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Press Release

An important member of the New York School, Bluhm boldly created his own aesthetic of gestural marks, vivid colors, and sensual imagery out of the Abstract Expressionism movement. James Graham & Sons will exhibit five examples of the artist's works on paper from the 1980s selected from his Estate that represent the diversity of his oeuvre.

Born in Chicago in 1921, Bluhm was already a student of the Bauhaus architect Mies van de Rohe at the Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago by the age of sixteen. After serving in World War II as a bomber pilot, Bluhm studied in Paris on the GI Bill, shared a studio with Sam Francis and was associated with Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle. In the late 1950s, Bluhm moved to New York City, where he showed at Leo Castelli Gallery. In the early 1960s, he married Cary Ogle and moved his family first to Paris and later to Millbrook, New York. A retrospective of his work was held at the Corcoran Museum in 1968. In the 1970s, Bluhm showed with the Martha Jackson Gallery, and in the 1980s, he was represented by Joan Washburn Gallery. Bluhm spent the last decades of his life in Vermont, where he died in 1999. His work is currently held in many public collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.