About FRITZ BULTMAN

Fritz Bultman (1919 - 1985) was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor, and collagist and a member of the New York School. 

Fritz Bultman was born to a prominent New Orleans family. By the age of thirteen Bultman showed an interest in art and worked with artist and family friend Morris Graves. As a high school junior in 1935 Bultman 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 Bultman studied with Hofmann in New York City and Provincetown Massachusetts. Despite Bultman's father's wishes that he become an architect, with Hofmann's encouragement Fritz decided instead to continue his study of art. In 1944 he bought a house in Provincetown, and thenceforth his wife Jeanne divided their time between Cape Cod and New York City.

Fritz Bultman's early paintings have been described as "rough and painterly," an amalgam of symbolism and geometry. Bultman exhibited with other abstract expressionists by the late 1940s, and in 1950 aligned himself 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 Bultman studied bronze casting in Florence in 1951; subsequently he was the sole abstract expressionist to fully integrate sculpture into his oeuvre.

Affected by anxiety and depression, Bultman worked little between 1952 and 1956, and resumed painting and sculpting after undergoing Freudian analysis. At a time when African Americans were prohibited from visiting white museums in the south, in 1963 Bultman and his wife led a group of prominent New York artists and writers in the creation of a collection of modern art for Tougaloo College, a black institution in Jackson, Mississippi. Bultman was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1964-1965 to work in Paris. In the 1960s Bultman began to make large collages, using pre-painted paper cut or torn and assembled into shapes reminiscent of his figurative drawings and more abstract sexual symbolism. In 1976 he began making stained glass windows with the aid of his wife. 

Fritz Bultman died of cancer in 1985. 

It has been suggested that Bultman's career and subsequent reputation suffered from the vagaries of chance: Bultman was not available for inclusion in the now iconic photo shoot for Life magazine that helped establish the reputations of the New York School painters. Another possibility, according to Robert Motherwell, was Bultman's lack of interest in "art world politics".

Whatever the reasons of the time, Fritz Bultman must be considered when one considers the development and progression of the modern American art movement.