Word: bloom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Latvian-born Painter Hyman Bloom recites this legend in self-defense when critics complain of his fondness for painting corpses. If they persist he counters: "One must take a pessimistic view of society as it stands today...
Last week, in the first big retrospective show of Bloom's work ever held, there was plenty to look at besides painted corpses. Visitors at Boris Mirski's Boston gallery could see encrusted oils of blazing chandeliers, Christmas trees ribboned with light, melancholy rabbis and bold abstractions that have contributed to Bostonian Bloom's slowly growing reputation. Nonetheless, the five most discussed paintings in the show seemed to come straight from charnel house and morgue...
...Bloom, now a slender 36, began studying painting at a community center in West End Boston. Since then he has kept at his art steadily, selling no paintings at first, indifferent to poverty. In 1942, he was jarred from an oilstove and breadcrumb existence by painting Curator Dorothy Miller of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. She hung 13 of his paintings in a show of American artists, and the museum bought two of them for its permanent collection...
Boston's astute Director Mirski, an old hand at presenting local artists to Boston society, eliminated the usual opening-day cocktails and canapes for the Bloom exhibition. He hung the more cadaverish canvases upstairs, on the assumption that anybody who could walk upstairs could stand what he would...
Then wrapping himself in a cloak of political doubletalk, Henry grandly brushed aside criticism of Soviet totalitarianism. "The Russians," he explained, "approach the democratic principle through an economic dictatorship." Said Sol Bloom: "Oh, stop kidding...