A great softwood forest gathers in Alaska, erupts across parts of Canada and wanes on the granite shelf that carries Maine to the Atlantic Ocean. An obstinacy on that narrow margin is the town of Lubec (pop. 1853). The fabric of Lubec, like that of its near neighbors, has a fugitive quality. Compressed between the Bay of Fundy and the remnants of the forest, its buildings, in accord with vernacular proprieties, offer their sides to be rutted by seasons of sun and rain. Their forms honor tradition while their hides of cedar and spruce betray origins in that forest. An awareness of these accommodating woods persists in the walls of the community whether abandoned to the manipulations of nature or calmed by a skin of white paint.

In successive summers between 1955 and 1957, Hyman Bloom came to Lubec and a consequence of those visits is a series of large landscape drawings that are among the most glorious and troubling evocations of the forest ever achieved. It would be convenient if one could write that Bloom was drawn to the woods near Lubec because of a retained dread of some savage place in his native Latvia — thus a return to and a reconciliation with that place — but no one has suggested that this is so. Bloom’s family fled a frozen Latvia — literally by sleigh — when he was seven years old, and there are no forests in the published accounts of that escape. The woods in the Maine drawings are a compound of imagination and observation, Bloom’s own history and the ascendancy of his thoughts. In them the woods of Lubec are so modified by a dense personal culture that they cannot be read in conventional terms. To understand them requires an atlas of philosophy, rather than of places, and that atlas is not fully at hand.

Still, I am not willing to abandon the role of memory in these works. I do not suggest that the evergreen woods of Maine serve as a surrogate for a European deciduous forest in a physical sense but rather as a vehicle for the expression of collective memory. They give physical form to received, if not actual, experience. There is in them, as in all of Bloom’s work, a collective inheritance from Jewish Eastern Europe. In paintings and drawings not germane to Lubec, that inheritance is explicit. Here, however, the memory of places once inhabited by Jews in Poland and Lithuania, in small towns near dark forests, may be implied. It is a matter of metaphor. This, I think, is a component in the drawings, not controlling, but one that informs them. These are visionary images, mythical landscapes, and in their darkness, their near agony, they deal, in part, with abiding memories whether actual or received culturally from other generations.

Any consideration of the work of Hyman Bloom will raise the name of Rodolphe Bresdin (1822-1885), and it may be best to turn to this at the outset. Bresdin was a French etcher and draftsman of notable personal and aesthetic eccentricities, a pupil of Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), and the teacher of Odilon Redon (1840-1916).

He worked on a small scale, even a minute scale, and there is in his prints and drawings a bewildering surge of intently observed facts, modified often by phantoms dredged from deep within his psyche. Each of his works and there are not many of them declares a tiny universe inhabited, at once, by things real and imagined, whose mission is not fully disclosed. In his most puissant etchings, Bresdin summoned a forest dense with darkly weighted chiaroscuro, a hard- wood forest that occupies almost every millimeter of the sheet that is not needed for the principal narrative. His woods, for all their visual weight and their first blush potential for malice, are, in the end, a dramatic embrace for a set of independent events an act of the Good Samaritan, the Flight of the Holy Family, the Comedy of Death, a symbolic tree or a distant village. They play to such moral dramas.

Bloom is an admirer and a connoisseur of Bresdin’s work and has collected his prints. Those seeking a commonality between Bloom and Bresdin note the unremitting intensity of their works, their shared horror of vacant spaces, their affinity for darkness relieved sometimes by a swirling radiance, and for a turbulence in which light emanates from somewhere within.

But, ultimately, the forest serves each of them in distinct ways. Bresdin used it to add grandeur or irony to events, to harbor a collection of irrational creatures and while we do not repair to his woods to celebrate their Arcadian majesty, we sense a cultivation, a scheme of arboreal rightness underlying the works. There is a feast in much of Bresdin’s woodlands, however deep and non-domestic he has made them. Darkness does not absolutely exclude all delight or thoughts about charming groves.

Bloom’s slice of the vast forest of pine, spruce and hemlock is quite a different place. It is not Bresdin writ large. To avoid dwelling on some supposed foundational relationship between Bloom and Bresdin, one must learn to tell the trees from the forest, the primitive remorseless conifer from the highly evolved and accommodating oak and beech. In the end Bloom’s densely woven conifers, moldy and dusted with some primitive fungus, are so funereal as to discourage intrusion. They speak of an inner terrain less gracious than Bresdin’s and, at the least, not easier to comprehend. That world as revealed in Bresdin’s prints strikes one as a holy place whose profuse eccentricities excite curiosity and, ultimately, fascination.

Hyman Bloom’s drawings appear to be of a private wilderness given materiality through forms common to the coast of Maine. Those forms were recruited to give tangible presence to long-considered philosophic possibilities and the Lubec drawings bear the weight of those efforts. Beyond the heavy knit of their components — the fiercely embracing trees, brambles, rebellious clouds there are proposals about materiality, decay and the possibility of spiritual transcendence.

