CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/19/2019

Spiritual striving and emotional urgency in 'Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom'

"The Hull" (1952) is reproduced from Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom, the enlightening new overview from D.A.P., published in advance of MFA Boston's major Bloom exhibition, opening this summer. A Boston painter described by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as "the first Abstract Expressionist," Bloom was a pioneer who brought a "new quality into American painting—a new sense of spiritual striving and emotional urgency, and a new sort of release from the confines of literal representation," according to essayist Henry Adams. Yet, today he is nowhere near as well-known as his contemporaries. Born in Latvia into a traditional Jewish family, Bloom emigrated to the United States in 1920. Over the course of his life, he embraced mysticism, studied music and mathematics, and got into dissections and autopsies as fodder for his paintings. "Bloom's paintings have a different goal and expose a terrain that we're usually not aware of," Adams writes, "one that's normally hidden from us—not only the internal layering of muscles, fat, cartilage and bone, but also the body's metaphorical interior, the soul. His paintings are a sort of archaeological excavation."