Mass Debut

Hyman Bloom paints in the slums of Boston, in a studio heated with a rusty kerosene stove. Morris Graves paints birds in a lonely cabin near Campbell Lake in Western Washington. With 16 other U.S. artists, many practically unknown, Painters Bloom and Graves made their first formal appearance in the art world last week, chaperoned by Manhattan's stylish Museum of Modern Art.

Planning a series of annual exhibitions to provide a cross section of the finest painting and sculpture now being produced in the U.S., the Museum did its choosing without regard for previous reputation, wound up with 200 items that proved that modern U.S. art is sprouting luxuriantly, that some of its choicest sprouts come from west of the Rockies.

Styles ranged from the rugged realism of painters like Kansas City's Fletcher Martin (TIME, Nov. 25, 1940) and Chicago's Francis Chapin to flat, geometric abstractions and surrealist fantasies. Top-notchers whose work had already drawn plaudits included Portland, Ore.'s Darrel Austin (who paints dank, dripping green landscapes swarming with wide-eyed animals and ghostlike humans), Boston's Jack Levine (whose red-faced politicians and gangsters appear to be seen through a glass of water).

The most striking discoveries in the Museum of Modern Art's show were Boston's 28-year-old Hyman Bloom and Seattle's 31-year-old Morris Graves. Until the Museum's Painting Curator Dorothy Miller dug him out of a hermit-like existence in a Boston slum, Latvian-born Painter Bloom had been painting in solitary squalor in a little second-story studio.

A lover of Oriental musk who beguiles his spare moments playing on the Arabian lute, Hyman Bloom loves to paint, with exuberant Oriental color, the gloomy, bearded rabbis and synagogue scenes that he remembers from his childhood.

Uninfluenced by other U.S. artists, indifferent to both money and publicity, shy, mop-headed Bloom has seldom sold a picture, never had an exhibition. But critics last week, gawping over his cloisonne-colored rabbis and gaudy transmogrified chandeliers, were willing to rate him as one of the most striking of U.S. colorists.

Morris Graves's queer-looking gouaches, disembodied pictures of weird, woebegone snakes and spindle-legged birds, were the show's No. 1 hit. Totally unlike anything hitherto dreamed of in U.S. art, they somewhat resembled the wiry expressionist fantasies of famed Swiss Painter Paul Klee (TIME, Oct. 21,1940). Hopping about an ornithological fairyland, or standing gravely among heaps of what looked like luminous spaghetti, Painter Graves's fossil-like birds were painted with the delicacy of Chinese landscapes.

Quizzical and obscure as one of his own birds, tall (6 ft. 4 in.), rangy Morris Graves lives alone with Edith, his pet dachshund. Uninterrupted by visitors (no roads reach his cabin), he often paints for ten hours at a stretch, takes an occasional job at the Seattle Art Museum. Enigmatic even to his closest associates, he loves snakes and gardening, thinks the Museum's show of his work is "all a mistake."

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