Eight Drawings by Hyman Bloom
With a Note by Hyman Swetzoff
The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1962), pp. 543-554
IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to discuss Hyman Bloom and his drawings without saying something of how, at an early age, Bloom entered the classes of the brilliant Harold Zimmerman.
Teaching at a community center in Boston during the late 1920s, Zimmerman was convinced that it was possible to develop the dormant creative instinct. To do this, he picked his pupils from those who were barely teen-aged. It was at this stage or earlier that he felt that the process he had evolved would uncover a depth of talent that would grow and materialize into the particular type we call the artist.
The method evolved by Zimmerman was based on a series of physical rhythms: the hand, following its natural movements, rhythmically traced with a hard pencil on paper what looked to be a giant spider’s web. From this the imagination took over to perceive in the linear patterns, figures and landscapes, the subject which the pupil was to develop. As the hand became more controlled and proficient, the imagination, with the aid of observation and memory, formed more specific concepts until the maze of lines disappeared into the total idea. And a picture was produced.
At that period, the drawings of these students were very much alike. But in a very short time, an amazing development could be seen in each one. The differentiations that occurred were those of touch and, increasingly, as the imagination took hold, of personality.
As the memory became more and more trained, and as the rhythms established the interrelationships in a certain well defined space, more concrete evidences appeared. The outside world became the reservoir of the eyes and memory, while the imagination became a reservoir of creative strength, individuality and point of view. This combination of inside-out and outside-in movements heightened and released the energy on which the artist’s work depends, to become so much a stream of communication that one could only continue or turn this energy to something else.
The early student drawings of Bloom differ very little, in a sense, from the later ones. There is a similarity of conception and in some of the drawings a similarity of technique. The linear quality and the profound interest in anatomy are obvious, but the romanticism that found inspiration in Blake and Michelangelo changed to that of another kind-to be found in the paintings-and then to an increasingly realistic approach.
The drawings Bloom made while he was painting were, in the main, studies to define his pictorial effects. Drawings as such, done more for the sake of themselves, were not produced until about 1950 when the Seance series appeared. These drawings were carefully worked in charcoal and white chalk or in brown or red conté, their mood and atmosphere deriving from observation and experience. The subject of these drawings was explored not so much for its supernatural qualities as for the reality of the experience. There is no hint of mysticism as such. Or rather, the mysticism is the end result of the objective and penetrating approach, and relies for its interpretation on the person looking at the drawing. The experience is examined; the mystery is seemingly impenetrable.
The idea behind each drawing basically forms the ultimate effect-an effect not so much pictorial as a transfer of experience. As in his paintings, once the idea has approached this stage the drawings are re- leased as separate entities.
Each drawing then becomes a living embodiment of the experience. This is especially manifested in the large Rabbi drawings which he did as cartoons for paintings.
The element of time and almost palpable energy placed in these drawings is very great. Each drawing contains within itself a myriad of other drawings which slowly were incorporated in a building-up process to the final and spontaneous drawing. The deeper the subject penetrates the artist’s mind, the deeper the space it penetrates on paper until a balance is achieved and something of an end reached. It is a simultaneous happening which occurs when the artist goes beyond the identification process.
The Anatomical drawings done about this time in conté were worked in large masses, and were also studies for paintings. In these the juxtaposition between the spectator and the drawing forms the entire idea. This concept — that of making the spectator part of the pictorial idea — comes from the paintings of Corpses first exhibited in 1945. The drawings of Dissections and Autopsies contain palpable and limp flesh outside of which the living quality hovers in the shape of the spectator.
The drawings which follow become even more realistic and intellectual — if one can say that of drawings so alive. Drawn with white ink on colored papers, the Beggars are psychologically sick, their maze of lines forming their distortions and their sickness. In the Landscape drawings, which come somewhat later, another quality is added, more compulsive in its effect. The play of line becomes provocative and suspenseful as it ties various parts of the drawing together, penetrating and searching. The line has become so fine that it is like the play of the surgeon before making the final and incisive cut.
-Hyman Swetzoff