Hyman Bloom

Hyman Bloom (March 29, 1913 – August 26, 2009) was a Latvian-born American painter.

His work was influenced by his Jewish heritage and Eastern religions as well as by artists including Altdorfer, Grünewald, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Blake, Bresdin, Ensor and Soutine.

Hyman, along with his parents and older brother, Bernard, emigrated to the United States in 1920, joining his two eldest brothers, Samuel and Morris, in Boston.

By that time the two brothers had changed their family name to Bloom and started their own leather business.

The extended family lived in a three-room tenement apartment in Boston's West End.

At a young age Bloom planned to become a rabbi, but his family could not find a suitable teacher.

In the eighth grade he received a scholarship to a program for gifted high school students at the Museum of Fine Arts.

He attended the Boston High School of Commerce, which was near the museum.

He also took art classes at the West End Community Center, a settlement house.

The classes were taught by Harold Zimmerman, a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, who also taught the young Jack Levine at another settlement house in Roxbury.

When Bloom was fifteen, he and Levine began studying with a well-known Harvard art professor, Denman Ross, who rented a studio for the purpose and paid the boys a weekly stipend to enable them to continue their studies rather than take jobs to support their families.

Ross sponsored Bloom from 1928 to 1933.

He also sponsored Harold Zimmerman.

Bloom's training under Zimmerman and Ross was rigorous and traditional.

Zimmerman focused on drawing and Ross on painting.

Zimmerman encouraged his students to create full page compositions rather than partial sketches.

To develop their powers of observation, he also insisted that they draw from memory rather than directly from the model.

He hung William Blake prints on the walls of the settlement house, and encouraged students to synthesize images from multiple sources.

He took Bloom and Levine on a field trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Bloom was impressed by the work of Rouault and Soutine and began experimenting with their expressive painting styles.

Ross, whose leanings were more academic, taught Bloom how to handle paint in the style of the earlier masters.

Thus Zimmerman and Ross fostered respect for artistic tradition while also teaching that art was not merely a matter of copying, but of using one's imagination to create a formal design: ideas that would later influence a school of painting known as Boston Expressionism.

In the 1930s Bloom worked sporadically for the Public Works of Art Project and the Federal Art Project, and for his brothers.

He was a slow, methodical painter who liked to work on a piece, then set it aside for a while and come back to it with a fresh perspective.

As a result, he had trouble meeting government deadlines.

He shared a studio in the South End with Levine and another artist, Betty Chase.

It was during this period that he developed a lifelong interest in Eastern philosophy and music, and in Theosophy.

He first came to prominence when his work was included in the 1942 Museum of Modern Art exhibition "Americans 1942 -- 18 Artists from 9 States".

MoMA purchased 2 paintings from the exhibition and Time magazine singled him out as a "striking discovery" in their exhibition review.

He first received national attention in 1942 when thirteen of his paintings were included in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition Americans 1942: 18 Artists from 9 States, curated by Dorothy Miller.

MoMA purchased two of his paintings from that exhibition, and he was featured in Time magazine.

The titles of his paintings in the exhibition reflect some of his recurring themes.

Two were titled The Synagogue, another, Jew with the Torah; Bloom was actually criticized by one reviewer for including "stereotypical" Jewish images.

His work was selected for both the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennale exhibitions and his 1954 retrospective traveled from Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art to the Albright Gallery and the de Young Museum before closing out at The Whitney Museum of American Art in 1955.

Starting in the mid 1950s his work began to shift more towards works on paper and he exclusively focused on drawing throughout the 1960s, returning to painting in 1971.

In a 1954 interview with Yale art professor Bernard Chaet, Willem de Kooning indicated that he and Jackson Pollock both considered Bloom to be “America’s first abstract expressionist”, a label that Bloom would disavow.

He continued both drawing and painting until his death in 2009 at the age of 96.

Hyman Bloom (né Melamed) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in the tiny Jewish village of Brunavišķi in what is now Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire.

He was one of six children born to Joseph and Anna Melamed.

His father was a leather worker.

Brunavišķi was a poor village in an area torn by civil unrest, where Jews lived in fear of persecution.