A spiritual quest

FRAMINGHAM -- Before the 7-year-old Hyman Bloom left Lithuania in 1920, he told his rabbi that he planned to become a rabbi himself in America. But settling in Boston, Bloom abandoned his family's Orthodox Jewish faith after his bar mitzvah. And as the Danforth Museum's exhibit "Hyman Bloom: A Spiritual Embrace" persuasively shows, he sought spirituality instead through theosophy, the occult, LSD experiments, Eastern religions, psychoanalysis, astrology, and, ultimately, his art.

Artistic success came early for Bloom: a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1942, the 1950 Venice Biennale, a 1954 retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum. He is considered one of the major Boston Expressionists, with such artists as Jack Levine and David Aronson who became known in the '30s and '40s for their moody, painterly realism. But the Modernist era was one of art manifestos and orthodoxy, and Bloom, like most American artists who didn't strictly pursue abstraction during the heart of the 20th century, was shunted aside.

The painter Bernard Chaet has said Willem de Kooning told him that he and Jackson Pollock discovered Bloom's work at MoMA and thought him the first Abstract Expressionist. You can see what he's talking about in "The Christmas Tree" (1938-39), as the tree dissolves into a tangle of glowing, jittering oil paint thickly dragged across the canvas. While Pollock was still caught up in turbulent, rough-hewn Picassoish paintings of masks and totems, Bloom's canvas suggests a way for paint itself to take the starring role.

But Bloom already seems to be backing off from full-on abstraction in 1945's "Chandelier II." He turns the giant crystal confection into an icon in thick, sticky strokes. It's surrounded by thinly painted stripes of ceiling molding (apparently inside a synagogue) that radiate energy, while also framing the chandelier and flattening the painting's space. Bloom's Christmas tree and chandeliers have often been interpreted as references to the biblical account of God speaking to Moses through the flames of a burning bush -- the embodiment of spirit in light, and, here, paint.

Bloom found abstraction a dead end, too removed from life, but he never altogether abandoned it. He continued the metaphysical questing that is part of the rhetoric of early Abstract Expressionism, pursuing a hybrid of abstraction and realistic imagery drawn from memory and imagination. In his séance paintings from the '50s, apparitions hover in the air and people are twisted into contortions by the force of bringing spirits into the corporeal world. It's during this period that Bloom's work, rather than embodying energy and feeling, begins to seem like an illustration of it, the sensation at one remove. And the ghosts and monsters can feel hokey.

Disembodied faces are trapped among toothy monsters in tangled forests in Bloom's large "Astral Plane" charcoal drawings from the '60s, which recall H.R. Giger's designs for the film "Alien." Billowing clouds of abstraction hide a skull or a rotting human leg swarming with flies and maggots in paintings from the '70s and '80s that bring to mind the art of Odilon Redon. These works echo Bloom's signature corpse paintings of the 1940s (not here) and speak of cycles of life, the body returning to nature after death, perhaps reincarnation.

The through line of the 49 works here is a series of paintings of rabbis. Danforth director Katherine French, who organized the show, argues that rabbis are Bloom's metaphor for artists -- he calls rabbis "aristocrats of learning" who must beg for their financial livelihood.

"Rabbi with Torah" (1945) is built of quick, loose brushstrokes and scrubbing that coalesce here and there, particularly in the rabbi's pallid face, tired eyes, and clenched jaw. Bloom's two "Rabbi with Torah" paintings from about 1955 shift between misty passages of color and sculptural solidity. The withered rabbis are monumentally enthroned, their gowns carved out by jagged brushstrokes. In 12 rabbi canvases from the past decade, Bloom, now 93 and living in Nashua, seems to be hurriedly searching for something. Each is an imagined portrait of a frail old man resembling Bloom, bent over, his bony hands clinging to the Torah scrolls. The men are blurs, as if half-remembered or melting down to skeletons. Bloom dashes in one line and then another, then scrubs in a swath of color, as if rushing to capture the details, the feeling, at the edge of some deep insight that's just barely eluding him.