Elise Blumann

Who was Elise Blumann?

Elise Blumann was a German born artist who achieved recognition as an Australian Expressionist painter. She studied under Max Liebermann at the Berlin Academy of Art from 1916 until 1919. After which, Blumann taught in various schools in Germany from 1920 to 1923, when she married Arnold Blumann. She fled Nazi Germany with her husband in 1934, moving to Perth in 1938. With the Curator of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Robert Campbell, she helped found the Art Group, a discussion group through which she promoted modernist ideas and attitudes in art and art education. However, in the 1950s Blumann became disillusioned with the possibilities of art in Western Australia and only painted sporadically. Her work first received national attention in the late 1970s some fifteen years before she died in 1990, aged 93.