CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/13/2019

'Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death' opens at MFA Boston

Hyman Bloom's gorgeous, shocking 1948 "Self-Portrait" is reproduced from Matters of Life and Death, published to accompany the major MFA Boston exhibition that opens this weekend, with a focus on the artist's largely overlooked paintings and drawings of autopsies, anatomical studies and archaeological excavations from the 1940s and 1950s. "Bloom's compelling images of corpses and cadavers are the most distinctive and provocative works he created," curator Erica E. Hirshler writes. "They force us to confront matters of life and death, to understand, as Bloom would have wished, that there are indeed aspects of human existence that survive the mortality of the body. Art is one of the things that lasts beyond the span of a life. And for that alone, Bloom's reputation deserves to be resuscitated."