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Luce Foundation Center for American Art

Painting: 20th century: Vegetable Dinner
Peter Blume

Peter Blume

(born Smorgon, Russia 1906 -- died New Milford, CT 1992)

Peter Blume came to America from Russia when he was eleven, and within seven years he had attended art school and opened his own studio in New York. Blume caused a stir when he was only twenty-eight by winning the Grand Prize at the Carnegie International Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture in Pittsburgh. (Peter Blume, Exhibition Catalogue, Kennedy Galleries, 1968) His earlier, more conventional scenes painted in the interwar years have an edgy quality that came out much more strongly in his fantastic images of the late 1930s. Blume eventually moved with his wife to Sherman, Connecticut, where they lived in the country and grew their own vegetables.

Image Credits: Courtesy Juley Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum.