ABOUT THE ARTIST
American, 1921 - 1999
Norman Bluhm is an important figure in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, He enjoyed substantial critical success during his lifetime. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Exhibitions include: Carnegie Institute, 1958 “American Abstract Image”, Guggenheim Museum, 1961 “Two Decades of American Painting”, Museum of Modern Art, 1966 “Large Scale American Painting”, Jewish Museum, 1967 Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1970’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1969 (solo) and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1959, 1972.
It was Mid-1950s in New York, that Bluhm began a lifelong successful career as an Abstract Expressionist painter. He was part of a vibrant and glamorous "movement", socializing with a handful of art-world titans and collaborating with the curator and poet Frank O'Hara to create a legendary collection of "Poem Paintings." Some of the highest priced and most desirable works come from the 1950s. 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