Painting 'the Red City'.

hat irritation of offensively red brick is this, red aspoor-man's flesh? —William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1946) These lines from William Carlos Williams's modernist American epic provide an apt epigraph for Oscar Bluemner's paintings of the textile mills of Paterson, New Jersey. Thirty years later, Williams, by choosing Paterson as a fitting microcosm in which to set his poetic meditation upon “ the mind of modern man and the city,” echoed Bluemner's realization that this gritty New Jersey town of immigrant workers, with its history of labor strife, could stand for the essence of America. Oscar Bluemner first sketched and painted his view of Paterson's silk factories against the backdrop of Garrett Mountain around 1911. Five years later he radically revised this work in watercolor and then in oil. During the interim, much had changed for both the artist and the city. Contacts with European modernism abroad and at home had transformed Bluemner's artistic language.