A Blood on the Moon Fierceness: Fritz Bultman’s Paintings and Collages
Fritz Blutman, “Rosa Park” ( 1958) (All images courtesy Estate of Fritz Bultman and Edelman Arts, New York)
“Painting deals with paradox,” wrote the artist Fritz Bultman in a notebook he titled Time and Nature, “For paradox offers us a tantalizing choice that is purely human and it is as a human document, not as a stylistic development, that art has a reason for existence.”
For Bultman, who unfortunately missed his photo-op as one of “The Irascibles” (the group of Abstract Expressionist painters made famous by a 1951 photograph in Life magazine), the paradox in painting was bridging nature and art. On view now at Edelman Arts is an exhibition of some of Bultman’s most important work, offering a rare opportunity to experience the artist’s struggle with this elusive paradox. The exhibition marks the first exhibition of Bultman’s work held in New York in nearly a decade. (The last exhibition was held in 2004 at Gallery Schlesinger, Bultman’s primary advocate since 1982.)
Fritz Bultman (1919–1985) was among the artists associated with the first generation of the New York School. He split his time between Provincetown and New York and counted among his close friends icons like Hans Hoffman, Lee Krasner, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Tony Smith, and Jack Tworkov.
In 1950, Bultman signed the historic letter protesting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s indifference to Abstract Expressionism and other forms of advanced art. Labeled by the press as “The Irascibles,” the group included almost all the artists who would achieve international acclaim as Abstract Expressionists. Unfortunately Bultman was studying sculpture in Italy at the time and missed the photo shoot for Nina Leen’s famous photograph, published in the January 15, 1951 issue of Life magazine. His absence from the iconic group portrait undoubtedly denied him a more prominent place in the history of post-war American art. Robert Motherwell proclaimed that of all the painters of his generation, Bultman was “the one [most] drastically and shockingly underrated.”
