Fritz Bultman - Abstract Expressionism - New York School of art

Fritz Bultman (April 4, 1919 – July 20, 1985) was an American Abstract expressionist painter, sculptor, and collagist and a member of the New York School of artists.A. Fred Bultman was the second child and only son of A. Fred and Pauline Bultman. His family was prominent in New Orleans, where his father owned a Catholic funeral company. By the age of thirteen he was interested in art, and worked with Morris Graves, who was a family friend. As a high school junior in 1935 Fritz went to study in Munich for two years,and there boarded with Maria Hofmann, the wife of artist and teacher Hans Hofmann. After returning to the United States he studied with Hofmann in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Despite his father's wishes that he become an architect, with Hofmann's encouragement he decided instead to continue his study of art. In 1944 he bought a house in Provincetown, and thenceforth Bultman and his wife Jeanne divided their time between Cape Cod and New York City.His early paintings have been described as "rough and painterly", an amalgam of symbolism and geometry.
Bultman was exhibiting with other abstract expressionists by the late 1940s, and in 1950 was aligned with the group of New York School artists, nicknamed the "Irascibles" in an article in Life magazine,who signed a letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art protesting the institution's conservative policies. With the assistance of a grant from Italy he studied bronze casting in Florence in 1951; subsequently he was the sole abstract expressionist to fully integrate sculpture into his oeuvre.Wikipedia

 

"The art and life of Fritz Bultman evolved in three of the most vital American art centers of the twentieth century: New Orleans; New York City; and Provincetown, Massachusetts. His academic studies in Germany and his architectural training at the New Bauhaus in Chicago brought him into contact with the principles of Bauhaus design principles as well as modern art and architecture in Germany. Raised in New Orleans, and recognized as a significant artist and teacher in New York, Bultman was also a resident and central figure in the Provincetown art colony in the summer resort community at the tip of Cape Cod.Bultman possessed an openness to expressing his vision in diverse media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, collage, and the stained glass for which he became especially well known. In addition to his interests in architecture and design, his eclectic tastes may have been nurtured by his exposure to the principles of the Bauhaus, a school of design in Weimar Republic-era Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts and had a profound modernist influence upon art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, and industrial design in the first half of the twentieth century. This became evident with his unique role as a painter and sculptor in the Abstract Expressionist movement, marked by his search for expressive forms in stone, bronze, and other materials."(Author: J. Richard Gruber)