Norman Bluhm (1921-1999)

Born in Chicago in 1921, Norman Bluhm initially studied architecture at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) under Mies van der Rohe for three years, before  enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941. Most scholars agree that his experience as a B-26 pilot during the war 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 fully 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, where he became acquainted with many prominent European modernists and a growing exodus of American expatriates such as Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell.

In 1956, Bluhm moved to New York and soon began showing his works at such renowned galleries as Leo Castelli and Martha Jackson in Manhattan, as well as Galerie Stadler back in Paris. From the late 1950s until his death in 1999, Bluhm exhibited regularly in group and solo shows at some of the leading institutions and galleries in both the U.S. and Europe, becoming associated with what would come to be known as the second generation Abstract Expressionists.

Bluhm’s work may be found in many private and public collections around the world, including in such permanent collections as: the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, TX; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, Wales; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Norman Bluhm died in 1999 at the age of 78 in East Wallingford, Vermont. Bluhm continues to enjoy critical and commercial success well after his death; his work the subject of a major solo retrospective in 2022 with Miles McEnery Gallery in New York.

Source: Hollis Taggart and Miles McEnery Gallery