The Hull
Artist
Hyman Bloom
(American, born in Latvia, 1913–2009)
Date1952
Mediumoil on canvas
Dimensionscanvas: 95.6 x 115.6 cm (37 5/8 x 45 1/2 in.)
ClassificationsPaintings
Credit LineGift of the William H. Lane Foundation
Object number1977.145
DescriptionOn a table lies a cadaver with rib cage exposed. The head is at the left. Two hands enter the composition from the left, one holding a knife. The cadaver is painted in a variety of intense colors, the background a dark brown.Label TextHyman Bloom practiced an alternative modernism that explored paint’s material properties to convey the vulnerabilities of the corporeal body. This is best exemplified by his paintings of corpses and autopsy scenes created during the 1940s and 1950s. While some viewers responded to The Hull and its image of a disemboweled corpse complete with flayed limbs and exposed viscera and rib cage as repulsive or violent, Bloom found the subject to be one in which “the paradox of the harrowing and the beautiful could be brought into unity.” Complicated formal rhythms and fluid brushstrokes both reveal and conceal the subject; similarly, Bloom’s palette in one context conveys a sense of jewel-like beauty but in another suggests the bruised opalescence of bodily decay. Bloom understood the cadavers he observed in Boston hospital autopsy rooms as evidence of physical mortality transcended by the indestructibility of the human spirit. “Life is not just what we experience on earth. You don’t just die and rot away. That would tell us that life is trivial, and that wouldn’t make sense.” ProvenanceAcquired from Durlacher Brother, in 1955 by William Henry Lane, Donated by William Henry Lane to the William Henry Lane Foundation in 1964, The William Lane Foundation, Leominster MA, donated painting to the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, 1977.
On View
On view
