To Hyman Bloom, a drawing is a completed work of art, not merely a stage in the evolution of a painting. Few drawings released from the privacy of his studio could be called “studies” or “sketches”.  Once a drawing has passed his vigilant censorship, then we may consider it, not a tentative thought, or a groping step towards a definitive composition, but the shaped and satisfactory crystallization of profound reflection.  Because they are to be regarded as independent works of art, the Bloom drawings deserve this their first major retrospective exhibition; because they enrich and illumine the career of one of America’s leading painters, they demand our closest consideration.

Almost all of Bloom’s drawings date from two periods in his career-the earliest years and the most recent, the late ‘twenties, early ‘thirties, and the ‘fifties. Linking the early and the late works, thus separated by nearly two decades, are threads of consistent intention: beauty and expressiveness of line distinguish all of Bloom’s drawings; a fascination with the macabre and the fantastic continues throughout his career.  Yet both the line and the meaning it conveys have altered through the years as the adolescent’s extravagant imagination matured, and the artist pondered increasingly profound and complex themes.

So many influences shape the development of an artist that we can but suggest a few in so brief an essay.  One can indicate the direction of Bloom’s development by tracing the changing sources of his style. Blake, Botticelli, and possibly Beardsley laid the pattern for his youthful drawings, while Leonardo, Durer, Rembrandt, Redon, Soutine and Rouault represent the wider range of his later enthusiasms.  But ultimately, analysis of Bloom’s artistic heritage tells us little more about his art than would a glance at the titles of the texts on philosophy, religion, psychology and medicine that fill his bookshelves. For to the probing, acquisitive mind of the artist, Spinoza or Leonardo might offer suggestions, but never solutions.  A study of the artist’s family background might also provide some explanation for the evolution of his art. Certainly Bloom’s Eastern European origins and his Bostonian training were important factors in his development. Perhaps his Jewish upbringing would offer even more significant clues.  But these cultural and family influences have been studied elsewhere.”

Bloom has been called a religious painter, but only the most limited or the most inclusive definitions of this term apply to his art.  The ostensible subjects of his works may often be religious, as in the series of compositions entitled “Rabbi or “Synagogue.  In the broader sense, however, his preoccupation with the fundamental problems of humanity might be considered religious, although not peculiarly Jewish. For Bloom’s art challenges the vague and conventional distinctions between birth and death, between the animate and the inanimate, between tangible reality and the visions of man’s conscious and subconscious mind.  In a world where doctors have learned to raise Lazarus from the grave and physicists have discovered memory in particles of matter, we may well consider Bloom poet laureate.

Bloom is a poet-painter; he conveys his philosophy through visual metaphor and lyrical imagery. To Bloom, as to the poet, a peacock feather and a corpse may offer equally significant answers to the questions of man’s existence.  And a Bloom drawing, whether it depicts dragons, fish, skeletons, clouds, a beggar or a seance, embodies fragments of a complex philosophy, the reflection of a life¬time of restless inquiry.

A great drawing such as the Goldbergs’  “Fish Skeletons” or the magnificent red chalk of a cadaver belonging to the Whitney Museum reveal the new power of Bloom’s mature work.  In these drawings we see the satisfactory culmination of the artist’s long, often bitterly opposed struggle to find adequate visual vocabulary to express his ideas.  In the ravaged, misshapen forms of rabbis, beggars, crones and even corpses, we read that man’s dignity and spiritual vitality survive physical dissolution, and that the intrinsic beauty of the physical world, seen through form, color and light, persists also in death and decay.

In order to communicate such complex metaphysical arguments, Bloom has developed extremely sensitive and flexible means. Both means and meaning now express the intensity of becoming. With nervous, restless lines he builds his forms, or with thick flashing strokes and smokey clouds of chalk. The compositions are flowing, seldom stable. Light and color are vibrant, shimmering, opalescent. With each new composition Bloom finds new techniques and new images to convey his thought. Through visions of never-ending flux and mutation, he illumines for us those mysterious realms that lie between states of being.

BERNICE DAVIDSON
Chief Curator, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design