This preliminary introduction explains the attitude by which the work of the young painter, Hyman Bloom, can be understood.

Hyman Bloom was born near Riga, Latvia, in April, 1913, and came to America In 1920 to settle in Boston. At the age of thirteen, he was still living in the West End, one of the slum districts of Boston, where his family had settled when they first arrived. In anearby settlement house, Bloom was also attending art classes. These art classes were taught by an extraordinary teacher whose name, Harold Zimmerman, deserves to be better known. Zimmerman taught his pupils to draw and paint directly from the imagination and to become aware of its development, its direction, so as to exercise lucidly, its individual form. Meanwhile, the vigorous discipline of the imagination was begun, a channel of development and its maintenance was taught.

Using memory cannot help but teach using the eye and what is sees. It is possible for this way of seeing to degenerate into merely copying what is familiar, or, on the other hand, it can also provide a basis for, and evolve more imaginative qualities in the pupil. Memory, like the senses, is merely a tool for the imagination and a bridge to interior knowledge. This way of teaching gradually unfolds to the eye and gives to the memory a reservoir of detail, a foothold on the objective world.

The emphasis of seeing clearly with the eye attached to the memory and leading to more subtle and darker processes which transmute and synthesize the material according to the individual interior vision to project the result clearly, Bloom has developed to a very high degree. Bloom is predominantly a seer.

When Zimmerman was taken on as an assistant by Denman Ross of the Fogg Art Museum, Zimmerman’s other famous pupil, Jack Levine, went with him and Bloom. The drawings of Hyman Bloom that are available at the Fogg Art Museum indicate a love for ferocious action, exaggerated in the manner of the Italian baroque. The vitality and sureness of these drawings show a command and a precocity over the graphic medium that few mature painters today can display. As a painter, Bloom was realizing color through the theories of Denman Ross – theories he later rejected – and, as a painter, he was interested in the chiaroscurists, Caravaggio and later Rembrandt.

When Bloom was eighteen years old, he visited New York where he saw for the first time, the paintings of Rouault, Soutine, Klee and Chagall. This group of painters seemed to him to have a common basis from which their work grew. Grew, in the sense, that every work of art has its own life. This idea which impressed Munch, the famous Norwegian Expressionist, so much that he threw his paintings into his barns and henhouses or out into the snow so that they would experience the same vicissitudes of existence the individual goes through.

Bloom saw not only this but he also saw color and paint used in a way that expressed the state of mind of the artist and the work of art. These paintings not only displayed the violent conflict of the subjective and objective worlds but the validity and precedent of the inner experience over the outer. It was this inner experience from which the picture seemed to break away to grow again in its direction, separate from the artist. It was the shock of affinities, a mutual recognition. When Bloom returned to Boston, a feeling of independence and a corroboration of his own experience led him to leave Zimmerman to begin painting on his own.

After painting at home for a year, The WPA provided Bloom and Levine with enough money to rent a house in the South End of Boston.

Bloom began to copy Rouault, trying to understand and penetrate the artist’s method to realize his intent so as to making it part of his own vision. He next turned to study Soutine whose rhythmic brushstrokes and clear, strong color, recalled that part of his imagination which was so deeply stirred by Oriental music. What is more important, the exotic background of his childhood in a village similar to Chagall’s, and the orthodox Jewish upbringing and his consequent rebellion against it led him to re-evaluate his religious faith. It was this tedious and terrible process of self-examination, this metaphysical voyage back to his beginnings, the realization of his creative processes which brought him to the study of the culture of the Near East and Vedanta. In 1942, Bloom was chosen by Holger Cahill and Dorothy C. Miller of the MMA as one of the members of the exhibition: Americans, 1942.

In these canvasses, Bloom had begun to express his newly discovered understanding and its domination over those painters who had influenced him.

