Art: The Pessimistic View

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As Mohammedan legend has it, Jesus was walking in the bazaar with His disciples one day when they came upon the body of a dead dog. "How it stinks!" blurted one disciple. Said another: "Look at the buzzards wheeling overhead." But Jesus looked and said, "How whiter than any pearls are the teeth."

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 see.

For the rest, he let the paintings speak for themselves, and they did a good job of proving that Bloom, whatever his subject, was a first-rate artist, who could daub color as rich as Rouault's, weave oils over and under each other with an unerring eye, hit his spectators hard with whatever his imagination wanted to get across.

Bloom's cadavers have not sold as well as his other work, but he is optimistic about the eventual market, after the first shock wears off. One customer has been Author Glenway Wescott (Apartment in Athens), who bought an amputated leg with a gangrenous foot, hung it on his dining-room wall.