Norman Bluhm: Action painting's true champion

Norman Bluhm’s life and work stand as one of the purest, most textbook examples of why action painting emerged in the postwar era. During World War II, Bluhm served in the United States Air Force as a B-26 bomber pilot and flew 44 missions over North Africa and Europe, most notably the mission over Romania that destroyed the Nazis’ last major oil supply—at the cost of approximately 75% of American bomber crews. Upon his return home, Bluhm chose not to resume his architectural studies and instead pursued art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy, as well as at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he lived in Paris.

Sioux, painted in 1961, stands as a visceral tribute to the essence of action painting, as it feels “compelled into existence.” Bluhm reflected on this period in an interview, stating: “Well, I think the fifties and sixties had a lot to do with the anger, the energy of that time, the postwar energy of even America, so to speak, and this kind of endeavor to make something that was American, greater than most people would accept.”
This painting was exhibited in Art from American Embassies: Mexico at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965, and later traveled to the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.