White Box
329 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002
212 714 2347 / www.whiteboxny.org
Monday – Friday 11am – 6pm
Until September 22, 2013
“Hyman Bloom: Paintings and Drawings (1940 – 2005),” currently at White Box (the cutting edge international art space on Broome Street), is a rare opportunity to observe the creative process of one of the most important practitioners of 20th century Jewish Art in America. Totally dominating the pristine gallery space are 18 large oil paintings of rabbis each holding a large Torah scroll. It is as if the artist invited you into the most private recesses of his studio (which in reality he never would permit), put his arm around you and explained, “this is exactly how an artist makes paintings about being a modern Jew.” Considering the subject of the paintings and the nature of the venue, this is a shocking and gusty show.
Bloom, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 96, was a highly respected and yet tragically under-valued star of the mid-century avant-garde. Born in Latvia in 1913, his traditional cheder education quickly fell by the wayside upon immigration to the United States and settlement in Boston in 1920. Art school at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the local West End settlement house eventually led to working on the Federal Art Project of the WPA where he blossomed artistically. On the occasion of his retrospective at the National Academy of Design in December 2002, I related:
“… Dorothy Miller, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visited his studio [in Boston] in 1941 and included him in “Americans 1942” at the Modern. His paintings of that era include “The Bride,” “Rabbi,” “The Synagogue” as well as paintings of “Female Corpse” and “Corpse of Man.” “The Synagogue,”[depicting the Kol Nidrei service] purchased by the Modern in 1943, was part of the opening exhibition of the Jewish Museum in 1947.
In 1950 he is one of seven artists, including Arshile Gorky, John Marin, Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. By all accounts, Bloom had become an established member of the American modern art scene.
In 1954 Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning considered Bloom “the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America.” In 1954 he had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Even though he was considered an insider, he willfully remained on the periphery of the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York and slowly drifted out of public notice and the New York art world.
In the subsequent years he sequestered himself away from the Boston and New York art scenes and pursued a metaphysical journey creating paintings of fantastic landscapes, séances, seascapes, still lifes, trees and hallucinatory fish. In the current exhibition almost none of these subjects are shown. Rather, the 18 paintings here all date from the last 25 years of his life and represent the underlying struggle with meaning and spirituality that defined his entire artistic life.
No artist’s lifetime of work can or should be summed in one sweeping statement. With that acknowledged, Bloom’s paintings of rabbis, first created in the 1940s, represent a major personal and artistic struggle, conscious or not, to come to terms with being an assimilated Jew in modern America.
Menachem Wecker trenchantly observed upon reviewing the rabbi paintings in 2009… “The rabbis in Hyman Bloom’s paintings look like rabbis, dress like rabbis, and come with all the usual rabbinic accessories: beards, hats, kippahs and Torah scrolls. But don’t let that fool you… they aren’t real.” Rather they are “imaginary constructs…” Indeed they are barely concealed portraits of the archetypical Jew lurking inside the very contemporary Hyman Bloom.
Bloom’s paintings easily transcend the trope of solipsistic self-portraits. Rather he decided to play out his secret obsession with the lush tools of painterly expressionism that came so naturally to him, utilizing a veritable encyclopedia of art historical references, returning to these paintings year in year out over the decades of his old age. The works exhibited here were almost all gleaned directly from paintings left in his studio after his death, expertly chosen and hung by the curator Jan Frank with the full collaboration of Juan Puntes (Founder and Artistic Director) and Tony Guerrero (Executive Director) of White Box.
Each of these eighteen paintings is a large work ranging from 48” x 40” to 72” x 55.” In every painting a robed figure holds a Torah scroll, many also holding a large book in his free hand. Each man is bearded, with a skullcap or clerical head covering; over half wear one type of streimel or another. Collected here is a random catalogue of religious Jewish men. The notion that they are “rabbis’ is of course simply a cultural shorthand reflecting that the images represent Jewish individuals with a close connection to the Torah; fervently holding, clasping or embracing this holy object, the font of all Jewish knowledge and wisdom. In reality and, I would assert, in Bloom’s mind, these were simply Jewish men with the ultimate symbol of their faith and people. It is clear he couldn’t get them out of his mind.