Chicago, 1921 - Vermont, 1999 — Norman Bluhm was an American abstract expressionist painter.
In his youth, he studied with Mies van der Rohe at the Armour (now Illinois) Institute of Technology. He served during World War II as a bomber pilot and returned to the United States wounded both physically and psychologically.
He decided to abandon his architecture studies to study art, first at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he lived from 1948 to 1956. His close colleagues included artists Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Jean Paul Riopelle, and Zao Wou-ki, as well as critics Michel Tapié and Georges Duthuit. He returned permanently to the United States in 1956 and settled in New York City. He spent the last years of his life in Vermont.
Although he never achieved the same fame as some of his peers, Bluhm was an influential figure in American art and is widely considered a “painter's painter.” His work uses the repetition of organic forms and semi-figurative moments in pure abstraction to create a rhythmic language with paint.
Today, his works can be found in major American museums (Metropolitan Museum and MoMA, NYC; MOCA, Los Angeles; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, etc).
Sources: Wikipedia, Artnet
