Slaughtered Animal is one of the Boston artist Hyman Bloom’s best known paintings, and the work hails from the high point of his career. In 1954, the Institute of Contemporary Art mounted the first major monographic exhibition of Bloom’s work. This show, which included Slaughtered Animal, traveled to M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The same year, Time Magazine illustrated the painting in a piece about Bloom, and critic Thomas Hess called the artist “one of the outstanding painters of his generation.”

Slaughtered Animal embodies the powerful and challenging dialectic that defined Bloom’s “cadaver paintings” of the 1950s. In the words of the eminent Bloom scholar and curator of the 2019 MFA exhibition Erica Hirshler, these were “his bravest works.” Like Bloom’s images of human bodies, this large, colorful and sensuously-painted depiction of a flayed animal presents “a series of intriguing paradoxes: captivating and repellent, beautiful and horrible, spiritual and physical, abstract and figurative.” Striking details like the single eye that stares eerily outward at lower right and the glistening cords of rope define a painting that invites, seduces and repels all at once.

Bloom was deeply engaged with the history of art and Slaughtered Animal recalls earlier treatments of the subject from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655, Louvre) to Chaim Soutine’s Carcass of Beef (1925, Minneapolis). In its flowing brushwork and jewel-like rivulets of color, the painting seems of a piece with the work of mid-20th century contemporaries like Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning, but also, in its deeply historic subject matter and consideration of heady matters of mortality, distinct from the work of these peers. Bloom famously rejected Abstract Expressionism as “emotional catharsis with no basis,” while DeKooning, ironically, proclaimed Bloom “the first abstract expressionist.”

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