Born in Brunoviski, Latvia, Hyman Bloom emigrated to America at the age of seven. In Boston's West End community, Bloom straddled the two worlds of his parents' Orthodox Judaism and the secular culture of urban life. He received his early artistic training from Harold Zimmerman at the West End Community Center and learned color theory and art history under Harvard professor Denman Ross. Bloom felt an affinity for the tragic sensibility of the Jewish expressionist Chaim Soutine and the personalized religious visions of the Christian mystic Georges Rouault. In his own quest for spiritual understanding, Bloom looked beyond Jewish tradition to the philosophies of Spinoza, theosophy, astrology, and the occult. Though hailed in 1954 by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock as "the first Abstract Expressionist painter in America," Bloom never fully disavowed representation and kept a quiet distance from the New York School.


In Female Corpse, Bloom combines his private musings on the human condition and his anguish at the events of the Holocaust. In the early 1940s, scattered reports and photographs of massacred Jews mingled in Bloom's consciousness with broader philosophical inquiries on the nature of mortality. Beginning in 1943, Bloom made visits to the morgue at Boston's Kenmore Hospital to sketch autopsies. By focusing on a decomposing body on a dissection table, Bloom found a stand-in for the decomposing bodies in Europe, which he did not paint. Inspired by the haunting immediacy of Hans Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521) and the graphic lesions of Christ's body in Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (1515), Bloom's life-size and surprisingly vertical presentation of the corpse forces the viewer into a confrontation with the brute reality of death.

Bloom renders the female body with a palette of yellows, reds, greens, and browns. Circular patches of impasto corrode the surface, representing gangrenous dead tissue. The painterly buildup of the rotting remains suggests not only decomposition but also smoldering. The pus-filled swellings might also be the blisters of a burned body, and the ruddy, bone-thin hands have the rawness of scorched skin. The fury of red and brown paint, culminating in an orange flourish at the right, suggests the encroachment of flames upon the swaddled corpse.

Yet to see nothing but death in Bloom's painting is to miss the dualities of his art. The sores are depicted in the form of cells, which constitute all forms of life. The white paint that engulfs the woman is not only a death shroud but also the amniotic sac that surrounds a fetus in the womb. And the segment of red and brown paint might be not only a perishing blaze but also a placenta-an infant's source of vitality. While depicting the isolation of death-a solitary corpse on his canvas- Bloom connects this state with the preternatural condition of human life. Just as the regeneration of life from death must be seen as a continuum, so does Bloom's painting chart the metamorphosis of artistic expression from tradition to innovation. The female nude (a subject belonging to a tradition of figurative art) is presented as a corpse, built up through gestural brush strokes and surrounded by amorphous partitions of colors. Bloom's painting, however, is neither an elegy for canonical representation nor a manifesto for a new abstraction but rather a meditation on the unceasing flow from old to new.