuity caused by destruction, distance, time and chance, and with man’s attempt to unite, repair and rebuild from the fragments that remain. Stones, rocks and girders recur as iconographic motifs, for instance in Tasso’s Oak (1956; New York, Dintenfass Gal.). Recollection of the Flood (1969; New York, Dintenfass Gal.) shows victims of the floods in Florence (1966) seeking shelter in a hall where restorers are already at work. This painting was followed by Blume’s first sculpture, Bronzes about Venus (1970; New York, Dintenfass Gal.), whose deliberate references to antiquity and Mannerist art are reiterated in the painting From the Metamorphoses (1979; New York, Dintenfass Gal.). The latter depicts the legend of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who repopulated the world by throwing stones that turned into men, a further indication of Blume’s preoccupation with the role of the artist in restoring the world through the ability to transform materials.
Rina Youngner
From Grove Art Online
© 2009 Oxford University Press