ROBERT BLISS — PART 3
By JOHN CURUBY

Robert Bliss
Lone Tree, 1969
Oil on board
30 x 25"
Collection John Curuby

Robert Bliss
Under the Inflence, 1979
Oil on board
20 x 24"
Collection Mark Potter

"The time has come,” starts an 1869 conversation with a Walrus. Countless examples of wildly disconnected realities act as signposts to how easily genius begets creative imagery. Some are born with an ability to leave their past training and step into the unknown. Others may innately develop or learn to find a pathway outside. For most who do not posses an internal trigger or external exercise to do so, humans have discovered and produced many products which have been consumed to help get “above and beyond,” “far and wide,” “out of it.”

I would enjoy delving into the history of substances’ uses, and abuses, but I will now only confess to hearsay of these treats in the life of one person: Robert Bliss. To say these stories are part of my life would be an admission of complicity in devious and destructive actions. Those of you who know me, know better.

Let’s take a step by step in a life of lush.

Robert Bliss left his art training with the Wyeths to teach at Deerfield Academy. This school is still one of the most prestigious
private, secondary schools in America. While there, Bliss transited from his academic artistic style to a very personal expression of the love of the young male torso.

He did this by utilizing the façade of sports: the swim team, the gymnastics teams were his models. Bliss posed them in ways that satisfied his audience yet simultaneously satisfied his own prurient imagery. Had he kept himself controlled, Bliss could have continued teaching at the school to retirement. What drove him from Deerfield?

When I spoke to Bliss about leaving, he said that he began painting works that met with bad reviews from the school. He said that it was aesthetic differences in his artistic production which caused him to leave. I now know that this was not completely true.

During his time at Deerfield, Bliss’ struggle was not solely with aesthetic production. It was rooted in his inability to consume the vast quantity of beauty surrounding him. This sorrow was satisfied with an increasing consumption of copious amounts of alcohol. The struggle was successfully sated. Bliss was eventually let go from Deerfield because of an exceptionally nasty drunken bout with the chaplin of the school.

But cannot both reasons be true? Perhaps the extreme intake of alcohol allowed Bliss to loosen control of his paintings’ compositions. Did drinking cause him to create works which were too far-out for the conservative rulers of Deerfield and also to eventually put himself at odds with the staff? I propose the tension between Bliss and the school can be seen in the following late Deerfield landscape.

First, Bliss found a period, mid-19th century frame which typically housed portraits. Inside this oval format Bliss painted the portrait of a lone tree in a field. To the sides are ovoid distortions of the Deerfield hills which surround the School. Flanking this tree are clouds painted in a mid-19th century style (again curved) which then burst straight upwards in an expanded image of the tree.

This lone tree can be seen as a self-portrait. This old frame represents the bastion of Deerfield itself. The shape of the frame (school) has begun to distort Bliss’ life and environment. The vaporous reflection is disconnected and exhibits the true, extreme Bliss persona as a form of nature reaching out to the sky to escape his similar, but constrained school-rooted self.

This painting far exceeds the norm of acceptable style and composition proscribed by institutional standards of the day. I was at another Yankee prep school just seven miles away from Bliss while he was teaching at Deerfield and these schools were fighting to keep expansive 60s influences like this out… even if the basic motivator was excessive drinking and not drugs.

So what about the drugs?

Bliss moved on from teaching art to boys. He returned to Eastern Massachusetts from the Berkshires and settled by the sea in a town called Hull.

I mentioned in my previous article that the most important change in Bliss’ life and career was befriending one of my art instructors, Samuel Rose. Rose taught Bliss much about the painting techniques of the Masters. While studying at Rose’s studio, Bliss also received a greater education in a style of life which until then was mere fantasy.

Like Bliss, Sam Rose painted pictures of youths with gusto. Rose had a city studio in Boston where he had young men lounging about for his modeling needs and sexual pleasure. To keep these wayward suburban boys content and sedentary; booze, pot and pills were constantly available. The Rose studio had the aura of an eternal Orientalist bacchanal.

