American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

A letter by the artist describing the conception of the present lot is included in the Peter Blume papers, held by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.

Provenance:

Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, New York, by 1976.

Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York, New York, by 1980.

Acquired directly from the above, April 1987.

Private Collection, New York.

Exhibited:

New York, Bernard Danenberg Galleries, Inc., "Peter Blume: Recollection of the Flood and Related Works," March 30 – April 18, 1970.

Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, "Peter Blume: A Retrospective Exhibition," January 10 - February 29, 1976.

New York, Terry Dintenfass Gallery, "Peter Blume, From the Metamorphoses: Recent Paintings and Drawings," March 8 – 28, 1980.

New Britain, Connecticut, The New Britain Museum of American Art, "Peter Blume: Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture Since 1964," October 3 – November 14, 1982, n.p., no. 31, illustrated.

Washington Depot, Connecticut, Anna Howard Gallery, "Peter Blume," April 1991.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphoses, November 14, 2014 – April 5, 2015 (traveling to Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, July 3 – September 20, 2015).

Literature:

Bernard Danenberg Galleries, Inc., Peter Blume: Recollection of the Flood and Related Works, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1970, no. 1, cover illustration.

A Retrospective Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1976, n.p., illustrated.

Jeanne Silverthorne, "Peter Blume," Artforum, Vol. 18, No. 10, Summer 1980, p. 81.

Terry Dintenfass Gallery, Peter Blume, From the Metamorphoses: Recent Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1980, no. 8, illustrated.

William Zimmer, "Painter Known for 30's Works, Still Explores Epic Themes," New York Times, April 21, 1991, p. 124.

Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis, exhibition catalogue, Philadelphia, 2014, no. 162, p. 287, illustrated.

Lot Note:

Peter Blume permeated his paintings with a sense of incongruity, a key tenet of the magic realist movement to which he subscribed throughout his decades long career, starting in the 1930s. Spatial inconsistencies, enigmatic figures, and jarring color schemes often disturb our cognitive reflexes, throwing us in a puzzling state, all the more unsettling that the discordant elements are hard to pinpoint exactly. In Recollection of the Flood (1967-69), a mature work later in the artist’s career, this sense of disquiet is activated in nearly imperceptible ways.

The painting obeys a triangular structure, guiding the eye along opposed diagonal lines shooting upwards to tacitly intersect just below the upper edge of the composition, a metaphorical culmination of the artistic endeavor—both Blume’s and that of the portrayed painters—blending the border between creator and creation. The diagonals, most obvious in the slanted postures of the painters and the related shadow, are neatly repeated throughout the painting via the open window, the legs of the sleeping child, the cross braces of the scaffolding, the drawing board held by one of the painters, and the wings of the angels in the mural. Yet, while the reverberation of diagonals provides formal uniformity, the slightly different directions they follow—the open window-pane, for instance, is not quite parallel with the cross braces—yields a dizzying effect.

The unsettling undertones of the painting also emanate from the source of light. The scene is bathed in natural sunlight, evidently from the window distributing a gentle brightness throughout the room, in stark contrast to the dark recesses not exposed to it along the leftmost edge, surrounding the luminous opening. While the interplay of light and shade appears concordant and is visually pleasing, the light source itself is distressing, as the window shows a moody, leaden sky, at odds with the bright softness inside the room.

What Blume created here is a climate of underlying anxiety filled with quarreling emotions—ease and discomfort, serenity and apprehension. Is the sense of doom looming, or is it receding? It is impossible to know. Instead, the painting’s significance resides in its lingering. Blume executed this painting shortly after the Arno flood of 1966 in Florence, Italy, which resulted in immense loss of human life and catastrophic destruction of cultural heritage. The painting’s construction and its focus on human design recall the aesthetics of the Quattrocento, and function as a celebration of Florence and its enduring artistic legacy.

The upward movement of the composition also suggests collective elevation in the face of hardship, a metaphorical rise above the flood waters. But it also serves as a larger commentary on human suffering and salvation with subtle allusions to the Holocaust—the star of David formed by the two triangles hanging below the window—woven into the narrative of the painting, a heaviness that persists even as humanity carries on. Perhaps most compellingly, the anthropomorphic gourds strewn about the floor, akin to dead bodies, mirror the sullen, exhausted figures sitting behind them, images of humankind left bereft and wretched.

But the motif of the gourd, a reference to the biblical story of Jonah, who finds temporary shelter under a soon-to-decay gourd vine, symbolizes both hope and despair. It embodies the irreconcilable tension between abundance and loss, implying that they are not mutually exclusive. Rather, triumph over death is a perpetual struggle, always contingent on the impermanence of earthly comforts. In Recollection of the Flood, Blume promotes artistic and formal prowess as an existential pursuit, one that all at once wards off oblivion and remains forever fraught, as the ominous sky outside the window aptly reminds us.