The Australian Women's Register

Elise Schlie was born on 16 January 1897 at Parchim, Germany, to Paul Schlie, cavalry officer and civil servant, and his wife Elfrida. Elise was the youngest of their three children, and, after attending school in Hamburg, was taught painting by Baron Leo Lütgendorff-Leinburg at Lübeck. She then studied in Berlin from 1917-20 under impressionists Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, worked teaching art, and exhibited for the first time in Hamburg in 1921.

Elise married Dr Arnold Blumann, a wealthy industrial chemist, in 1923. After spending brief periods in the Netherlands and England, the couple migrated to Australia, arriving in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 4 January, 1938. The Blumanns built a modernist house (since demolished) at Nedlands, and Elise Blumann’s first paintings completed in Perth were a series of views of the Swan River. These were exhibited, along with a selection of nudes which caused a scandal, at her first Australian exhibition at Newspaper House, Perth, in August, 1944.

Blumann’s outback travels also found expression in her painting, and reflected her interest the quality of nature and the individual’s relationship to it. She was a member of the Perth Society of Artists, lecturing and holding art classes for adults and children, and staged an exhibition of her work in Paris in 1950. After the death of her husband in 1970, Blumann returned to Germany for five years, and upon returning to Perth, held exhibitions in local galleries, and then at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1984. Elise Blumann died at Nedlands on 29 January, 1990.