Next to Hull, where Bliss moved, was an amusement park called Nantasket Beach. It was there that Bliss painted many of his later beachside paintings and met young men that he brought back to his studio as models. Once there they were plied with the opportunity to party and join in the frolic of the fray.

These lads came in from the heavily Irish towns just south of Boston. They would take public transportation to the beach during the summer and then spend the day or sometimes the weekend chez Bliss.

As they reached 18, some of these models moved in with Bliss and took odd jobs to help support the household. One worked as a guard at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Others helped Bliss at a small shop on a wharf in Boston where he sold bric-a-brac and his paintings.

When I first entered the Hull house of Bliss, a large painted statue greeted me. A group of boys then greeted me in various states of pose and poison. I was considered an artist and treated with undue respect.

Drugs have various degrees of potency and duration. Drink is a slow climb, pot offers a few hours from launch to burn, but LSD was a day at the races; and it was LSD that Bliss started to take in Hull with a passion. Bliss said that he began taking acid because he had become a nasty drunk. It began as a recreational event to be taken once in the morning, or afternoon, or evening. How did it affect his art?

The figures in his paintings became more sensuous. I can only assume that part of this sensuality came from his access to boys in an intimate way after leaving Deerfield. Perhaps most of his post-Deerfield presentation of the figure in his compositions; lusty and available, comes from his actually having had the pleasure of connecting with these models. One of Bliss’ models then is one of my friends now, and he still will not break the sanctity of the model/artist privilege to tell me the extent of Bliss’ personal interactions…but that has always been my proof.

I also believe that the LSD helped Bliss obliterate the separation between his desires and his description in paint.

When Bliss first started his career painting, he fully developed the paint surface. Boys, barns, and hills were all completely formed.

Bliss then began in one painting to paint in diametrically opposed ways. He simplified his backgrounds and simultaneously made his figures more complex. I detailed this in my second article. But what I did not state is that I believe the simplification was an effect of his LSD use. I will show this in my final presentation.

Here there is no longer a fully developed figure with a simple chromatic background, like his many round muscled boys against a plain cream-colored scene. This work simplifies both the background and the figure. It is the only painting that I know Bliss did while he was under the influence of LSD…hence the title.

I believe that I would be stating the obvious to describe the undulating, repetitive shapes that turn dunes into dreams. What is important is to see that the chromatics expressed throughout this painting are the same as Bliss used, for many years before this oeuvre, increasingly only in the background.

LSD allowed Bliss to break with the stricture limiting his compositions of the past. He adored the boys and after he moved in with them at Hull he finally could produce works that proved just that. He did not need to finish the painting beyond that point but he had to. He developed a way to juxtapose a simplified background to accentuate their bodies. His artistic skills provided him a satisfying solution.

But one must also remember the complexities of the LSD state of mind. Simple can seem complex, and vice versa. Under the Influence was painted simply throughout both because Bliss would have had difficulty in accomplishing more, and also because while he painted he would have been appreciating more of the little that he had done.

I see the development of Bliss’ paintings after learning glazing techniques with Samuel Rose as his final positive step. For several years thereafter he produced paintings that expressed this new technique with simplified background chromatics to focus completely on the body. They should be added to his career’s peak production.

But beyond these Hull paintings, Bliss’ evolution to total simplification is less the direction of a trained academic artist finding new direction and more of someone profoundly crippled by his drug consumption.

I have recently been made aware of a group of paintings which were purchased by one patron of Bliss. I am told these works are a series that Bliss felt was the crown of his artistic achievement. They were designed and governed by his use of LSD.

After seeing these works, if they amount to a turning point in my critical evaluation of this last period, perhaps there will be a future article where I will eat crow.

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John Curuby is president of The Boston Art Club, founded in 1854, and an avid collector of Robert Bliss paintings.