Norman Bluhm

Born in Chicago in 1921, Bluhm took a somewhat circuitous route to becoming an artist. He studied architecture at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) under Mies van der Rohe for three years before he enlisted 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 upon his later career as a painter, in which he would incorporate the sense of space and the feeling of speed.

After the war ended, Bluhm briefly returned to Chicago and in 1947, decided to devote himself to art. For a short time, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence, but then settled in Paris from 1947- 1956. There he attended both the Académie de la Grand Chaumière and the Ecole des Beaux Arts and came to know as Alberto Giacometti and other modern painters. In 1956, Bluhm moved to New York City and soon began showing his works at such renowned galleries as Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson in Manhattan and Galerie Stadler in Paris. From the late 1950s until his death in 1999, Bluhm exhibited regularly in group and solo shows throughout America and abroad.

As James Harithas wrote “the 1950s and 1960s gave rise to a powerful new generation of Abstract Expressionists. It consisted of artists such as Norman Bluhm, John Chamberlain, Al Leslie, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Di Suvero who approached the style with a profound commitment to take it to the next level. A sophisticated and sympathetic grasp of their European cultural roots and a greater emphasis on basics-composition, drawing, color, surface quality and structure-distinguish their approach.