About this work
Bluemner's title announces his dual purpose: this is simultaneously a place and a formal investigation. What emerges is a compressed valley landscape, rendered not as picturesque scenery but as an architectural study in color and spatial geometry. The composition likely builds from receding planes of land—the industrial or agricultural terrain of Wharton, New Jersey—fractured and reassembled in the artist's characteristic prismatic style. Expect the saturated, almost acidic palette he favored: deep blues and purples alongside those glowing touches of red and vermillion that made him the "Vermillionaire." The viewer encounters not a window onto nature but a scaffold of color-forms, where emotional intensity and geometric precision collide. There is nothing quaint here; the New Jersey landscape becomes a stage for Bluemner's belief that color itself could speak as directly as line or shape.
This work sits squarely within Bluemner's most important investigations—the industrial margins of the Northeast transformed through Modernist vision. Where his contemporaries in the Stieglitz Circle sought spiritual essence in landscape, Bluemner seized on the overlooked valleys and working lands of New Jersey as proving grounds for his theory that color could function as a language of emotion. The title's pairing of "space motive" with a specific place reflects his architectural training: he was composing with landscape the way he once composed buildings, but now charged with Expressionist fervor.
This print rewards a position where natural light can activate its colors—a study or living room with eastern or western exposure. It speaks to viewers drawn to early American Modernism and those who understand landscape not as escape but as territory for intellectual and emotional risk-taking.
