Full Blume
Erotic vegetables, masochistic peelers, tension and control. We sense Blume's heightened emotional current and the balance between enigma and disclosure. Different zones occupy the canvas, uneasily coexisting but not quite touching. On one level, Blume displays his mastery by combining three traditional subjects in a single image—landscape, interior with figures, and still life; at 21, he's showing us that he has already earned his union card as an artist. On another level, he's toying with tradition. He turns a still life of carrots and squash into "reclining nude vegetables." Even his "realist" bowl, wall, table, and window, seem to double as the ideal "abstract" forms of circle, square, triangle, and rectangle.
Pictured: Peter Blume, Vegetable Dinner,1927, oil, 25 1/4 x 30 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.
Part 5
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Vegetable Dinner
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