The city of Boston — to which Hyman Bloom was brought from Lithuania by his parents in 1920, and where he has been living and working ever since – in its splendid museum has a huge painting by Gauguin, entitled, Whence Come We? What Are We? Where Are We Going? This title could have served as a motto for the exhibition, The Drawings of Hyman Bloom, that opened at the University of Connecticut Museum of Art last spring, was recently seen at New York’s Whitney Museum of Modern Art, and will end its tour at the Boston University School of Fine Arts. Bloom, now fifty-five, exhibits infrequently, spurns self-advertisement, and, in his outlook and manner, runs counter to the aesthetic fashions of the 1960’s. To present Maximal Art to an Establishment that aggressively promotes bloodless simplifications and oversimplifications as panacea for all aesthetic ills appears foolhardy, yet Bloom has long adopted the role of an outsider – one who can draw and paint like some of the Old Masters; one who welcomes the stimuli of seen objects, of religion and philosophy, to set into motion the creative apparatus of mind and hand; one who is willing to confine his oeuvre to a few impeccable masterpieces instead of engaging in mass production, and one, finally, whose pictures are often so “shocking,” so “repellent” in subject matter that they can appeal only to connoisseurs ready to acknowledge the inevitable “ugliness” of man’s existence, physical and metaphysical.

Thirteen years ago, Bloom had a brief upsurge of recognition in New York when the same Whitney presented a retrospective: forty oils, plus a selection of drawings. Some of the subject matter of the 1955 show is covered in that of the current exhibition (which is restricted to tonal drawings in crayon, ink, gouache and, most of all, charcoal). There are the bearded Orthodox rabbis, clutching Torah scrolls; and there are the cadavers and corpses. Added are eerie groups engaged in séances (Bloom is fascinated by occultism), and many pictures called Landscapes, although they suggest segments of the dense thicket the artist observed in the remote woodlands of Maine.

Is Bloom’s art Expressionist? Is it Surrealist? Is it closer to the Hasidism of the Baal Shem Tov, or to the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky? Viewers may differ on these points, yet are bound to agree in their respect for an art that is so skillful, personal and intense. It is draftsmanship on a par with the work of Ivan L. Albright, Rico Lebrun, Leonard Baskin, and Jack Levine (an early classmate and friend of the artist’s), and the pictures, though, perhaps, related to some oils, are clearly independent drawings rather than preparatory studies (some, incidentally, are unusually large; one landscape, covering about 50 square feet, is the size of a mural). It is spiritual art, in the tradition of Leonardo, Duerer, Rembrandt, Goya, Blake and Redon, yet without any obvious borrowings from these masters who, like Bloom, had tried to exteriorize those inner forces that beat at the door of consciousness, to liberate those pre-conscious fantasies that may very well be more real than the cosmos as seen by the casual traveler through life.

Not a single of these 44 pictures could have come into existence without the people, the objects, the vistas that, at one point or another, had stimulated the artist’s interest. Yet, there is no photography, save, perhaps, hand-drawn dream photography (to borrow a phrase from one of the Surrealist manifestoes). They dig into the Self, discovering the essential which is neither the measurable nor the tangible, but the fabric of that trance which overpowers the “practical” man, while it is the constant state of the composer, the poet, the painter. Whatever Bloom’s theme, any one of his strange and mostly bewildering pictures seems as a bridge between the outside world and the inside world.

But Bloom is only very distantly related to the Surrealists who rallied around André Breton in the Paris of the 1920’s and 1930’s. There is no “pure psychic automatism,” no “absence of all control exercised by the reason,” no “eschewal of aesthetics or morality.” In his work, there appears to be no docile surrender to the unconscious. Bloom seems to side with Goya who warned that imagination, abandoned by reason, was capable of producing only impossible monsters, whereas, united with reason, she was “the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.” Like Goya before him, Bloom is very “realistic” in technique. He explores the most fantastic stretches of an untrammeled imagination with an eye obviously trained to study nature with great precision. At the same time, he is as little a “Realist” as Goya, since he too assumes a world beneath and beyond that of everyday vision, and since he too expresses the contradictions that spring from the never completely charted realms of the mind by resorting to startling juxtapositions, combinations and deformations.

Baudelaire might be a more appropriate witness than Breton — Baudelaire who proclaimed the importance of raison while, at the same time, defining art as “the creation of an evocative magic.” Bloom’s evocative magic testifies that he too knows a world that most of his fellowmen do not care, or dare, to envision, and that his art has helped him to conquer his obsessions, or, at least, to tame them by giving them definite shape.

Of these preoccupations, the strongest is with death and decay. In his glowing paintings, mortal transience is a frequent theme. In the current show, there is Autopsy, and there are pictures of fish skeletons as well as human cadavers. Bloom’s approach is as shockingly sincere as that of the morticians’—who dress up and “beautify” corpses before surrendering them to their destination and fate is childishly hypocritical. When I met Bloom, I was relieved to find an artist with whom philosophical talk was not only possible but even inescapable. As his talk is serious, so is his art. Bloom’s pictures of dismembered corpses hark back to the Gothic period when, for the first time, artists portrayed skeletons with the rotting flesh, instead of less gruesome symbols, such as angels of death, or riders on pale horses. Why not face up to death, to look at the refuse that once was human, to live with the fact of death?

Much of contemporary art is basically escapist. It is very easy to conduct business, and even frivolous business, in a room decorated with Minimal Art which does not intrude into the seat of man’s morality, wherever that might be located. Bloom’s art, by contrast, hits with a bludgeon; it is profoundly disturbing, even when the subject is an old man or woman, or a puzzling arrangement of twigs, ferns and shrubs. Indeed, regardless of subject matter, some of his works – earlier ones in oil pigments, and recent ones in drawing media — are so hair-raising that they would estrange the beholder and thus defeat their purpose of communication, were it not for the redeeming power of aesthetic transformation, wrought by a man of unusual talent.

It is interesting that, on one occasion, works by Bloom were juxtaposed with those of the Englishman, Francis Bacon (at the galleries of UCLA). Indeed, there is much affinity between the two artists, in their elusiveness and ambiguity, their wild extravagance. Both also seem to signal the return of an art that, far from being egotistically self-sufficient, seeks to communicate, by strictly aesthetic means, ideas and feelings that convey moral truths, however detached from the circus of organized society the artist himself may appear to be.