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Boston Expressionists get their due

ART REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

December 21, 2011|By Cate McQuaid

Among the works in The Expressive Voice exhibit is Seascape II, by Hyman… (DANFORTH MUSEUM OF ART )

FRAMINGHAM - The Danforth Museum of Art, thanks to its attention in recent years to a strain of artists known as the Boston Expressionists, has lately been showered with gifts from collectors of Boston Expressionism. This particular school of art skewed toward narrative and representation as Abstract Expressionism exploded and ran roughshod over figuration.

“The Expressive Voice,’’ a big and invigorating show now up at the Danforth, celebrates the windfall. There are 112 works in the exhibit, primarily new acquisitions. Maybe this particular style of painting is finally getting its due.

Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine were its progenitors starting in the 1930s. They made paintings that employed wild color, dynamic gesture, and emotional resonance free of irony. Both came of age in Jewish immigrant communities in Boston, attending settlement house art classes, and were keenly influenced by the starkness and angst of German Expressionism, and by other Jewish artists and pioneers of Modernism, such as Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. Another key player was Karl Zerbe, a German emigrant whose earlier work had been destroyed by Nazis and labeled “degenerate.’’ Zerbe taught a generation of artists at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

In the 1940s, these three had great success. In a catalog essay for the Danforth’s Hyman Bloom show, the museum’s director Katherine French relates that Willem de Kooning said he and Jackson Pollock considered Bloom “the first Abstract Expressionist in America.’’ But Bloom spurned pure abstraction, calling it “emotional catharsis, with no intellectual basis.’’ So he left the art market behind, not to mention the attention of curators, even in his hometown. The Museum of Fine Arts, for instance, has hardly blinked at Bloom.

But the collectors, many in the Boston area, have been faithful. It’s fascinating to note that while Boston has for decades been a conservative city in terms of collecting contemporary art, Boston Expressionism is an exception. This show even includes a painting by Joan Snyder, who does not live or work in Boston, but is so well-collected here she might as well be a native. Of the recent gifts, French said in an interview, “there are people falling all over themselves trying to donate. They know we’re not going to put it in the basement.’’

“The Expressive Voice’’ explores Boston Expressionism very nearly up to the present. It’s great fun to follow threads through generations of teachers and students, and in one case, a parent and child. At the Museum School, Zerbe taught a clutch of acolytes who developed solid careers, including David Aronson, Arthur Polonsky, Henry Schwartz, and Barbara Swan.