Oil on canvas
Signed, dated, titled and with an indication of direction on the reverse. 290 x 330 cm (114,1 x 129,9 in)

We are grateful to the Estate of Norman Bluhm, Vermont for their help in cataloging this lot. The work will be included in the forthcoming catalog raisonné.

PROVENANCE: Collection Michel Tapié, Paris.

Born in Chicago in 1921, Norman Bluhm was admitted to the Armour Institute of Technology at the precocious age of sixteen, where he studied architecture with Mies van der Rohe from 1936 until 1941 as one of the youngest students at the Institute. After service in the US armed forces during the Second World War, Bluhm moved to Italy and began to study art at the Academia de Bella Arte in Florence. Only a year later he moved on to Paris, completing his art training at the École des Beaux-Arts. Drawing inspiration from both the traditional and modern influences to which he was exposed in Paris, Bluhm soon arrived at a style of his own and forged close ties with artists such as Sam Francis, Jean Paul Riopelle and Zao Wou-Ki. In 1956 Norman Bluhm returned to the US and settled in New York City, where he had his first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1957.

Stylistically, Bluhm is numbered among the second generation of New York Abstract Expressionists following on Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline and Wilhelm de Kooning. Nevertheless, his work remained relatively free of influences from other artists. Bluhm worked out his own inimitable signature attesting to his intensive preoccupation with his feelings and experiences. The monumental works Bluhm produced in the 1960s express enormous vitality and immediacy while at the same time attesting to Bluhm’s artistic maturity and assurance.

The artist lived with his family in New York City until 1969. In the 1980s suggestions of figurative and ornamental elements surfaced in his works, lending them a decorative component. Norman Bluhm died in his house in East Wallingford, Vermont, in 1999. [NB].

Good overall impression.