Norman Bluhm, Tertia Aemilia, 1972, remains on view as part of an exhibition of the artist’s paintings from 1967-74 at Loretta Howard Gallery, 525 West 26th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, (212) 695-0164, until May 27.
“As intense as his subject matter is,” writes John Yau in the catalog accompanying this exhibition, “Bluhm never becomes ponderous or didactic. He could be erotic, funny, and serious all at once, an ability that he and his friend, the poet Frank O’Hara, shared. There is a supple gracefulness to Bluhm’s paintings that feels as choreographed and inevitable as Fred Astaire’s defiance of gravity. His hybrid forms often evoke bodies, landscapes, or clouds, but they resist any literal interpretation. And yet for all the masking and deliberate ambiguity that the artist achieves in his painting, the underlying subject, which is to say the perception that you cannot ever get away from, is ecstasy.”
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