As I have suggested, on being confronted by one of these great drawings, the observer is asked to penetrate a wilderness that will not easily yield, an estate so well-defended as to enjoin all trespass. There are no clear places of admission and no ground tracks to be followed. The spruce trees have limbs so wantonly articulated that they have become bones snarled into a web by some pernicious force. Beneath this aggressive chaos is a floor infected by cast-offs and deformities and demoted to a charnel house. Through the wild disorder of these metamorphosing forms, the drawing becomes a vision about the imperfection of material things and of their decay.

And yet, among all this, edging and sometimes frailly penetrating the blackness, a light can be found that is at once spectral and beckoning. It may be dissolved by the clouds or, perhaps, take refuge among them, but in either case it suggests a purpose or intention to the event. That purpose cannot be read with any certainty; indeed, the light may point simply to still other such events, but we take it as a tender, an offering of communion with the intelligence and intuition of the hand that created the image. It may also imply a promise, and I think this is the case.
You may accept Bloom’s forms on an impersonal occult level or in terms of his history. The latter, while not easy-in fact, nothing about Bloom is understandable in a simple way is the easier adventure.

We have received the chronology of Bloom’s life from Holland Cotter, Sydney Freedberg, Marvin Sadik, and Dorothy Thompson. Collectively, they trace him from the time of his immigration from the tiny village of Brunoviski, Latvia, to Boston and on through his career. It is a journey from a durable Jewish world to a personal world having an underlayer of old country culture over which plies of Transcendentalism, Theosophical thought, the culture of southern India and various engagements with spiritualism have accrued in mixed succession.

Cotter points out that Boston in 1920 was a “city of contradictory traditions.” It was rational, pragmatic, with a great tradition of scholarship. At the same time it was the locus of Transcendentalism and an established residence for spiritualism and matters occult. Bloom’s progress through these venues was utterly difficult, ameliorated in part by a remarkable succession of teachers and patrons, but difficult nonetheless.

Several writers allude to, or speak directly of, a transcendent experience that Bloom had at the age of 26. In one fugitive moment even the commonplace attained a new reality for him. This was more than simply heightened perception, it was a true epiphany. It is thought that this confirmed to Bloom that, as William Blake had pro- posed, it was possible to give tangible form to metaphysical truths. Blake, who saw his visions clearly, believed that he had fixed them with “the firm and wiry hand of rectitude.” If one, for example, could understand that a visual relationship existed between the human spirit and nature, one might be able to contribute that understanding to one’s work. That contribution is a principal aspect of the Lubec drawings.

They exemplify, in a metaphoric way, the relationship between the natural and spiritual realms and Bloom’s engagement with them. Their complex fabric stands for transcendent personal experience the flow from the patently tangible to the intangibly spiritual, the flow from death to life. Bloom’s woods of Lubec are not haunted as perhaps the Jewish forests were – but they are not consoling. In their precincts we may see decomposition followed by growth and then, once again, decomposition. It is a raw place in which life and dusty death succeed one another in infinite succession.

The natural world in Bloom’s terms is not offered for its holiness as in the American landscape tradition. We do not summon it to serve as a verdant temple and thus a symbol of a land favored by a Divine Providence. It does not represent any preferment nor does it point to some acquired national virtue. It has another mission.

It is reasonable to conclude that the light that filters through the arthritic, arboreal limbs, through the lichen and the darkness implies a promise. That light, in addition to an offer of communion between artist and viewer, represents a transcendence to a state beyond life and, perhaps, to the prospect of reincarnation. It alludes to forces abroad that will transcend death and promote a return or continuance of life. It finds its way beyond rationalism and mortality, to, if not proclaim, then at least hint at some form of continuity. The dense tangle, in the end, bows to light, however wan.

Hyman Bloom is unique in our time. Alluding to the occult eccentricities of Redon and the formal vocabulary of Bresdin, he has achieved a body of art that gives form to a singular vision. In his great charcoal drawings, the woods at Lubec become a forest of dark memories, actual or received. The trees appear intent on devouring one another and, in turn, to be devoured by death until tempered by an insistent radiance. These elements give substance to a view that is a synthesis of Eastern European Jewish attitudes – sometimes lyrical, but, as here, sometimes dark the promise of Transcendentalism and personal investigations into the occult. The level and consistency of the intensity embodied in these visionary drawings are the rarest of accomplishments. They are seldom sought – perhaps dared and more seldom attained. And the aesthetics that embrace all of this are, simply put, sublime.

This effort to move us toward a new consciousness about the vindication of life, achieved with such nobility by Hyman Bloom, is an endowment for the ages. We are deeply in Bloom’s debt.

Philip M. Isaacson Lewiston, Maine  May 2001