By the time German-born Oscar Bluemner emigrated to the United States in 1892, the twenty-five year old artist had already studied architecture, started a professional practice, and designed a theatre and two post offices in his native country. In America he continued his architectural career for another two decades. He was, in fact, one of the designers of pre-fabricated units for the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, and in 1902 he won the commission to design the Borough Court House for the Bronx, New York. But he also had all the while a strong interest in drawing and painting. When he was nineteen he participated in a portrait exhibition, and he made many fine sketches and watercolors of the German landscape.

Except for periodic work and study in New York, Boston, and Hartford, Bluemner lived in Chicago until 1900. He then settled permanently in the East, first in New York City and then in neighboring New Jersey. In 1910 he met noted photographer Alfred Stieglitz and began frequenting his "291" Gallery in Manhattan, which showed many of the most avant-garde European and American artists of the period. Excited on seeing the latest trends in art, Bluemner soon produced his first oil paintings. At the same time, he grew increasingly uninterested in architectural work. He abandoned architecture altogether in 1912 to pursue painting full time. That year he also traveled again to Europe, where he enthusiastically visited galleries and museums throughout France, Italy, and Germany. He admitted to being impressed by the work he saw of the individual artists Cézanne and Van Gogh and by the several figures who constitute the Orphists and futurists particularly for their use of intense and exotic color. Bluemner returned to the United States in the fall of 1912; he submitted five paintings to the famous Armory Show in 1913 and he was given a one-man exhibition at "291" in 1915.

Judith Zilczer, the curator at the Hirshhorn Museum who organized that institution's important 1979-80 Bluemner retrospective, calls the artist's mature style "color expressionism." Indeed his landscapes of the late teens, twenties, and thirties assume the bold palette of the Orphists or the German Expressionists, and aptly manifest the independent abstract function of color: psychological association, temperature, relative strength, optical vibration, advancing or receding spatial properties. At the same time his preference for simplified shapes, monumental groupings, and tightly structured compositions doubtless reflects his architectural background. The Hunter's Form and Light, Motive in West New Jersey (Beattiestown)of 1914 shows all these characteristics and further demonstrates how the artist liked to weld the components of his pictures together by the rhythmic repetition of shapes and contours (swatches of sunlight streaming across the ground, branches of trees, roofline diagonals, etc.) to achieve an effect of sequential ordering in a carefully calculated depth of field.

Bluemner's career was brought to an abrupt end in 1935 when he was severely injured in an automobile accident. Then sixty-seven years old, he never fully recovered, and he was never able to resume painting. Sadly, he committed suicide three years later. Sadly, too, in his lifetime he never knew the critical recognition he has since been accorded. His work helped define the upward striving impetus of American modernism in the pubescent years immediately before and after the Armory Show. He was a pivotal figure in the advancement of abstract art and is now, of course, especially regarded for his effective use of color. As curator Zilczer has noted: "In his preoccupation with color and emotive symbolism, Bluemner created a highly personal style and esthetic of color expressionism."