Themes of mortality and spirituality in the long-neglected art of a
midcentury American pioneer
"Bloom's unsettling paintings are fueled by a sense of existence as a
state of spiritual emergency and of art as a means for transfiguring
fear." -Holland Cotter, Art in America
Hyman Bloom was a contemporary of Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and
Arshile Gorky. This new study focuses on Bloom's paintings and drawings
of human corpses, anatomical studies and archeological excavations from
the 1940s and 1950s. He often returned to these subjects throughout his
career, using thickly applied paint in rich colors as he aspired to
present both the physical and the spiritual on canvas.
Insightful curatorial essays accompanied by beautiful full-color
reproductions explore this difficult but compelling work, considering
themes such as the life, death and rebirth of Bloom's artistic
reputation; the growing divide between figuration and abstraction at
this defining moment of American art; earlier artistic traditions of
representing mortality; the relationship between these works and Bloom's
Judaism, interest in Eastern religions, and belief in reincarnation; and
the artist's desire to find beauty and meaning within death and decay.
In these drawings and paintings, as Bloom himself asserted, "the paradox
of the harrowing and the beautiful [can] be brought into unity."
Hyman Bloom (1913-2009) was born in Lithuania, now Latvia. He and
his family immigrated to the United States in 1920, escaping
anti-Semitic persecution. He lived and worked in the Boston area until
his death. His work is held in many public collections, including the
Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Whitney
Museum of American Art and others.
