On the Fritz

If he hadn’t been studying bronze casting in Italy at the time the movement known as Abstract Expressionism was first coined and celebrated by LIFE magazine in 1951, Louisiana native Fritz Bultman would be as famous as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning are today. These contemporaries praised his vivid work, but a geographical miscue led to his absence from the New York City birth of one of the 20th century’s most memorable artistic trends.

Bultman’s work is showcased in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, but now through Jan. 5, the Louisiana Art & Science Museum in Baton Rouge has 50 vibrantly colored and large-scale pieces by the late artist.

Robert Motherwell called Bultman the most “shockingly underrated” painter of his generation, but at least one publication was paying attention. In 1950, Art Digest wrote that Bultman’s work had a “fierceness that strikes at the heart.”

Sixty-three years later, it still does. lasm.org