Cramer was born in Wurtzburg, Germany, and was influenced by the Munich expressionist movement, Der Blaue Reiter, literally the Blue Rider. This group was founded by Wassily Kandinsky and was the avant-garde art movement of its day. Cramer had employed oil, watercolor, and ink in a loose, free flowing style used to depict fish, nudes and other objects. From that subject matter, he switched to Cubism, inspired by Cezanne's planes of light technique. Having adapted cubism to the local landscape, he was considered to be one of the more radical artists during this time. With abstraction now as his preferred mode of depiction, he became one of America's earliest modernist painters. He then contiguously founded and directed the Woodstock, New York Art Association and the Woodstock School of Painting. He divided his time between Woodstock and Manhattan and was highly prominent in progressive art circles. He was a close friend of Alfred Stieglitz, who interested him in photography, which led to Cramer's directing and teaching at The Woodstock School of Miniature Photography. He was also a skillful illustrator and textile designer. In 1911, he married an American art student and immigrated to America, where he began his distinguished career. In 1913, he established his American reputation with a pioneering series of abstract paintings. His post World War I style became a fusion of European modernism with imagery of American culture, such as common household objects, an amalgam of both to his early objective work in Germany and his subsequent abstract work.