Interested, as every artist is, in transferring life to a blank canvas, Bloom was also aware that this process was a means of self-discovery. Objectifying what he had realized, he was also aware of that part of the imagination in which both color and music reside. The Jew with Torah is like a slow mournful chant across the centuries; a man whose source Bloom discovered in himself. This man who is not a man but become more, an abstract conception materialized in a living and pulsating force, a man in whose body a sacred object rests just as in the Torah he holds, another sacred object rests, The Word become Man. It is not so much a self-conscious symbolism he uses always again but a rediscovery, a resurrection of the symbol. They are not, the Jew and the Torah, two different objects, but animate beings alive with God, the source of all being.

In the two Synagogues, especially the larger one, the tragic song that lies implicit in the Jew becomes a rhapsodic, ecstatic, body-splitting song. The chandelier in the picture shudders and is transfixed like a living thing as the voice of the cantor echoes life into all its prisms. The chandelier here and in the pictures he made of thema alone, are misrocosms. Religiously devout, Bloom reiterates his belief in the inner fire common to all. The impulse in all his work is the same impulse that makes the cantor sing; it is an inner compulsion whose spiritual tradition also rests in the anonymous creates of the Gothic Cathedral. As in the Christmas Tree where the lights ricochet one to the other, the Chandeliers are obscured by passion. The light is not pure. The understanding of the reality of existence has not yet burned away the false self. The Chandeliers and the Christmas Trees release the livingness, the being of all things. But, it is not fully expressed.

It is because he has understood creation not as a word or as an idea but as a living experience that Bloom becomes aware of the other end of the continuum: death. Creation is not completely understood without death; these two words are basically one.

In the paintings of the Bride and the Skeleton, the wheel of life and death are presentedas neither/nor. The Skeleton rests like an underground city and glows with an inward light; the Bride, stiff and dead, buried in the womb of earth becomes fertile with flowers.

Beyond the world of habit and appearance, the false worlds, the manmade world, there is a timeless rhythm which belongs to the spirit and which is beyond anything we know. This rhythm contains nothing of what we are surrounded withy; the objective reality is merely a symbol.

The sensual world is revealed in the lush use of paint, the thick impasto, the ringing, vibrant color, appealing to the eye and the hands, while the long brushstrokes seemed to have been painted to an inner rhythm which appeals directly to the spectator’s ear. His eye penetrates the object to its root; he knows the “howness” of things. The faculty of seeing which Bloom has, more so than any other American painter, can be explained by the words of another artist, Rodin: “The thing is to see. The Art…. sees: that is to say, his eyes, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of nature. That is why the artist need only trust his eyes.”

After the exhibition of 1942, Bloom continued his research into color that would more  adequately express the increasing depth of his experience. The later results become more songlike and his pictures begin to lose the taint of darkness and the confusion apparent in the Bride become less. Again, the influences of Rouault and Soutine in his work shown in 1942 become entirely dominated. When Bloom, during the period 1942-46, studied semiprecious stones, butterflies, polished abalone shells, peacock feathers, stuffed humming birds, clothing labels, and other bits of cloth, color plates of diseases and corpses in hospital dissecting rooms, he was studying and searching for what his ideas demanded before they could be externalized and structuralized into his paintings. His work had certain living needs which had to be fulfilled.

The process of creation leads to the desire of attaining and becoming the very process itself. The desire of many artists is to attain the terrible light of understanding and love to go beyond the womb to the ecstasy of light. The individual is released from the objective world and is propelled into a kind of super consciousness by which everything is understood.

In the exhibition of 1946, Bloom affirms his belief in an afterlife, reincarnation, the ultimate destruction of the symbol, and he reiterates his belief in a basic vocabulary running parallel and beyond the one by which the world lives and which is understood only after death.

Civilization tends to divide, separate and categorize what springs from a central and living source and is so doing tends to obscure this source. Synthesis is only apparent in the creator. Civilization tends more to oppose synthesis which divides the individual and makes the Gordian know more so. This synthesis is more apparent in Bloom’s paintings, so much so that they seem to have been created suddenly and spontaneously, another living worlds, at once, immediately.

