Barry Schwabsky on Norman Bluhm
Frank O’Hara contrasted the artwork of Norman Bluhm (1921–1999) with that of Jasper Johns, saying, “Johns’s enterprise is to withstand need, Bluhm unconsciously evokes it.” Maybe the poet’s comment helped flip Bluhm’s instinctive aesthetic objective right into a extra deliberate venture. In any case, by the top of the Nineteen Sixties, Bluhm’s imagery had swerved from the gestural abstraction for which he’d turn out to be well-known to a mode of portray that, whereas nonetheless nonrepresentational, was nonetheless extremely evocative of the physique; the work’s aggressive power had morphed right into a extra seductive sensuality. This, apparently, was not what the artwork world had ordered. Fred W. McDarrah’s {photograph} of Bluhm throwing paint onto an enormous canvas whereas seemingly dancing on a ladder had encapsulated a sure concept of The Artist’s World in Footage for the quilt of McDarrah’s 1961 e book of that title. However by 1976, Jeff Perrone, reviewing Lawrence Alloway’s 1975 quantity, Matters in American Artwork Since 1945, for Artforum, may illustrate the breadth of the English critic’s pursuits by citing his “shocking dedication to the outcast Norman Bluhm.”
An exhibition that includes half a dozen of Bluhm’s chromatically wealthy work, made between 1975 and 1978, might need induced a present-day viewer to marvel simply why Bluhm grew to become an outcast. At present, in any case, we are able to respect Johns with out committing ourselves to his austerity—which paved the best way for Minimalism and Conceptual artwork—and eschew taking sides towards Bluhm’s hard-won hedonism. We will admit that asceticism, no less than in Johns’s case, is a type of feeling and that sensuality, for Bluhm as for his nice predecessor Henri Matisse, is a type of intelligence. By the point he made these work, Bluhm had transmuted the direct gesture cultivated by the Summary Expressionists into one thing extra indirect through flowingly cursive arabesque strains defining areas which are painted in with broad suave strokes that learn as fluid surfaces, the contours carving and giving definition to clean, mellifluous zones of coloration as drips and splatters create oddly delicate traceries that adorn the works’ bigger kinds.
Whereas the work are largely horizontal in format—typically extraordinarily so, within the case of the twenty-foot-long however solely four-foot-high quadriptych Untitled, Research in Blue, White, Grey, 1975—the constant feeling in them is of a sluggish and circuitous however irresistible ascension on a type of gently billowing whirlwind, an upsweep Tintoretto (whose work Bluhm studied extensively throughout the Nineteen Seventies) or Rubens might need felt, had it been permissible to acknowledge the erotic foundations of such a picture. Bluhm’s regular, curving surfaces insistently evoke the flesh, the human determine, wherein, he held, “all the nice type actually exists.” That the flesh that obsessed him was feminine is attested to by a number of the work’ titles, equivalent to Sooty Girl and Mermaid’s Delight, each 1978. The paradox is that whereas the ensuing imagery is “completely corporeal,” as Jane Livingston wrote in a 1977 catalogue essay for the artist’s work, it by no means resolves into closed natural shapes. And because the pneumatic kinds waft ever upward, they may simply as simply be mingling currents of flowing coloured air or water; quantity and ambiance turn out to be indistinguishable. The viewer is immersed in eddies of enjoyment. Need—as O’Hara might need acknowledged, had he lived into the Nineteen Seventies—grew to become Bluhm’s program for portray.
