Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death
Museum of Fine Art, Boston, through Feb. 23
It can be hard to look at some of
Hyman Bloom’s best paintings, said
Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe. Because the Boston-based Latvian immigrant often painted cadavers that had been flayed open by medical examiners, “the mind recoils at what the eye drinks in, radiant color swiped in exultant strokes.” Bloom’s cadaver paintings have always been controversial: In 1954, protesters in
Buffalo had them removed from a midcareer retrospective of his work.
But viewer discomfort alone doesn’t explain why Bloom (1913–2009) faded into obscurity long before his death. Though Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning once praised him as “the first abstract expressionist,” the shy, limelight-shunning Bloom rejected that label and set himself outside the main wave and story of the era by continuing to produce figurative work. The MFA’s current show proves he should be counted among our 20th-century masters. “That it provokes, stirs, and disturbs only makes it more compelling.” Bloom’s cadaver paintings belong in a long tradition, but their origin was highly personal, said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. In 1941, a close friend of his killed herself, and he was asked to identify the body at a morgue. The experience “profoundly altered both his inner life and the trajectory of his art.” He believed he’d glimpsed, in the way color and life seem to be restored to bodies under dissection, evidence that death was not the end but a metamorphosis. Two years later he began visiting morgues and rendering what he saw there in electrifying jewel tones and thick impasto strokes. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Rembrandt had all studied cadavers to master human anatomy, but Bloom’s interest went further. “What really preoccupied him was the profound intertwining, the ultimate indivisibility, of life and death.” Given his Jewish background, it’s natural to see the paintings and drawings he produced across the next dozen or more years as a response to the Holocaust. In any case, they comprise “one of the most extraordinary and disturbingly beautiful bodies of work in American art.”
“At times, one could say Bloom’s symbolism becomes too much, but that seems to me a quibble rather than a fault,” said John Yau in Hyperallergic.com. Bloom was essentially a genre painter who produced still lifes, portraits, and landscapes that frequently come across as explorations of the continuum between life and death, matter and light. “I have no doubt of his greatness, no matter how unsettling his work may be. There should be a place in this world where disquieting visions are more fully honored,” and “the fact that Bloom has been rediscovered after years of neglect is a step in the right direction.”