Norman Bluhm biography
- NORMAN BLUHM PAINTER
Norman Bluhm was an American artist among the greatest exponents of abstract expressionism and action painting.
Born in Chicago in 1921, he studied architecture at the Armor Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) under Mies van der Rohe before enlisting in United States Army Air Corps in 1941. Most scholars agree that his experience as a B-26 pilot during wartime flying missions over North Africa and Europe had a profound effect on his subsequent career as an artist by influencing him with a sense of space and speed.
After the end of the war, Norman Bluhm returned briefly to Chicago and in 1947 decided to devote himself to art. He studied for a short period at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and then settled in Paris from 1947 to 1956. In the ville lumière the artist attended both the Académie de la Grand Chaumière and the Ecole des Beaux Arts and met Alberto Giacometti and other contemporary painters. In 1956, he moved to New York City and soon began exhibiting in renowned galleries such as Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson in Manhattan and Galerie Stadler in Paris. From the late 1950s until his death in 1999, the American painter exhibited regularly in group and solo exhibitions throughout America and abroad.
Norman Bluhm was able to reconstitute gestural abstraction into lithe, color-saturated, erotic forms, which evoke a wide range of associations, from the fleshy nudes of Peter Paul Rubens to the sunny clouds of John the Baptist. For this reason he has never received due recognition, also because the artist, unlike many of his generation, never abandoned painting nor rejected the past. On the contrary, he believed that the entire past was at his disposal and was in fact a regular 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 distinguishes himself from his contemporaries, such as Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell, by his use of saturated colors and the layers of form that he artfully compresses into his paintings. Regardless of the depth of the artist's illusionistic space, he always calls attention to the surface of the painting, sometimes with frank and suggestive means such as drops and splashes reminiscent of pollen, milk or sperm, bursting into rounded shapes.
Bluhm's curved forms, often marked by sinuous lines that fold back on themselves, summarize the dynamic and languid, fleshy and fluid forms that move on the surface of the painting. By outlining his shapes with another color, he created a pulsating halo-like effect.
Norman Bluhm was acutely aware of the relationship between paintings and their architectural surroundings. Both in formats and compositions it alludes to sacred spaces, altars and ceilings, and 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 inHenri Matisse's "Bonheur de Vivre".
His work anticipates the waterfall paintings of Pat Steir, the floral paintings of Cy Twombly,
There is a hierarchical system at play in each of his paintings, but marked not by a clearly defined system of power, but by ambiguity and beauty. It is a hierarchy that does not rise through upwardly mobile 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 life and energy.
Norman Bluhm passed away on February 3, 1999. He worked continuously and consistently until his death. His work invites us into the fullness of being as our birthright. It is a work that insists that the world is beautiful, terrible and desperate that calls us to live.
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