Editor's note:
Norman Bluhm's career has taken him through a series of significant moments in the art history of 20th century America. His studies in Chicago with Mies van der Rohe, before and after WWII, exposed him to the Bauhaus-inspired ideas of European exiles which were so crucial to the evolution of American art. In Paris after the war, he joined other young American artists and writers in the vibrant expatriate scene. Moving to New York in the mid '50s, Bluhm became a mainstay of the painters and writers who gathered at the Cedar Tavern, among them Jackson Pollock, William de Kooning, Franz Kline and Frank O'Hara. The Bluhm/O'Hara poem paintings are among the prime artifacts of this legendary group. The following is a composite of two interviews with Norman Bluhm. The first was conducted by John Yau in New York, September 1996. The second was done by Jon Gams at Bluhm's studio in Vermont, January 1997.

t was a Sunday, a dismal day in October, 1960. Frank O'Hara was supposed to come over to my studio and see what I was up to, and then we were going back to my house for lunch. Cary and I lived on 17th Street then, next door to Anton Dvorák, and Frank often came over to our house for lunch on Sundays.

Bang

My studio at the time was the top floor of the old Tiffany Glass building, 333 Park Avenue South. My landlord had found all these sheets of paper in the basement and had given them to me, and I had stapled a lot of them to the walls of my studio. Frank and I were sitting around in the studio, talking, and I believe Prokofiev's "Piano Sonata for Left Hand" was on the radio. We were talking about music. We both liked a lot of the same things, especially late 19th and early 20th-century piano music and opera. Frank played piano beautifully, and I told him that when I was a child I had to play the cello. I only lasted a year, because I was so bad that they finally took the cello away from me. Frank and I often went to the opera together, along with Tom Hess, who was then the editor of Art News. His family had box seats. Of course, Frank liked lots of kinds of music, and so we also used to go to the Five Spot and other jazz clubs together.

At any rate, I was talking about the Prokofiev. I don't remember what I said, but to illustrate my point I took a brush and went up to the paper and made a gesture. And just like that, Frank got up and wrote something, "Bust," or something like that. He was open and quick, and we were talking, and what we did was part of our conversation. Right away, we decided to do some more. I drew a hand; he wrote something. We worked separately and together. The spontaneity of Frank and I doing 26 things at once meant that we would have different connections with different poem paintings. Each one was different. Frank would write something on a sheet of paper while I was in another part of the studio, making a gesture on the paper. It was all instantaneous, like a conversation between friends. You know, going back and forth. Quick and playful. There were no big thoughts, no idea that anyone would be interested in it or that it would ever be shown or published. We were just having fun on what had started out as a dismal Sunday afternoon. And what happened was an interlocking energy of words and art, but to be honest, I think Frank's words are more creative and that my work is just the illustrative factor.

I'm so tired...

I remember once when Frank got angry because I drew a line through a phrase he had written about apples. "Why did you do that?" he asked. "Because I don't like apples." We did a bunch of these and then we went to the house for lunch. Later, we decided to do some more. The second time, we used color. We worked on bigger sheets of paper. I used to draw on butcher block paper, so I put some big sheets of it up — brown butcher block paper. Then the art attempt got heavier. I would say to Frank, "Water is blue. Write something in blue." The whole thing was more arty, more self-concious, whereas the first time it had been instantaneous.

For a long time, the collaborations just lay there in the corner of the studio. I went to Europe in 1964 and left them there. When Frank died in 1966, I felt that I should do something with them, that they shouldn't just sit in the studio because they weren't really mine anymore. I talked with Johnny Myers about them and he said that I should donate them to New York University because they would exhibit them, which they did once.

I didn't give them all to NYU. I gave one to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was the biggest mistake I made, because they've never hung it up. It's just sitting in their storage somewhere. I gave one to Leroi Jones, which got destroyed in a fire, and one to Tom Hess. Helen Hess has that one now. And I gave one to Bill Berkson and kept one for myself — "Haiku", which is in Vermont.

Frank's a great poet and his poems should be out in the world. They shouldn't just sit in storage where no one can see them. That's not why I gave them away.

here are certain elements that every artist likes, which he will always have. He never gets rid of them. For instance, there are gestures in the work that I'm doing now which were present in my '50s paintings, and also in the paintings of the '70s and '80s. But now I'm using this gesture in different ways.

I do not have the physical strength to make the gestures I made in the '60s. The violence in my '60s paintings was there because the violence existed in the man himself. At that period in my life I was always causing trouble. The gesture was part of that violence. I mean, if you hit a canvas with a big brush with a lot of paint on it, you're going to create an atmosphere of violence, and that's what I did then. I do not have that outlook now. And anyway, I would not want to make them. That would be absurd.

The gesture I'm using now encloses the figurelike forms or moves those forms outside of their own design, so to speak. Or in some cases to destroy the form, to give the form a kind of abstract motion in a kind of gothic way, if you wish to say that. Move the form up with the gesture. Another way is to just destroy part of the form by putting a gesture over it or to embrace the form.

May! Am I a pole?

I mean as you use things in the creative process, their meanings change to you. Because what is our vocabulary as a creative individual. It has vast unknowns, some of which you pick up by your knowledge or looking at different periods whether it was Picasso when he looked at African art or Van Gogh maybe when he looked at Japanese art. You know everybody looks at sources, whether they admit it or not. Maybe they only take one little bit of that source and use it but it's all there. I don't mean to be a snob about it but if you're a cultured invididual with a certain intelligence and I believe to be a creative individual in this century, you've got to know something. You cannot stay a poor damn dummy because the idea of being a pure primitive is impossible. Everybody listens to the radio, they watch TV. They go to the movies and if they don't go to the movies or watch TV, they are still there and it's still in the atmosphere. The idea of a primitive is passé.

My new works have an architectural element in them. I start by drawing with a brush, in ocher. It's a method which basically comes out of frescoes — I studied fresco painting in Italy in the '40s. What I want to do now is use the idea of the cartoon as it was used in fresco painting in the 15th century.

Today a lot of painters, and a lot of abstract painters, don't draw at all. They don't even know how to draw. I've always thought that one of the great elements of great art is drawing. From the Renaissance to Matisse and Picasso, and even the Impressionists — every one of the greater painters could draw.

I think as you get older, your knowledge naturally increases. Your desires become, and I don't mean this in a religious context, more spiritual. The work has become more spiritual. The desire is to create another kind of space, another form of color.

There I was...

hen I was in Paris in the late '40s and early '50s, artists were part of a larger unit of creative people. I knew actors, as well as poets like Paul Eluard and René Char and painters like Jean-Paul Riopelle. When I came to New York, it was just the painters and a few poets. But the big difference in New York was the gigantic force, the energy and desire to create an art form. You can call it Abstract Expressionism but I don't even like that word any more. It's a boring word and that energy was utterly fantastic. And the relationship among artists was at a very high level.

For instance, at the Cedar one night — the "cathedral of Abstract Expressionism" as I call it — a big collector or dealer or museum person, whatever he was, came in. We had been drinking quite a bit and he went up to Franz (Kline) and he said, "Franz, I will be at your studio tomorrow at 10." And Franz says "Oh yes? Well, I'll tell you what we'll do. You can come to my studio at 10, and then at 11 we'll go to Norman's and at 12 we'll go to Bill's." The man said, "I don't have time for all that." Franz says, "Then you don't have time to come to my studio!"

At that moment in my life I certainly was not at the level of Bill (de Kooning) and Franz, but still there was a kind of friendship and respect among us because of the mere fact that we were all in the same boat. Maybe it's changed now, but the '50s in New York had respect and energy.