Painter born in Parchim, Germany. Blumann had private lessons from the Baron Lutgendorff Leinberg, Director of the Museum fur Kunst und Kulturschlichte der Hansaat L_beck, about 1913. Following this she went to the Berlin Academy of Arts under Max Liebermann and Kathe Kolwitz for 1914-18. She fled to Eutin during the Berlin Soviet and returned in 1920. She renewed her studies and taught in a private girls school near Kassel until 1923 when she married Dr Arnold Blumann director of a large chemical factory. Blumann travelled regularly in Germany, Italy and Switzerland and became familiar with many aspects of modern art. She held a one exhibition in Germany in Hamburg in 1924.
In 1934 the family fled from Nazi Germany and after four years in Europe they arrived in Perth. Elise began painting almost immediately. Her work fused her understanding of European modernist painting with direct observation of the light and weather in her new home. She maintained an individual style based on the Jugendstil sensibility fashionable in her student days. In the 1940s she became a conduit for modernist ideas into Perth through the Perth Art Group which she helped Robert Campbell found in 1942.
She made trips to the northwest in 1946 and 1948 and to Europe in 1949 but became disillusioned about the possibilities of art in Western Australia and her work became sporadic and uneven thereafter. The critic Charles Lemon wrote in the West Australian 25 July 1946: “This artist makes no concessions to realism. She says that our Landscape is founded on certain elemental and primitive qualities, mysterious and ancient origins which she dimly sees but strongly feels.”
She ceased doing much work in the 1960s but travelled to Europe regularly until the 1980s.
- Writers:
- Dr Dorothy Erickson
- Date written:
- 2010
- Last updated:
- 2011
