Burnt Umber

by Sheldon Greene

1945. The bloody days of the allied invasion of Europe. A lost American soldier seeks shelter in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse and in an old trunk discovers the sketchbook an unknown artist. So begins the story of two intertwining lives, that of Franz Marc, the visionary German painter, and Harry Baer, a draftee from Cleveland, haunted by the sketchbook and the urge to make art.

Franz Marc (18801916), was an expressionist painter who, along with Kandinsky organized Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, a band of artists whose aim was nothing less than the rebirth of looking. Although Kandinsky lived to become one of the seminal figures of modern art, Franz Marc was killed in 1916. His confused sex life and his struggle to capture the mystical spirit of nature in his work are imagined here for the first time.

Harry Baer is based on the life of Harold Paris, the enigmatic California artist. Having built a reputation in the left bank of Paris, he took a semester to teach at Berkeley, and stayed on to create haunting sculpture until his early death.

Burnt Umber is a novel about art and ideas but above all the lives of two artists who struggled to express themselves while engaged in the defining moments of the 20th the trenches of World War One, the liberation of the concentration camps, the intellectual turbulence of post-World War Two Paris, the social upheavals of Vietnam-era Berkeley.

Sheldon Greene ";is a born story teller,"; raves the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of one previous novel, Lost and Found (Random House, 1980), grew up in Cleveland and lives in Berkeley.

Paperback

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Sheldon Greene started young. He was appointed Warden of Insurance of the State of Ohio at age 23. A public interest lawyer, Greene pursued seminal issues literally decades before they achieved national attention, such as our flawed health delivery system, the impact of illegal immigration on the economy, renewable energy, and our public land policies. Greene was a participant in the first Obama national policy team for both immigration and energy. He was one of the founders of the New Israel Fund and helped formulate its unique structure drawing on his experience as General Counsel of California Rural Legal Assistance. He is an executive in a wind energy development company and has been actively engaged in renewable energy for over 25 years. He advocates the formulation of a God concept derived from the life process, stripped of anachronistic anthropomorphic characteristics. He has developed personal guidelines for a balanced, seamless life with spiritual, intellectual, social, and creative dimensions. He is the author of seven published novels.

Of the seven novels already published six have strong Jewish content. The topics range widely from fact based to flights of imagination. Topics explored include aid by Jews to the American Revolution,(Pursuit of Happiness) Jewish influence on Pre-Columbian culture, (The Seed Apple) World War II Jewish partisans, the illegal immigration to Palestine, the Israeli War of Independence (Prodigal Sons) , small town Jewish values,(Lost and Found). One of the novels, (Burnt Umber) moves from Pre World War I Germany to Berkeley during the Viet Nam war with the German artist, Franz Marc and a fact-based Jewish artist and Cal professor as the principal characters. A major theme is the empowerment of women in the 20th Century. Yet another novel (After The Parch) describes California in the near future after the dissolution of the United States.