Norman Bluhm

Sooty Lady

1978

Norman Bluhm (1921-1999) was an American Abstract Expressionist celebrated for creating paintings with bold, energetic brushwork and colorful, voluptuous forms. Born in Chicago, IL, Bluhm studied architecture with Mies van der Rohe. In 1948, after serving as a fighter pilot in World War II, Bluhm moved to Paris, where he studied at the Ecoled des Beaux-Arts and associated with Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis and Alberto Giacometti. After moving to New York in 1956, he joined a circle of action painters including Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning and showed at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Prior to and after his studies, Bluhm was a member of the Air Force and served in World War II. After World War II, he lived in Paris with other hopeful American writers and artists of the expatriate scene. There he developed an interest in nude painting. In 1956 he moved to New York. The Cedar Tavern was a favorite gathering place where he convened with other painters and writers, such as Frank O'Hara, Franz Kline, William de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. Among the work of this noted group were the twenty-six Bluhm-O'Hara spontaneous poem paintings, composed in Bluhm's studio atop the old Tiffany Glass Building in 1960. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. exhibited Bluhm's work in his first museum show in 1969. During the 1960s and 1970s, his art created an atmosphere of violence, with a large paint-soaked brush, often using blues, pinks, purples and greens. His work which featured webs of jagged marks, cascading drips and violent splatters of paint, increasingly took on the energy and scale of abstract expressionism. Later his violent outlook changed, as did his style. He has exhibited his works throughout the United States and Europe.