A small selection of Bloom’s drawings from Lubec make up “Landscapes of the Mind,” on view at the Museum of Fine Arts until Dec. 1. The pocket-size exhibition follows up 2019′s “Matters of Life and Death,” the MFA’s posthumous, bone-rattling Bloom survey, which should have laid any doubt about his stature in the American Modern canon to rest.
The leading light of the Boston Expressionists, as they became known, Bloom
demonstrated a devotion to the human form that defied the wholesale turn to abstraction among his mid-20th-century cohort; as Abstract Expressionism rose to dominance in New York in the 1940s and ‘50s, Bloom remained in Boston, studying cadavers in medical schools and morgues. The paintings that resulted were the core of “Matters of Life and Death,” a catalog of serene and beautiful images of the inevitable: “The Hull,” to pick one, is a 1952 picture of a corpse flayed clavicle to pelvis, its organs made resplendent with Bloom’s gestural swipes of vibrant color, framed by graying flesh.
Bloom sought not horror but a reverent vision of death that paid homage to the earthly vessel for the soul. For Bloom, the interplay between the mortal self and what might lie beyond was a source of unfathomable beauty. That tension, between physical fact and emotional imagination, is what gives his pictures such force.
In Lubec, Bloom found parallels to the dominant theme of his work in the dense nearby woods, where the cycle of life that so energized him was constant and dynamic. Decay fed new growth; sapling and fern reached for the light as they siphoned what lifeforce remained from the thick layers of death on the forest floor. You’re not wrong to see, in a drawing like “Landscape #2,” 1962, echoes of fiber and viscera that converge into human flesh; it feels at once microscopic and cosmic, the mysterious, unearthly building blocks of life itself.
Of the dozen or so works here, most are charcoal drawings, highlighting Bloom’s virtuosic draftsmanship and classical roots, if you’ll pardon the pun. (Abstraction largely abandoned age-old technique, like drawing, one of Bloom’s peeves; in the 2005 book “Boston Modern,” published a few years before his death in 2009, he called the movement “emotional catharsis, with no intellectual basis.”)
The drawings here, most from the 1960s, came amid a period when Bloom had ceased painting, a temporary and intentional reset. The art world was transitioning from the rough gestural abstraction practiced by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to a new phase: Color Field painting, sharp and precise, meant to extend abstraction’s dominance. Bloom, who always shunned movement and trend, set his own path.
In Lubec, he dwelled within age-old themes. Bloom’s forestscapes focused on decay, but, like his cadaver paintings, radiated life, possibility, and a world yet to be; they imply dynamic systems, ever in motion, with death just a phase to pass through. However frank, Bloom’s work mirrors a powerful spiritual sense of continuity that his forest pictures capture in all their breadth. Bloom drew at the scale of his painting, an unusual and powerful element to the work here. One major drawing depicts the dense tangle of a felled tree on the forest floor, rough and gnarled in elaborate detail. Through its thick and brittle branches, light emanates — the tree making way for the undergrowth to thrive in life-giving sun.
Drawing in charcoal inevitably imbues Bloom’s drawings here with a pervasive gloom; let it not be said he lacked for drama. But the exhibition includes one oil painting, an explosion of color that serves as a beacon of the artist’s greater intent. (Bloom was never shy to show his hand — this was, after all, an artist who exulted in the colorful portrayal of entrails, pulsing with accretions of paint.) The painting, an untitled landscape from 1975, feels like an out-loud exclamation amid a roomful of hushed musings.
It’s an essential inclusion, if only to affirm Bloom’s astonishing ability with a brush; in the foreground, slender, death-bleached branches flick lightly at yellowing fronds; beyond, a leafless forest descends into ochre, autumnal shadow. It’s foreboding, a signal of life retreating in seasonal change; and yet it crackles with vitality, wind-whipped and electrifying. Life, it seems to say, finds a way.
HYMAN BLOOM: LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND
Through Dec 1. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Ave. 617-267-9300, mfa.org.
Murray Whyte can be reached at murray.whyte@globe.com. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.