Norman Bluhm biography

- NORMAN BLUHM PICTURER

 

Norman Bluhm was an American artist and one of the leading figures in abstract expressionism and action painting.

Born in Chicago in 1921, he studied architecture at the Armor Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology) under Mies van der Rohe before enlisting in the United States Army Air Corps in 1941. Most scholars agree that his experience as a B-26 pilot during the war, flying missions over North Africa and Europe, had a profound effect on his subsequent career as an artist, influencing it with a sense of space and speed.

After the end of the war, Norman Bluhm briefly returns to Chicago and in 1947 decides to dedicate himself to art. He studies for a short period at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, then settles in Paris from 1947 to 1956. In the city of light, the artist attends both the Académie de la Grand Chaumière and the Ecole des Beaux Arts and meets Alberto Giacometti and other contemporary painters. In 1956, he moves to New York City and soon begins exhibiting in renowned galleries such as Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson in Manhattan and Galerie Stadler in Paris. From the late '50s until his death in 1999, the American painter regularly exhibited in group and solo shows throughout America and abroad."

Norman Bluhm was able to reconstitute gestural abstraction into agile forms, saturated with color and eroticism, evoking a wide range of associations, from the fleshy nudes of Peter Paul Rubens to the sunlit clouds of Giovanni Battista. For this reason, he never received the recognition he deserved, also because the artist, unlike many of his generation, never abandoned painting nor rejected the past. On the contrary, he believed that all of the past was at his disposal and was indeed a frequent visitor to the Metropolitan Museum, which he visited during his numerous trips from East Wallingford in Vermont, where he lived since 1987, to New York.

Norman Bluhm also stands out from his contemporaries, such as Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell, for his use of saturated colors and for the layers of shapes he skillfully compresses into his paintings. Regardless of the depth of the artist's illusionistic space, he always draws attention to the surface of the painting, sometimes with blunt and suggestive means like drops and splashes reminiscent of pollen, milk, or sperm, bursting into rounded forms.

The curved shapes of Bluhm, often marked by sinuous lines that fold back on themselves, synthesize the dynamic and languid, fleshy and fluid forms that move across the surface of the painting. By outlining the contour of his shapes with another color, he created a pulsating effect similar to a halo.

Norman Bluhm was deeply aware of the relationship between paintings and their architectural environment. Both in formats and compositions, he alludes to sacred spaces, altars, and ceilings, and to the desire to elevate our mortal forms to the sky. He was a sensualist in search of the spiritual, and his paintings extend the prelapsarian joy found in Henri Matisse's "Bonheur de Vivre."

His work anticipates the waterfall paintings of Pat Steir, the floral paintings of Cy Twombly, the use of blacks and pinks, purples and magentas by Judy Ledgerwood, the dense concatenations of Philip Taaffe and his embrace of the occult.

There is a hierarchical system at play in each of his paintings, but marked not by a clearly defined power system, but by ambiguity and beauty. It is a hierarchy that does not rise through upward-moving aspirations; its movement is instead simultaneously internal and external, a totality of imaginal movement. Its liberating architecture opens the mind's eye to the potential powers of sympathy and compassion, states in which we can more clearly experience the altruistic impulse that connects us to the world and the world to ourselves, a world pregnant with lives and energies.

Norman Bluhm passed away on February 3, 1999. He worked continuously and consistently until his death. His artwork invites us to the fullness of being as our birthright. It is a work that insists on the fact that the world is beautiful, terrible, and desperate, calling us to live.