Norman Bluhm

Like Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell, Bluhm was one of the most powerful so-called second-generation Abstract Expressionists (more accurately second-decade) and, also like them, among the few who remained consistently faithful to this aesthetic.After four years as a bomber pilot [in World War II] - a visual and psychological experience that had a lasting effect on the artist and his work - Bluhm returned briefly in 1945 to Chicago, his birthplace, to resume studies with Mies van der Rohe. Seeking greater artistic freedom, he left the same year to enroll at the Academie de Belle Arte in Florence and two years later went on to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a city he loved and would return to frequently. There, in 1953, he shared a studio with Sam Francis. This relationship, on top of Bluhm's having seen an exhibition of Jackson Pollock's dripped paintings two years before, led to such works as Bleeding Rain, 1956, a perfectly titled painting inspired by the styles of both artists. But during the previous summer in New York, Bluhm had met de Kooning and Kline, and under their influence the direction of his work soon changed from allover abstraction to the use of broad brush-strokes, sometimes with figurative associations.When Bluhm returned to Paris before settling permanently in New York in 1956, he met Joan Mitchell, who reinforced his change of direction. At that time Jean-Paul Riopelle, whom he had known since 1949, gave Bluhm his studio. In this large space Bluhm's work became both greater in scale and increasingly gestural, encouraging him to use his entire body rather than only his hand and arm. In New York he established a close relationship with the critic Thomas B. Hess and one, closer still and more important to his career, with the poet, sometime critic, and MOMA associate curator Frank O'Hara.It was in 1959 that Bluhm's career first peaked. He had his second one-person show at Leo Castelli Gallery and his first at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan; was included in Documenta II in Kassel as well as in various other important group shows; and completed a series of twenty-six collaborative poem-paintings with O'Hara. In these drawings, as in, for example, the Whitney Museum's The Anvil, 1959, having completely assimilated the work of his predecessors, his style was his own. In many other paintings of 1959 (Chicago, 1920 and Winter Nights) and of 1960 (Balaclava and Sculpture's Landscape), Bluhm's slashing, dripping brushstrokes, aggressive power, and sensitive palette became his "signature," one no more mistakable for those of Kline or de Kooning than his drips were for Pollock's. In 1961 Fred McDarrah took his famous photograph of Bluhm balancing acrobatically on a ladder as he completed a sweeping brushstroke. The shot, as full of energy and information as any of Hans Namuth's photographs of Pollock, deservedly became the cover image of McDarrah's The Artist's World in Pictures.B.H. Friedman Artforum International Magazine, Inc.Source: http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m0268/8_37/54454979/p1/article.jhtml