Robert Bliss
Boy in Yellow Sweater, 1959
Oil on canvas
22 x 18"
Private collection.
Image courtesy of the Boston Art Club.

Robert Bliss
Boy at the Barn, 1964
Oil on canvas
39 x 24"
Private collection.
Image courtesy of the Boston Art Club.

Robert Bliss
By John Curuby

There is no easy way to explain how we see other people. When we look at someone in the flesh there is a direct, physical perception. When we look in a mirror, at a photograph, at a painting, into our own imagination, etc., we have another type of perception.

What can we know about the differences between these two types of perceptions? When we physically confront another person, his or her body is an object. But when we view the image of that person in a mirror or a photograph or a painting, it is the mirror or photo or painting that is the object. The figure that appears in the photo or painting is not the object itself. It is, rather, the figure objectified.

Here’s the rub. The great genius of some artists is their ability to vary the method of construct—the composition, the form of the paint surface—to two ends. First, they can minimize the objectification of a figure in a painting so that we almost feel connected in a way similar to the model’s actually being there in the flesh. Second, they can take the reality of objectification and increase this effect so that we feel an increased disconnection from the image.

These connections or disconnections help define the emotional relationship between a figure in a painting and the viewer and also give the viewer signs of the relationship between the actual model and the artist, whether true or imagined.

Robert Bliss was an artist who practiced both extreme potentials and their combinations.

Robert Bliss (known to this writer and his friends as Bob) was born on October 30, 1925. His first known figural paintings were painted when he was a soldier enlisted in WWII, and we suspect he continued to paint figures until his dying day. For three decades Bliss’s figural works were described by art critics and historians in the latest fashionable, often euphemistic, jargon, but let us drop the façade and state what he truly painted: the beauty of adolescence.

The oldest boy painted by Robert Bliss was himself. He was still a teenager when he entered military service, and there are several self- portraits he did while he was still in uniform. Bliss painted his own image in a frozen way. The bit of teenage fat left on him from his pampered youth in a suburb next to Boston is evident in his cheeks. What we read from this captured face is presented as face forward as his drill sergeant demanded he be.

When Bliss was discharged, he studied painting formally with Carolyn Wyeth at Chadds Ford, PA. This school of art practiced by the Wyeths was called “Buckets and Barns.” If you've seen enough of the Wyeth family work from this early post-war period, you'll know why the phrase still applies.

How did Bob go from “Buckets and Barns” to “Baskets and Barns?” The answer is Deerfield Academy, the Berkshire bastion of Brahmin boys.

There is no story to tell, intriguing as it may be, as to how Bliss found himself teaching art at Deerfield Academy. We will never know the path he took from uniform to bathing suit or why he started to paint the young male body. Being stranded at a boys’ school with a few hundred blue-blooded bodies, if you liked to paint the figure you had to paint what was available. Perhaps it was those thirteen years amongst the continuously corrupting influences of teenage boys exiled at the foot of Deerfield Mountain that bent Bliss into painting the repetitive subject matter I am here to analyze.*

I have personally viewed over 400 works by the artist. Until a more exhaustive inventorying and comparison of his output can be made I cannot be certain of any figural paintings done in the years of 1945-1959. I do hope that some day I will be able to fill in many gaps in the story of Robert Bliss.

How did Bliss’s approach to painting figures change in the first decade we know of his output? Let’s look at two paintings. First is a painting from 1959 and second a painting from 1964.

It is easy to first notice the reality for which Bliss strives in the painting Boy in Yellow Sweater (a later appellation, not Bliss’s). The paint style is meticulous in capturing as many actual features as was possible given Bliss’s techniques. The skin is modeled to feel round and toned. A close-up inspection of the boy’s head and hair shows more time put into adding strands of blonde hair in half the boy’s head than later in his career he would put into entire paintings.

The boy seems a bit worried, or anxious, or even upset in his gaze, which is turned away. Bliss tried to capture the boy in as “reach out and touch” as he was able, but is there a real connection? To me there is an emotional separation.

If the boy turned now and saw us looking, we would be unexpected and uninvited to have viewed this personal moment of his inner reflection. Even though Bliss has created the boy in a superbly real impression, he has also psychologically turned the boy into an object of our voyeuristic eyes. We are separated from a possible interactive relationship.

Was this because Bliss understood the tension between his private reality and public posture of an artist and his model? Was he giving us all the signs of the time that he could? In this work, was what Bliss painted as close an expression of connection as he could create for 1959 public review? Did Bliss find a way to objectify his painting’s subject to sufficiently obfuscate his true intent and avoid any taboo?

This is where I could insert chapters on the abstracted psychologies of the relationships between artist, model and viewer. Perhaps a brief study of the 1964 painting can help lead us to understand.

The first reaction I had in seeing the painting Boy at the Barn (again a later appellation) was the overwhelming sense of sexuality. The absurd placement of a boy in a bathing suit nowhere near water. The spread of the boy’s legs coupled with his placing his hands behind his back offering no resistance. Is the image of the goldenrod reflexive or is it to imply a direct path to penetration?

With our 21st century perception it seems that in his stylistic development of five years Bliss has decided to let it out. Would the headmaster at Deerfield have been appalled at these hidden (cough!) symbols? A contemporary 1964 viewer might immediately recall the Wyeth family composition and bless this as an innocuous subject. Did Bliss use the old “Buckets and Barns” composition to pull the wool over his own obvious wolf's nature?

The boy is posed so that the angles of his stretched legs are following the lines of the barn boards. Bliss has graphically brought the boy and his background into objective harmony. The pointing of the goldenrod and its obvious bisecting position also brings the boy into the growth in the foreground. Here are two graphic ways Bliss objectified the boy front and back and melded him into the inanimate surroundings.

In this 1964 painting, as in the 1959 portrait, the boy is turned away. But in this painting there is far less detail in how Bliss painted the body and the face itself. Is this simplification part of a necessary artistic formula to keep the boy from standing out in the composition? Or is it a new method Bliss needed to make the boy less real, less accessible to himself? In so doing has he created a very tempting dichotomy which stimulates our desire by mixing the obvious sexuality of the composition with an emotionally neutral, objectified figure? More chapters of psychology, please.

Ponder this matrix when you see your next Bliss.

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

* Note: Pennington Haile, a Dartmouth professor who knew Bliss, stated that the artist always sought the permission of the students’ parents to paint them and that for the most part they were flattered by the request.

—Charles Leslie