Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) is a bit of an odd and rare bird. He is an overlooked American Modernist (a major minor painter in the Gallery 291 circle of O’Keeffe, Dove, Stieglitz, and Hartley), yet he defies classification.

Walking among the 80 Bluemner paintings and drawings in the new retrospective at the Whitney, I could not decide if his voice was Modern or Realist; European or American; original and sophisticated; or derivative and naive. If you have never seen Bluemner’s paintings, or if you have seen only a few of them at a time (as most of us have), then this retrospective, which opens tomorrow, will perplex and even startle you. If nothing else, it will rustle the art-historical feathers of the American Modernist canon. And it will most definitely put Bluemner on the map.

Bluemner’s paintings are mostly desolate cityscapes and landscapes or large, threatening, abstracted starburst suns and cabbage moons. Filled with spooky, gesticulating trees, whose limbs become fingers and arms, and anthropomorphic houses and factories, whose windows and doors become wide-open mouths and eyes, the paintings are built of either pared-down, brightly colored, childlike blocks or liquid and dreamy forms that suggest, in their clouds, foliage, and snowdrifts, human faces and reclining nudes.

It is difficult to separate Bluemner’s influences. It is also, in the case of O’Keeffe and Dove, difficult to know who exactly influenced whom. Many of Bluemner’s pictures are imbued with Halloween moods that hark back to Munch, Frederic Church, and Grunewald. Yet, Bluemner’s use of black at times suggests that of his contemporaries Beckmann or Rouault. Many of his pictures’ surreal, languid forms look like those of O’Keeffe or Dove; or they are tight and twisted like those of Thomas Hart Benton; or they have the somber elongation of De Chirico, Hopper, and Charles Sheeler. When the artist’s color is electric and his forms are pseudo-Cubist and cinematically fractured, as in “Morning Light (Dover Hills, October),” “Aspiration (Winfield),” and “Perth Amboy (Tottenville)” (all 1911), the paintings are reminiscent of Franz Marc, Orphism, and Futurism.

Originally trained as an architect at Berlin’s Royal Technical Academy, Bluemner immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1892, and designed well-proportioned neoclassical, neo-Gothic, and Beaux-Arts public buildings and private homes in Chicago and New York. A half dozen of Bluemner’s tightly worked and detailed architectural drawings are on view at the Whitney, including that of the “Bronx Borough Courthouse, Rear Elevation” (1903).Yet the conservative architectural renderings do not prepare us for the artist’s obsession with houses, especially red ones, or his explosive use of color – themes that would fuel the rest of his career.

In 1911, Bluemner won a court settlement against Tammany Hall crony Michael Garvin, who had hired him to design the Bronx Borough Courthouse and then refused to give him credit or compensation for the approved commission. Encouraged by Stieglitz, the disillusioned Bluemner turned to painting. In 1912, he was in Europe, absorbing German Expressionism, Italian Futurism, Cubism, and the new abstraction – movements he never seemed to fully comprehend or explore but, through a strange combination of Northern clarity and American ingenuity, made entirely his own. He participated in the Armory show of 1913, and he kept meticulously illustrated diaries and notebooks about his thoughts on Modernism. Some of these densely packed books, which are at times more fascinating than the paintings themselves, are on view in a vitrine at the Whitney.

The chronological retrospective opens with a re-creation of Bluemner’s first one-person show at 291, in 1915, of works that show his foray into Modernist color and fracture. It then moves into the architectural drawings and early Futurist-inspired works. (The show skips over Bluemner’s neo-Impressionistic paintings from the late 19th century. To see an example of his pre-Modernist painting, I suggest you visit Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, LLC, where, among a superb and varied grouping of Bluemner’s small works, is “Untitled [German Farm]” [1885] – a watercolor that helps to ground us in the artist’s roots.)

There is a gallery of small watercolors from the late teens and 1920s – work that is more representational, but some of the best in the exhibition. Watercolors such as “Harrison Street Bridge Over Canal, Bloomfield” (1918) and “Flag Station, Elizabeth, New Jersey” (1925) are luminous little gems. It is in these works that Bluemner’s hand feels most natural and does not succumb to Modernist mannerisms.

From there, we are presented with a wonderful grouping of suns and moons from the late 1920s, pictures that, in their entirety, give us a full range of the artist’s obsessions and abilities. Bluemner transforms the sun and moon into blood, disc, lemon, and wheel; face, eye, and explosion. Here he is closest to Dove and O’Keeffe, with moments of Delaunay (though with a much more mercurial spirit), painting large, rolling forms that verge on abstraction; it is also here that his somber motifs – the moon-faces, threatening skies, and surreal architecture – interplay most naturally.

In the last two galleries we see a return, during the final decade of his life, to the theme of the house, which looms – glowing, frontal, and bright, yellow or red – in the center of many of the pictures as if it were on fire. I was especially struck by “Radiant Night” (1932-33), a stark, haunting picture of a white house, sidewalk, and trees. In liquid browns, blacks, and grays, it has a crystalline light that in places reminded me of Braque’s late studio paintings.

Bluemner took to heart the psychological color theories of Goethe and Kandinsky. (Loving blood-red above all other colors, he referred to himself as “The Vermillionaire.”) His own local and tonal color, which he utilized equally as a realist and an expressionist (often within the same canvas), can be forceful and compelling, at times unique, but too often his paintings – equally frenetic and barren, repetitively overworked and underdeveloped – can feel strident, impersonal, and melodramatic.

I respect Bluemner’s weird, icy, obsessive pictures, even if I am not sure that as a whole I particularly like them. Pushed as they often are toward – or reduced to – the iconic and archetypal, they feel as if (merely mechanically passionate) they had been stripped of true individuality and passion. Bluemner’s paintings, though adequate in many ways, are missing the very particularities that allow a work of art to stand alone, and distinct from an oeuvre.

Whitney from October 7 until February 12 (945 Madison Avenue between 74th and 75th Streets, 212-570-3600).

Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts, LLC (667 Madison Avenue at 61st Street, 212-813-9797). Prices range from $10,000 to $125,000.