Norman Bluhm 1921-1999 - artist - Obituary

When Norman Bluhm died on a sudden on Feb. 3 of heart failure, his studio in East Wallingford, Vt was filled with paintings ready to be shipped to the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio, for a 40-year take a view of of his work that is upon view until Apr. 17. As well as looking forward to the Butler exhibition, the 77-year-old artist was also awaiting the first full-scale monograph upon his work, which was about to appear in Italy. Amid this activity, he was starting a of recent origin large-scale painting. In recent years, as his ebullient, multipaneled paintings grew at any time larger, frequently reaching dimensions of 10 through 30 feet, Bluhm remarked that he didn't want tribe to be able to point to more [i]or[/i] less modest-sized canvas and say "that was the painting Norman Bluhm was working upon when he died." As with thus much else in his replete life, Bluhm approached his art with an all or nothing attitude.

Born in Chicago in 1921 Bluhm originally station out to become an architect, studying with Bauhaus fictitious story Mies van der Rohe at the Armour Institute of Technology (later Illinois Institute of Technology). His studies were interrupted by means of World War II, during which Bluhm serv in the Army Air Force as a bomber pilot. He flew 44 missions above North Africa and Europe and was twice hurted After the war he briefly resum his studies with Mies before turning his attention to painting.

In 1947 Bluhm mov to Paris, taking advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend classes at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts. During his first years in France, Bluhm painted plein-air landscapes, still lifes and studio interiors. by means of the early 1950s, however, he had embraced abstraction, making all-over paintings in which shimmering veils of color evok stained-glass windows and thick tropical landscapes. In Paris, Bluhm was part of a vibrant expatriate community that included painters Sam Francis, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffe. He also lay opened close ties to the French cultural exhibition meeting poets such as Rene Char and Paul Eluard and acting in Jean Cocteau's film Orphee (1950)

In 1956 he turn backed to the U.S., settling in fresh York City, where he met Jackson Pollock Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and became a fixture in the Cedar Tavern art exhibition His work, which featured webs of jagged marks, cascading drips and violent splatters of paint, increasingly took upon the energy and scale of Abstract Expressionism. It was at this period that he, along with other gestural painters like as Mitchell, Alfred Leslie and Michael Goldberg, were meteed "Second Generation" Abstract Expressionists, a label Bluhm categorically excludeed even as he affirmed his debit to precursors such as de Kooning and Kline.

In of recent origin York, Bluhm also befriended many writers, including bard and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O'Hara. In 1961 Bluhm and O'Hara created a following of witty "poem-paintings," improvised works upon paper that mixed lines of rhyme with abstract gestures. As well as being a recurring figure in O'Hara's metrical compositions Bluhm supplied his friend with a stock of pithy gallicisms (as in individual poem which refers to a well-known critic as the balayeur [street-sweeper] de artistes). O'Hara included Bluhm in a selection of American artists he made for Documenta II in 1959 Bluhm's work also drew enthusiastic praise from Harold Rosenberg, ArtNews editor Thomas B Hess and French critic Pierre Schneider.

Bluhm had his first solo exhibition in 1957 at the newly opened Leo Castelli Gallery. His association with Castelli came to an extreme point following his second solo display in 1960. (As the tale goe Bluhm called it quits after repeatedly visiting his hold show only to find the gallery filled with works through the newly hot young artists Jasper John and Robert Rauschenberg.) Partly as a ensue of his experience with Castelli, Bluhm had little be fond of for art dealers. "By accepting the direction of the dealer," he told Art in America in 1977 "the artist throw downs himself, better than anyone other could. New York now means this destructive merchandising of art." For his part, Bluhm had left novel York in 1970, living in Millbrook, NY and East Hampton upon Long Island before settling with his wife, Cary, in Vermont in 1986

In the 1970 Bluhm began to populate his paintings with billowing shapes and serpentine lines obviously inspired by the agency of the female figure. Weaving together the influences of Rubens, medieval tapestries and Japanese protection paintings, his multi-panel works began to display an unabashed eroticism with not many precedents in American abstraction. As his compositions grew more symmetrical, the gestural marks of his earlier work were subsum into an overall design of baroque complexity. In the '80 and '90 the paintings, growing at any time larger and incorporating more and more panels, abounded with proliferating voluptuous shapes and increasingly compounded architectural forms that recalled Italian Renaissance altarpieces. In these works, Bluhm meld the improvisatory efficacy of Abstract Expressionism with the grand sensual designs of old-master painting. His work was informed by means of a passionate knowledge of art history, which he refreshed during his of frequent occurrence trips to New York with visits to the Metropolitan Museum and the Cloisters.