Fritz Bultman

Fritz Bultman (1919-1985) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter, sculptor, and collage artist whose work formed an important part of the first generation of the New York School. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a family with deep cultural interests, he pursued his artistic training with unusual seriousness from an early age. As a teenager he traveled to Munich to study with Hans Hofmann in the mid-1930s, an experience that placed him at the heart of the transatlantic transmission of European modernist principles into American painting. He later continued his studies with Hofmann at the master's New York school, becoming one of Hofmann's most gifted and lifelong students.

Bultman divided his adult life between New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he became a central figure in the important artistic community that gathered on the tip of Cape Cod. His work evolved through several distinct phases, moving from early expressionist paintings deeply informed by Hofmann's push-pull theories of color and space toward the ambitious cut-paper collages and gouache works for which he is most celebrated. These collages, often large in scale and jewel-like in color, brought a distinctly personal vocabulary to postwar American abstraction and demonstrated Bultman's belief in the collage medium as a serious vehicle for major artistic statements.

Bultman also produced stained glass and sculpture, and he taught at Hunter College and Pratt Institute, influencing a generation of younger artists. He was included among the "Irascibles" who protested the Metropolitan Museum's conservative approach to contemporary art in 1950. His paintings and collages are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan, and other major American museums.