Hyman Bloom: Contemplation of Eternal Things
by Alfred Werner
Terry Dintenfass Gallery Exhibition Essay, April, 1975
Almost exactly two decades after his retrospective show in New York City, some of Hyman Bloom’s remarkable, but not sufficiently known, creations are presented here at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery. Those who attended the exhibition of 1955 are likely to recall Bloom’s fascination with Jewish themes, such as worshippers in a synagogue; and with images of death and decay, such as corpses of animals and men. None of the visitors to the Whitney Museum, I believe, has forgotten those Expressionist oils and drawings, the former on account of their rich, jewel-like colors, the latter for their black-and-white mystery of dynamic lines.
Bloom — reticent, introspective, with a philosophical bent of mind now reveals to the art world some of his preoccupations of recent years, works linked to those of the earlier part of his career by the same seriousness of intention, the same depth of penetration into the subject matter. A resident of metropolitan Boston, he has often ventured into whatever remnants of untamed, natural landscape has been left by mere chance in New England. But while he was inspired by what he saw in the woods of Maine, the results of his stays there are more like a Surrealist’s dreams than a geologist’s or a botanist’s renderings of the perceived scene. Topographical correctness was never his concern. His is a visionary type of landscape, in which rocks, trees, bushes and brooks seem to play roles like untaught actors in an unrehearsed drama.
Comparisons with revered works from the distant past force themselves upon the spectator. The names of Albrecht Altdorfer, Hercules Seghers and, in particular, Matthias Grünewald quickly spring to mind. It is no small compliment to Bloom to suggest that his new paintings are somewhat reminiscent of the panel in the Isenheim Altar showing the visit of St. Anthony to St. Paul. Each of the Blooms at the gallery could have served as a meeting-place for these saints, seated as they are amidst luxuriant vegetation (though the 16th century German master dared to add southern palms to the deciduous trees, whereas his 20th century “follower” carefully retains the real features of unpeopled sections in the rural northeast of the United States).
Grunewald, it appears, used nature to enhance the religious symbolism of his pictures. Bloom offers no messages, he does not preach. Still, his oils do express triumphantly their maker’s awe and wonder at the sublimity of unconquered nature. they are patently the products of one habitually communing with nature, of one for whom a landscape is more than just a collection of rocks and trees, but instead a living, breathing being, capable of harboring dreams, passions, obsessions not much different in character from those of humanity, though perhaps stronger in fervor, in vitality.
Though we know little about the genius who entered art history under the name of Grunewald, it is clear that he was a religious man. It is not known to me whether Bloom currently adheres to any of the existing faiths (though he is said to be fascinated by the cults and myths of Asia). But he too is religious, if one recalls that the term is derived from religare, that is, to tie, to bind, to link man to Divinity.
He links objective truth with lyrical intuition as effortlessly as, in his pictures, one branch is connected with another, one tree with the next. It is likely that each picture presents a synthesis of views, rather than a snapshot of a particular place. There is nothing static within or around the pictures. All that we see and feel is the rhythmic movement of the mysterious forces of nature, so different from the kind of landscape the hurried motorist observes on a weekend outing. For Bloom is a romantic painter, totally unrelated to the nature-photographers, the neo-Realists of today. One might recall what Caspar David Friedrich once wrote:
“The painter should not paint only what he sees around him, but also what he sees in himself. Should he see nothing within himself, he should refrain from painting what he sees around him.”
Bloom has given us through his pictures landscapes of his own soul. What he offers us in the present show, therefore, is a self-portrait, as it were. In at least two cases, he, the synthesizer, has even left the world of recognizable data to give us hints recollections “abstract” elements with which to rebuild reality but on a higher level than the quotidian one. It is a color-mad mystic’s approach to our everyday world, and again the words of a romantic dreamer come to mind, in this case those of a medieval thinker, Master Eckhart:
“If you seek the kernel, you must break the shell. And likewise if you would know the reality of nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.”
Only a superficial viewer may be deceived into thinking that Bloom, in this collection of pictures at the Terry Dintenrass Gallery, ever desired to give us what is commonly referred to as illustrations. These are essences! The wooded hills of Maine that unfolded before Bloom served no other purpose than to be stimuli that induced him in the solitude of his Boston studio, to pick up his tools and embark on interior trips of his own, journeys of the mind, which can penetrate reality deeper than the sharpest lens. Seemingly, he never permitted himself to be fettered by nature’s whims. Perhaps he argued that the Creator of the Universe must be a wiser architect than is evident at first glance, and that one ought to fathom his intentions rather than meekly accept the physical structures as they appear to the unthinking and the uninitiated. As the two large pictures, Melting and Dissolving, demonstrate, Bloom has, at times, been close to abstraction. Nevertheless, there is no indication that, in his mid-sixties, he has jumped onto the abstract band-wagon. These pictures are meant to be landscapes. He merely proceeded beyond the point at which a more conservative painter would have stopped by “editing”, that is, rearranging the haphazard agglomeration of data that present themselves as nature. In other words, through these two pictures he has conveyed his spiritual responses to what his mind tried to capture, as he scanned the visual field.
But this can also be said of the other exhibited pictures, in which leaves, twigs, stones are rendered with great fidelity to detail. They are clearly the work of one who was able to “listen” to nature but, at the same time, did not want his landscapes to degenerate into topography. They are the products of an immigrant from Eastern Europe who, filled with reverence for nature akin to pantheism, cannot possibly be accused of De Tocqueville’s charge: admiring the Yankees conquest of nature more than the natural beauties still left in America. For Bloom is close in spirit to those 19th century Americans who defied the greed and rapaciousness of the majority by deploring the inroads made by modern technology. In a philosophical sense, he might be compared to Thomas Cole, admirer of nature, in the midst of which “the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.”
But, unlike Cole and other early American landscapists, he eschews the “civilized landscape,” that is, places which suggest the nearness of man. In Bloom’s pictures, there is a complete absence of humans or human elements. There is no attempt to render atmosphere — light, air, dryness or moisture. What he presents is largely unreality, surreality, based on realistic facts. Still, he belongs in the best tradition of American landscape painting. George Inness, referring to a picture done by his father, asks the rhetorical question: “Was it done from nature?”, and answers, “It is done from art, which molds nature to its will and shows her hidden glory.” This verdict might also be applied to the new landcapes of Bloom, loneliest of the lonely giants in contemporary American art.
Dr. Werner is a well-known lectures, and the author of more than twenty books on art and artists, including biographies of many painters, including Modigliani, Chagall, Pascin, Max Weber, Duly, Soutine, Munch, Barlach and George Inness.