The repetition of the two Jews in the 1946 exhibition verge on the personal. The fury of the brushstrokes and the resultant color and thickness of impasto recall a sadism against which these two Jews have no protection. These two Jews are abandoned works and do not go as far as the white Bride, another repetition of an earlier theme. The step this Bride is about to take, the ghostly projections of herself embroidered on her dress and veil begint to fade as she moves like a nun across the threshold of a mystic marriage. In exploring the process of creation to its source, one reaches a new beginning after the ordeal of the womb. The Child in the womb realizes his place and smiles mockingly : he knows. The Child in the Garden, sphinxlike, has no need to speak of the roses, his friends, the roses with which he grows and fades. The Pot becomes a sexual image in which death and life is blended, while in Archaeological Treasure the womb is discovered rich with objects, the soul buried in sense material. Treasure Map, where jewels have been hidden becomes a metaphysical city over which the spectator hovers like a bird. Extremes meet; the circle closes. The psyche is being stripped off its unnecessary clothes, the precious sanctum comes near to being entered, the light, symbolized by the radiant Chandeliers – the light now clear and shining – comes to being permanent. The symbol is being burned away, a universal languages is spoken death is love.

The vocal quality of Oriental music is transferred to the paintings. The paint textures vary form expressive impasto to smooth calligraphic surfaces, circular, shining with gold and silver. They rest against the wall like tapestries and become paintings filled with infinite space, tours de force of dimension.

The Leg is like a magnificent burning jewel resting on a black table against a white ground. In the very title itself the attitude of the painter is expressed. He has given to what our eye considers a dead thing, a word and that is all. The Leg has an existence which dominates and is beyond the word. Take away the leg and concept of “legness” and we see a jewel. But, remember an ulcerous, decaying leg, seemingly ripped from the body and that is what this leg will be. But that is only a stage in trying to understand the picture and that is not the original intention of the picture. In such a picture, the spectator tends to project a feeling common to us all: horror and disgust at such objects. That is the way we have been taught. Take away that thought and the picture is something else.

Horror and disgust are the intentions of an Albright; Albright is aware of death as a negative and final action and he enhances the fear, corroborates and exaggerates this fear in a land where this is no real tradition of death and in a land where youth is the only state of being that is tolerated. It is this sadism which overcomes and utterly annihilates both what is painted and the spectator. What Albright carefully draws on canvas: The Picture of Dorian Gray, and stops at, Bloom paints and goes on. Where Albright visualizes the canvas as the final thing, Bloom considers the canvas as a medium by which the senses are taken into another world. One is a dead end and one is a means to an end which is pointed to, and is explained in terms of intellect and feeling. Where Albright projects on canvas a decaying body, Bloom paints corpses that are landscapes, clean and natural. In Bloom’s Corpse of an Elderly Male and Corpse of an Elderly Female, the flesh disintegrates and returns to the earth, the synthesis of all elements and from which all things grow. The gorgeous islands of color, blossom. The body remains empty of what has once given it life and has gone to a life beyond this one, to a life that cannot be described of visualized by the living human being, a state of being which is entirely different from the one that already exists.

These three pictures, the Corpses and the Leg have the effect on the spectator that is marvelous in itself. It is as though the spectator has suddenly and without recognizing it, encountered a mirror in the dark and seeing the dim reflection judges it until, just as suddenly, the whole incident having taken but a moment, the horrible mistake is discovered and the spectator finds that he has judged himself. Just as this accident has shown the spectator how he looks to himself so do these three pictures reflect and judge and almost force the spectator to do the same. They are no longer symbols, they are a daring challenge to the spectator to understand death, to realize a state of being much deeper and truer than the world of the sense with which he is encumbered. It is the awareness of this as a responsibility and as the purpose of the individual which prepares the individual for the return to the Original Source, the One form which all things come and to which all things eventually go.

-Hyman Swetzoff