Walter Kuhlman  Walter Kuhlman (1918–2009) was a 20th-century American painter and printmaker. In the late 1940s and 1950s, he was a core member of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism. He later worked in a representational style related to American Figurative Expressionism. Walter Kuhlman was born in 1918 in St Paul, Minnesota to Peter and Marie Kuhlman, Danish immigrants. Part of his childhood was spent living with an aunt in Saeby, a coastal town in northern Denmark. In 1936, Kuhlman enrolled at the St. Paul School of Art, where he studied with Cameron Booth (1892–1980), a modernist who had trained in Europe with André Lhote and Hans Hofmann. Kuhlman completed his studies at the St. Paul School in 1939, and then taught there. He was also enrolled at the University of Minnesota, from which he earned a bachelor's degree in 1941. During World War II, Kuhlman was drafted into the U.S. Navy and assigned a position as a medical illustrator. He married his first wife, Nora, who was also in military service. After both were discharged in 1945, the couple lived briefly in New Orleans and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Kuhlman enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in 1947. (This is now the San Francisco Art Institute.) The CSFA faculty, notably Clyfford Still, encouraged an exploration of Abstract Expressionism and thus established San Francisco as a recognized center distinct from the New York School. Kuhlman was among the core group of San Francisco Abstract Expressionists. At this time, Kuhlman became interested in printmaking. He joined five other artists associated with CSFA – Richard Diebenkorn, James Budd Dixon, John Hultberg, Frank Lobdell, and George Stillman – to create a portfolio of 17 lithographs. This 1948 portfolio, titled "Drawings," has been acknowledged as a landmark in Abstract Expressionist printmaking. The group has been referred to as "The Sausalito Six," because most, including Kuhlman, lived in Sausalito, north of San Francisco. Kuhlman also produced important intaglio prints at CFSA. The artist went to Paris in 1950, and he was among a group of Americans who exhibited in the 1951 Salon des réalités nouvelles (or "new realities").